listen!

21st March, Wednesday
was reading the book celebration of discipline by richard foster. how apt, considering discipline is not one of my strong points. got stuck at chapter one for a long time, but now i’m picking it up again. was reading about desiring the voice of the living God. how cool is that to have God speak to you! i can’t think of anyone in this world who wouldn’t want that for themselves. especially if yur having real trouble deciding between the better of two paths when both paths seem equally acceptable. so anyway, here are the israelites, the people God has chosen for himself, the ones whom he first revealed himself personally to, these same people turn around and happily decide that they would rather have a human king than to have God as their king. this is symbolic because its like they relegate themselves 1 level down. so instead of listening from God direct, they wanna put someone inbetween to listen to God for them. they are in effect becoming second hand listeners. pause a mo here, din we just say that we’d love to hear from god direct? it seems the reality is we want to hear from god direct only if its convenient. where it isn’t convenient we’d not mind if we were second hand listeners, like the israelites. to be fair, the israelites weren’t helped by the fact that all the other countries surrounding them had human kings and they seemed to be prospering. but here’s where it gets interesting. i mean, we’ve looked at this whole thing from our point of view, like what do we want, how we feel and how we think…..so what does God think? here’s what i think God thinks, or rather what the bible says God thinks. within the context of that episode i described about the israelites, there we actually detect a note of sadness when God says, “they(israelites) have rejected me from being king over them” 1 samuel 8:7. remember the last time you got rejected? =( sad huh?

i think we can safely draw out a lesson from this, that is that God wants to have a direct hotline to us not a secondhand hotline. or to put it in closer proximity, he wants to be family, not just a distant relative. he is sad when we settle for anything less than a personal relationship with him.

and so ps 40:1 has become my tagline recently. “i waited patiently for the Lord; he turned to me and heard my cry.” cos i know i don’t hear from God a lot of the times because i don’t have the patience to wait for him to reply. when i refer to hearing from God, i don’t mean the general impression or feeling kind. cos i was inspired while reading genesis and how God spoke to abraham. it is so different from what we experience today, where we hear a “word” from God. this guy hears sentences and paragraphs, enough to fill a storybook. i’m not saying a “word” is no good, but i am saying we shouldn’t be satisfied with just a “word” when God actually has much more to tell us. so that’s where i’m heading. will let you know if i have any progress. =)