SpringCleaning! Can You Hear Me Now? March 13
SpringCleaning!
March 13, 2021
Can You Hear Me Now?
Isaiah 55:3, ‘Incline your ear, and come to me. Hear, and your soul shall live; and I will make an everlasting covenant with you (NKJV).’
Did your momma ever tell you to clean the carrot patch out of your ears so you could hear better? Or ‘What you got growing in there, girl, that’s keeping you from hearing me?’ ‘Huh?’ I’d respond. Or maybe your teacher said to you, ‘Read my lips since you can’t hear me!’ What about when a friend is telling you something, and you’re only half paying attention, and they demand, ‘Are you listening to me even?!’ Some call it selective hearing. ‘What? Are you deaf?!’ Or did you simply not want to have certain conversations, so you hung up and texted instead, saying, ‘Oops! I must have poor service. I dropped the call.’
I wonder sometimes if God ever is thinking, ‘Can you hear me now?’ He puts great importance on our listening to and really hearing His instruction, and while He will never scream and yell at us to get our attention, He sometimes will allow something to take place in our lives so we can turn back and incline our ear to Him.
What if He drove out of service and dropped our cry to Him? Psalm 102:1-2 says, ‘Hear my prayer, O Lord, and let my cry come to You. Do not hide Your face from me in the day of my trouble; incline Your ear to me; in the day that I call, answer me speedily (NKJV).’
It’s pretty cool; ‘incline’ I found means to tend toward or bend to. I get this visual of the Holy God, the Lord of the Universe, bending to me to hear my cry much like a parent bends down to hear the whispered need from their sad or frightened child. I see Him in all His awesomeness and splendor tending to the request I pitched to Him like a negotiator at a board meeting. See, when we want something from Him, we suddenly remember His availability, His eagerness to hear from His children, His promise that He hears the cries of His children and is ambitious and enthusiastic to respond. But too often it takes a hard knock for us to be persuaded to hear His voice, to stop and really listen to His direction and desire for good for His children. We have the best Tour Guide, Personal Assistant, Instructor and Life Planner, to name a few, invested in our lives, but He can be all that, and we still end up lost, messed up, late to the game, MIA, frustrated, confused, destitute. All because we did not listen.
How do we SpringClean this area of our ‘Homes’? Hebrews 4:7 puts it simply, ‘“Today, if you will hear His voice, do not harden your hearts.”’ Listen and stay pliable in the hands of Your Father.
Come with me in March and let’s clean house!
If you are anything like me, you have kept some things around far too long
and now they got to go! And with the Lord’s help, they can!
