Stopped Praying

Something was said by a former student of mine. "One day I just stopped praying, but God never stopped speaking to me." I have been fascinated with that statement all morning. She mentioned a removal of herself from "what I was socialized to be."

If we have grown up even a bit in or around the Church, there are practices taught to be utilized and enacted in particular ways. I am not sure that this is how we are meant to live. God has made each one of us a particular way with very colorful wiring, and we cannot expect to relate to or hear from God in the exact same way as every other person.

It is very possible for me to hear and know the heart of God at the core of who I am when I allow myself the freedom to hear from God from that place instead of the rigid expectations of how certain people have heard from Him in the past.

As long as I am giving good check to those things I believe I am hearing from God. I want to be more focused on listening to Him than I am on the pathways or practices I have been taught along the way.

Those things I believe I am hearing from God still need to be checked against His Word and His Body (fellow believers) to be sure my heart is not deceiving itself and calling it God's voice, but there is still a far greater freedom in that than the socialized ways I have been taught for years in the Church.

Yes, there was a moment when I stopped making prayer closets, creating calendared "quiet times". There was a moment I stopped praying, but the more entangled I become with the heart of Jesus, I realize He never stops speaking to me. 

On hearing and understanding God

One of the reasons we do not hear God as we did in the Old Testament is because our sin has grown to do this to us. Humanity has been so sickened with sin that we have lost our hearing and we no longer even speak God's language enough to understand Him if we even could hear His voice.

Hearts have been so hardened over time that we are too incredibly foreign to God whose image is actually imprinted upon us. We who are in His very image are terribly foreign to Him because of our sin.

The good news is that God desires his imprinted people. He desires connection, contact, and conversation once again. The silence we hate is as hurtful to God.

He had to speak a language we would finally be able to understand. Jesus is that language. "Jesus is God spelling Himself out," wrote SD Gordon.

Jesus is God Himself. Jesus is God Himself speaking a language our foreign sin-soaked hearts can finally understand.

That intimacy we once knew in Eden is possible now only in Jesus.

Lonely listening

All the things we wrestle with in life are moments when we are truly alone in our hearts and minds. God gets you alone in those moments, and when we are finally alone in those moments, God can meet you and speak to you. I notice this in several of the most stressful and painful moments of my life, when I have no idea what will happen or how anything can happen. In those moments I come to God and hear Him most. Why is this the case?

Because the noisiest parts of our hearts and lives are our stubbornness and pride. Our self-confidence is terribly noisy.

This is why moments of heartbreak, disappointment, sickness, and brokenness are the times we hear God clearest. It is in those times our noisy self-confidence is shut off, and we have no choice but to hear the only One worthy of our confidence.