MAY WE LISTEN TO GOD
Psalm 85:8-9 : Let me hear what God the LORD will speak, for he will speak peace to his people, to his faithful, to those who turn to him in their hearts. Surely his salvation is at hand for those who fear him, that his glory may dwell in our land.
Sometimes when we yearn after a check-up with God, we often conduct an almost completely unilateral conversation, a monologue, where we talk and God listens. We call these prayers, but they are rather monologues.
Especially, when we pray for our personal matters, regarding forgiveness, health, happiness, relationships, wealth, well‐being, or progress of any kind.
These are prayers like saying:
Oh Lord, you can see that I am sick, I cannot lift my finger, I am bed-bound, or I have been in a wheelchair for years, or there is cancer in the body and chemo in the veins, there are tumors here and there, blockages in the arteries, big pain in the chest, the heart is too tired to beat, the lungs are shadowed, infections everywhere, broken hips, rusty knees, high blood sugar, high blood pressure, hernia in the front, hernia in the back, broken limbs, broken ribs, cracked spine, shaken brain, weakened bones, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's in the brain, mental illness in the soul, or just suffering from the spread of epidemics or a simple flu.
O Lord heal me, O Lord heal me, please have mercy upon me.
We can have similar personal prayers: O Lord I have committed my peccadillos, my transgressions here and there, You can see and judge my sins, but oh Lord, my burden is unbearable, heal me, heal me, have mercy upon me, give me forgiveness, peace, and strength.
We can have our personal prayers regarding our relationships: O Lord I am lonely, oh please give me a fiancé, give me a spouse, give me a child, give me a friend, give me company, give me a community.
Or a similar one: Oh Lord my relationship is broken with my spouse or with my children or with my parents or with a friend or a friendship circle or with the community. O Lord heal my relationships, please have mercy upon me.
Similarly in personal prayer we pray for the bread on the table, hopefully not for the lotto prize but for the necessities of life, especially in the time of need where the bread is profoundly missing, poverty hits, and hunger and cold prevail.
O Lord help me in my need, may Your kingdom and your abundance come into my life. All of these personal prayers might be completely legitimate and justified.
There is human need, and the human turns to the Almighty Creator, Healer, and Sustainer God in prayer, asking for forgiveness, healing, and Providence.
SO FAR SO GOOD. However, we should pay attention to the very advice of Apostle James, otherwise we could somehow end up even like Apostle Paul.
Paul confessed in his second letter to the Corinthians that “By reason of the exceeding greatness of the revelations, that I should not be exalted excessively, a thorn in the flesh was given to me: a messenger of Satan to torment me, that I should not be exalted excessively. Concerning this thing, I begged the Lord three times that it might depart from me.”
He prayed three times, but the thorn stayed. The advice of Apostle James is similar to what Jesus told the disciples regarding prayers.
The Master said according to the Gospel of Matthew that the Lord knows all your needs and also the urgent importance of these necessities; however, “But seek first God’s Kingdom and his righteousness; and all these things will be given to you as well.”
And this is a game-changer, or rather a conversation-changer, because it eventually means the same thing that was quoted as a cliché by JFK: “ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.”
Ultimately, it means you shall not ask what the Kingdom of God can do for you, but what you can do for the Kingdom of God. Nonetheless, it is very likely that if you sacrifice everything for America or your respective country, your homeland will not necessarily pay you back with responding kindness.
However, Jesus assured the disciples that it is certain that if you sacrifice everything for the sake of the kingdom of God, everything will also be granted as an extra, or its equivalent as a Heavenly reward.
Thus, in a respectful conversation with God, we should not sentence God to silence, forcing the conversation into a monologue where only we talk about our demands and complaints. It is not a danger-free zone, as it is written in the Book of Numbers: “The people were complaining in the ears of the Lord. When the Lord heard it, his anger burned; and the Lord’s fire burned among them, and consumed some of the outskirts of the camp.
The people cried to Moses; and Moses prayed to the Lord, and the fire abated.” Instead of demanding attention, we should open our hearts and our minds in our silenced individuality to listen to what God says, as it is written in Psalm 85: “Let me hear what God the LORD will speak, for he will speak peace to his people, to his faithful, to those who turn to him in their hearts.”
BECAUSE: “Surely his salvation is at hand for those who fear him, that his glory may dwell in our land.”
The ultimate purpose of listening to God is not really aesthetic, aimed at entertainment, or merely enjoying contact and revelation. Rather, listening to God is the primary expression of human devotion to God, asking the ultimate question: Oh Lord God, what do you want me to do?
As a community, and even individually, we have a mission—a meaning-giving task that nobody can do in place of you or me or us. This mission and task is carved out for us by the hands of the angels in Heaven according to the will of the all-seeing and all-knowing God: that in our place we must establish goodwill and peace, harmony and care, understanding and compassion, seeking the will and the love of God.
For all of that, we have to humble ourselves to the level of servants of the Kingdom of God, keep listening to the calls coming from the Lord, the messages that God keeps writing on the tablets of our hearts, and the spiritual dreams sent to us through which we fly to and from Heaven.
Listening is pivotal because our own voices can deafen us, effectively blocking God’s voice—not because it is inaudible, but because we block our ways of hearing and listening.
In order to listen to God, we have to become silent, calming down to the bottom of the heart. The more silent we are in front of the Lord, the more we can listen.
The more we calm down in the stormy sea of emotions and struggles, the more we can listen. For this receptive silence and calm we must pray; so may the Lord help and bless our prayers, AMEN.
