January 1 2025
“My sheep hear my voice, and I know them”
John 10:27 KJV
The depth of a relationship can be measured by the level of communication that takes place within it. How honestly and freely two people talk together reveals how trusted they are to one another. It also reveals how secure they feel that they will be heard when they speak. We tend to speak less when we know someone doesn’t value our words…. and our God is no different!
We can experience seasons in which we feel God is withholding his voice from us. This kind of silence may be due to a period of testing (-the well-used analogy of the tutor being silent when his student takes the test), and he wants to see if we can sustain ourselves with the trust and understanding that we should have developed prior to his silence.
However, we can also find ourselves in a period of not hearing God’s voice because our ears have tuned him out by repeatedly ignoring him. We can’t expect God to speak to us when we want to hear him if we are going to reject his voice at other times when he is not saying something favourable. We must be careful to consistently practise obedience to God, even when he tells us the necessary things we don’t like. If not, we can become like the people rebuked in Matthew 13:15 who were described as spiritually having ears that were ‘dull of hearing’ because they had consistently opted for disobedience.
Hearing from God is essentially a skill. Like the great prophet Samuel learning to recognise God’s voice as a child (1 Samuel 3:4-9), we may make mistakes at first, but by listening for God consistently, we will get better and better at it, just like any other skill. So if your desire is to be a friend of God, someone to whom he can speak and reveal his mind (John 15:15), let your prayer today be that he makes you a person who has ‘ears to hear’ his voice (Matthew 11:15).
Bible in a year: Genesis 1–2
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