We hear the world around us, even people who are hearing impaired have a sense of hearing in a way, they may interpret it differently than those of us who hear, but it is a perception of sound in some capacity or another. How many of us stop to hear? Do we sit in silence and listen to what is in our spirit, in our heart? Maybe some of us practice so much of such introverted listening, we are the only voice we hear.

Hearing is first mentioned in Genesis 3:8 “And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day.” i have wondered, what does God sound like when He’s walking in the cool of the evening, at the time of the evening breeze? Either way, Adam and Eve knew who they were hearing. Not only did they hear, but they listened and identified accurately what they were hearing. God was coming to talk to them! They heard Him before they saw Him, oh and don’t you know they knew well the sound of His footsteps! He who has an ear…let him hear.

To “hear” is a verb meaning to give an ear or to lend an ear, discern, to perceive. The value of hearing God above all things seems to have become devalued in the world today, it seems unimportant to most people. Even to people who want to hear God, they’ve become convinced they can’t hear Him so “hearing God” has become a low priority seeing as how, in most people’s mind it seems, the probability of hearing God seems minimal, as a result the idea and hope of hearing Divinity is at the bottom of their list of important things.
On the contrary, of all the voices in the universe, hearing Jesus is a necessity above all necessities in life. His voice IS life, as His presence is life, as His dreams are life, there is life infused in all which comprises the person of Christ. John 6:63 “It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing. The words that I speak to you are spirit, and they are life.”

Every word from the mouth of God, therefore, teaches us the fundamentals and deep things of God and faith. “He that has ears to hear, let him hear.”

Many people lend their ears to “commerce and media” and fill their heads with unfounded doubt and leave no room to hear that “small, still voice’. …and if they’re not pouring the effluent of the main stream media into their heads, they’re filling their ears with political talk, words of their work-a-day world, pornography, or just the common foolishness that comes in from the cable network. It’s no great wonder that people are so frightened when we tell them we “hear God”. Metaphorically speaking, many live in that “septic tank” that I compare “commerce and media” to. Think about it… IF we’re inside that tank, we can’t hear anything outside. We have no contrast. We only know when somebody “flushes” and when you hear the plumbing “rumble”, you anticipate the flow of effluent. But you don’t know that there is an entirely different world just a few feet over your head … just a few feet of dirt and a concrete slab dividing you from the brightness, fresh air, and the presence and voice of God. But it seems many have chosen to live in a “tomb” and they’ve been there so long that things which should be common between them and their God are now unthinkable to them.

What will it take for us, as humans, to be interested in hearing God’s voice again? For me, even if God comes to chastise me, i would rather hear the voice of the Lord who loves me and died for my sins, than to not hear Him at all. Jesus said in John 5:24 “Most assuredly, I say to you, he who hears My word and believes in Him who sent Me has everlasting life, and shall not come into judgment, but has passed from death into life.” Hebrews 4:12 “For the word of God is living and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit, and of joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.” Where it says “word” is the word “logos”, meaning “the sayings of God” as in what is “uttered by the living voice”. Personally, i really need to hear Jesus. Not just want, but need. It makes sense that the Living One speaks Living Words that are Life Giving for those who are without life that they might have Life if they would hear and listen to the Living One who speaks Living Words. He who has an ear…let him hear.

If we can’t hear God, just what do we hear? If we aren’t listening to God, who/what are we listening to?
David prayed in Psalm 51:8 that the Lord would ‘make him hear joy and gladness’. We should pray the same thing. Oh, and let us all be assured with all confidence that God hears us. Psalm 65:2 states that God is the one who “who hears prayer”. Not only is Jesus a speaking King, He is also a listening King…. Not only does God hear us, but we hear Him. Some say God doesn’t speak to men anymore, i say if that is so then there was no point in the words of Jesus in John 10:3-5, and this is important, so please listen, “To him the doorkeeper opens, and the sheep hear his voice; and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. 4 And when he brings out his own sheep, he goes before them; and the sheep follow him, for they know his voice. 5 Yet they will by no means follow a stranger, but will flee from him, for they do not know the voice of strangers.”

The Lord has a mouth and speaks, we have ears and can hear, i say, “Why shouldn’t He speak to us?” Where the word “voice” is used it means, “uttered words, speech”. Voice means exactly what it says and not some alternate means of perception. God said “they hear my uttered words, My speech”, and He meant exactly what He said. i hear God, i have friends who hear God, so i’m compelled to ask you, Do you hear God? If not, would you like to? He’s speaking a lot these days, can you hear Him?

Isaiah 32:3 “The eyes of those who see will not be dim, And the ears of those who hear will listen.” There is another place in the Bible where hearing and listening are used in the same sentence, and i’m mentioning this for the sake of those who might think “hearing” and “listening” are the same. Isaiah 42:23, like Isaiah 32:3 use both words, and there is a difference. If we give attention to God and incline our ears to Him, which is to hear, according to Isaiah 32:3 and 42:23 we can will also perceive His words and grasp His intent, which is listening. Believe me, if God wants you to hear and understand, He is entirely capable of making Himself known and getting His point across. And it’s not like He “tries” to speak to us, as if He would fail. The point is not whether God is speaking, but are we hearing and positioning ourselves to understand?

Like in 2 Chronicles 20:17 “…Position yourselves, stand still and see the salvation of the LORD, who is with you…. Do not fear or be dismayed …for the LORD is with you.” Put yourself in position to hear and listen to God. God will gladly give to us the riches of His hands, but we’ve got to make an effort. We can’t just sit back in our lawn chairs in casual repose, drink our mint juleps, and expect God to make all the effort. The heart of the Lord is that we would participate with Him in our own salvation. i fully believe the Lord wants a running dialogue with His people. These are the days that if we are brave enough to ask the Lord, He will answer … the catch is we need to actually be interested in hearing Him. Position yourselves, stand still, turn down the volume of the world in your head and in the world around you. Ask the Lord, He will answer, i assure you. And when He does, listen! The word “consider” in the Bible means to “incline you’re heart and focus until you have understanding”.

God does speak, and we can hear. The date is today, the time is now, and forward is the way we’re going. Can you hear the Lord? Would you like to? Now is the time, position yourselves and incline your ears to Him! He will answer.
i pray our ears will be opened and we will hear the life giving words of the Living God.

Open your ears, position yourself to hear God. As the days get darker, i believe the voice of the Lord will become more prevalent. Can you hear Him, He’s there and He is very interested in speaking to you.

To “press hard after God” is to follow him closely, like someone who is afraid of losing sight of something very valuable, following Him in season and out, whether it’s convenient or not. To “press hard after God” means we’re hot on His trail, we’ve got our nose to the ground, ears fully engaged, looking near and far for the indications of His presence and direction.

When David was in the wilderness of Judah, Psalm63 reveals a man who thirsted after the Lord. Psalm63:1, “O God, you are my God, earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you, my body longs for you, in a dry and weary land where there is no water.” David had a choice, he could just lay down and die letting Saul kill him and be done with all that chasing around, or he could set his eyes on the Lord and call to the only one who could actually help. Jesus knows how to help you find your second wind!

If you have stepped, purposefully or mistakenly, if you have stepped into a situation which wounds your conscience and causes you to lose your relish for righteous things, don’t hide yourself away. Run, i said, run to Jesus and tell it all to Him. It’s not like He doesn’t know and doesn’t see, He’s just waiting on you to bring it all to His healing place. Don’t think for a minute you can just hide it away in your heart … as if in the long run you think it doesn’t make any difference. Everything matters. Hidden sin will eat your lunch…maybe not today, but undealt with junk is just that, undealt with junk. Run to Jesus and tell Him all about it, never let it hide. Reconciling and resolving our wounded conscience and bad choosings should be to God’s glory and our testimony of His delivering power, not a shame to us which drives us indoors to shut our blinds, drawing our curtains, becoming isolated and alone in the dark. i can say from experience, when left to ourselves, alone with secrets, isolated and in the dark with shame to keep us company …. we are in bad company.

When viscious circumstances occur in our lives, and they will occur, that is not the time to hide away, that is the time to turn up the heat, pedal to the metal, being in hot pursuit of the Lord, calmly, methodically, with focus and all power….run to Jesus.

Matthew 22:39, “And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself”; as read from Leviticus 19:18, “… but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD.”

How do we love ourselves? i don’t mean a twisted perception of self-appreciation, thinking more highly of ourselves than we should, or being arrogant and proud, acting out all sorts of self centered-ness, but to those who think they are dogs or even less. That verse doesn’t read “you shall loathe your neighbor as your loathe yourself”, but “love your neighbor as yourself”. It appears to me, for much of my life, i’ve loathed myself instead of loved myself, beating myself long after God and others had forgiven me.

Did Jesus die enough for you?
Did Jesus suffer enough for you?
Did Jesus bleed enough for you?
If He did, then take it all to the next step …
Did He die enough for your neighbor?
Did He suffer enough for your neighbor?
Did He bleed enough for your neighbor?
If He did, then… you’ve got to let go of the burdens of your heart.

Who is it which keeps reminding us of all the things we ever did, or of all the things our neighbor did? It seems that for many, no matter how many times we confess to God our sins, we just can’t quite seem to find the washing of our conscience we so desperately need.

And who is it who continues holding up to our faces all our faults or our neighbors faults, long after God has tread the faults under and called them washed away? For us to keep bleeding about the past is to say…the sacrifice on Calvary made by the Son of God was insufficient. It is to say God can forgive others but He can’t quite reach me, and hell whispers through the cracks in the windows and doors of our hearts and says we MUST “PAY MORE”. For us to keep others bleeding long after the Lord has forgiven them, isn’t that not only calling the blood shed by Jesus insufficient, but worse putting ourselves in a god-position? “PAY MORE.” We who keep others bleeding, saying WE will decide when they have bled enough….i mean it was truly bad the other person did something terrible, but i believe it’s even worse when we point it out and stand over them, telling them to bleed until we are satisfied. “PAY MORE.” In Genesis 9 it was bad that Noah was naked and drunk, but it was worse that Ham pointed it out.

Did Jesus die enough, suffer enough, bleed enough for you? How about your neighbor? If He did, then let what constrains you go, open your hands and let it go.

By looking forward i mean not living hypnotized by the past, a life-style of always looking back. God had some hard things to say to Israel for pining about their past, whining about “what was” so much that it dictated their “what is”, and they lost sight of their “what will be”. God called it, “Hearkening back to a former time.” Let’s understand, i don’t mean never looking back, but i mean to let the past be past and not give the past anymore power over our lives than it already has. Looking forward, ask yourself: where is my life in the now? Where is life happening for you? Is God driving with His God-directions and God-purposes, or, maybe, like many of us, we really have no clue, or we answer “Yes”, but really mean “i wish”? You know, if we’re always looking back it’ll give us a terrible neck ache. We can’t drive forward if we’re always looking in the rear view mirror. Going forward is nearly impossible if we’re watching behind us.

Almost, pretty much, just about, for the most part, if, maybe, might have been…yea but, yea but if… …if… if only… Might have been… Might have been if only.

In the things we sow and reap, There are the sowings of things that, never in this life, would we wish to grow at our feet. But yet, more and more often, i see the seeds of regret that grow around our feet like vines that tangle us and cause our attention to shift from important matters to spending more and more time untangling ourselves from these “vines”, strangling vines, ropes impeding forward momentum, vines of distraction and the more we are distracted the more we are distracted. Many people like to wander in the cemetery of past errors and old wrongs, rereading old headstones and epitaphs of the things we think we have “reckoned dead”, moaning over old wrongs saying over and over, “Oh, i so wish i hadn’t done that,” but never really dealing with what’s in their heart and letting it all go. Regret often paralyzes hope, corrodes the connection between vision and purpose, and becomes a dead weight to our forward momentum. This is not healthy; it is what i call a chronic gastrointestinal turbulence of the soul.

In the silence of late night, the gray place between awake and asleep, we play the video of what “might have been”, but when it plays in a constant loop it makes us weak because it over-emphasizes the past at the expense of the present. How expensive is your present? Would you trade “now” to go back to “then”? Do you really think “then” would be all you remember it to be, or is it just a group of selective memories?

A man said to me once, many years ago while weeping over his life, “Sometimes, i seem to spend the bulk of my time wishing God would do something other than what He is doing.” For me, his words were such a profound idea to ponder.

Years later, i think of Israel, in the desert, the wilderness, a place of amazing miracles, a season of walking with God, and over and over they hearkened back to a former time, seemingly spending the bulk of their time wishing God would do something other than what He was doing. Israel was in what i call the “Season of The Golden Calf”, and i wonder if maybe we, in America aren’t living out a giant repeat of the story of Israel in some odd fashion. Looking back, always wishing we were anywhere but here, unbelieving of God’s promise of tomorrow, bitter about today.

OH, and the colors….the colors of “might have been” are always so brilliant! The reds, and blues, the crimson and purples, the yellows & pales…the white sails of distant ships are always full and whiter than our own, and the green of far away hills are always greener. Might have been always looks SOOO good from a distance.

We need to refocus. But what, or who will we refocus on? i think what Paul said in Philippians 3 is the supreme focus, “… forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead. I press on toward the goal to win the (supreme and heavenly) prize to which God in Christ Jesus is calling us upward.”

Let us go OUT of the graveyard of “might have been” and “if only” to go forward. We are not people of our history, but people of our destiny. As best we can let us take seriously what we sow; let us leave the graveyard of old things where regret grows around our feet … let it go; let the dead be dead and let us catch our breath in a new direction. Don’t just turn in a new direction, more better, come home! Refocus to be forward thinking, forward moving with forward momentum. Love the Lord you God with all your breathing, all your thinking, all your feeling, and all your forward momentum. And at that, i say: Selah, my friends, think on it.

In Matthew 25 there is a parable about talents (or gifts) and what three servants did with their talents.

Rev. R. R. Belter wrote, “The man in Matthew 25:26 said, “I went and hid my talent in the ground,”, and he is not the only one on whose tombstone, in the “Cemetery of Neglect” such words were written.”

Arthur Brisbane, whose’ syndicated column were read with relish years ago, once wrote these words: “The greatest loss to the human race has not been caused by floods or by fire, not by epidemics which have spread disease over vast areas and with the sickle of death mowed down millions, nor by earthquakes and topical storms; neither by record-breaking crashes of Wall Street … the greatest loss … has been in the buried talent of God’s people.”

Reverend Belter continued saying, “Is there anything more pathetic than a trained teacher who will not teach, a beautiful voice which will not sing, a pastoral gifting that will not shepherd, an apostolic anointing not allowed to plant, an efficient businessman who will not give to God the benefit of his knowledge, or a lawyer who will not serve in Church councils so that his Lord can have the benefit of talent which God alone gave him? We have men and women in all walks of life, who have been given blessings, but refuse to be a blessing.”

Our giftings don’t have to just be under the heading of the “big five” as seen in Ephesians 4. Some have pockets full of hope, others have a gift of just meeting people….people just like talking to them. Some have a gift of just knowing how to help before other folks seem to know they even need help, they just show up right on time, it’s more than a knack, it’s a gift and leading of the Lord. There are gifts of writing and communicating….some people in the Body of Christ are naturally wonderful, vision imparting communicators. There are people with organizational gifts, administrative gifts, gifts of compassion and grace, gifts of imagination and dreaming, the gift of spoken languages, gifts of mathematics and the practical application; there are people who just ooze kindness….those are all gifts from God and we are the stewards of those beautiful things the Lord gave us. What will you do with what God gave you? Are we going to bury our giftings, or use them for the furtherment of the Kingdom of God?

Like any Father, the Lord carries real concerns for our welfare, but He does not come at us with a hurricane, storm-cloud posture of tooth gritting rage, and ground shaking judgment. His heart is for us to stop hiding, to humble ourselves, be honest, and reconcile with Him. Yahweh is for us.

He is more than willing to balance our books, in fact, He’s already done the work, it is finished, we just have to believe on the name of Jesus, and allow Him to perfect in each of us what He started. Philippians 1:6, “being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.”

Come out, come out, where ever you are. It’s not like God, who’s eye nothing escapes from, does not see us. You know those things you do in the dark when you think no one sees? Well…..let’s not kid ourselves…God sees…we might as well be honest with Him. You know one day, every knee shall bow, every tongue shall confess that Jesus is Lord. At that point, it won’t be a request, it will be a requirement.

God is not hidden. We are. We were hiding in the garden of Eden, and we are still hiding today. The Lord is bidding us to come out of hiding, to humble ourselves and be honest, to throw open the doors of our heart and tear down our fences. Christ is visible and willing to forgive us all our darkest secrets, we’ve simply go to be willing to come out of our hiding places. Come out, come out, where ever you are. You may say, “One day i’ll do just that!” How about today being your “One day”. God is good for His promises, come out from hiding.

A friend of mine won the West coast 500 Pro Class Motocross many years ago so he seemed like a good candidate for a deeper discussion of faith and risk. In our discussion of the topic at hand, along with all the other racing strategies, the one which intrigued me the most was his use of the term, “controlled crash”. He won by pushing everything to the absolute edge – once he was on the track, everything – every curve, every shift, every jump, every slide – from start to finish, it was all a controlled crash, always on the edge of winning it all or losing it all. He was never damped by the possibility of failure, he said that an over focus on the “failure potential” skews our risk assessment. Even though quite a few years have gone by, he still lives life in a controlled crash, the only difference is that his maturity and experience have highly influenced his risk assessment, therefore he has a greater degree of success in all he does. That was important i think, here it is again: maturity and experience highly influence our risk assessment….or at least it should.

Now i suppose it would be easy to think the phrase, “controlled crash” was an oxymoron – or that it is a self-contradictory phrase, like saying something was a “cruel kindness”, but here’s what is meant by “controlled crash”: when something slips out of our initial plan, it speaks of the action taken to minimize the damage. Like when riding a horse at a full gallop and somehow your feet come out of the stirrups. You knew it was possible that this could occur, but in order to have a little control over the potential catastrophe which could easily follow, you already thought about what to do next. We see bull riders who do it all the time. They know the risk is high that they will get thrown off, but in the moment they are becoming dislodged, they are keeping their cool and thinking, not about the failure to make the ride to the buzzer, but about how to best dismount with as little damage as possible.

Acts 27:15 says, “And when the ship was caught, and could not bear up into the wind, we let her drive.” It was a “controlled crash” meaning they couldn’t get out of the storm, it was all out of control, so they picked a course of action that might minimize any potential damage, so they went with the wind, and “let her drive.” A “controlled crash” takes into account that it’s possible things will not go as planned and takes some control over what to do next.

Gambling addicts bet the house, but rarely have a back up plan in case they lose it all, whereas a good stock investor may risk a great deal on an investment, but almost always has an exit plan. Becoming part of a limited liability corporation is a risk, but the smart business man always has a larger, more detailed exit plan than the entry plan. Is your life just a crash waiting to happen with no strategy in the event things don’t go as initially planned, or is it a controlled crash where you’ve made a contingency plan built of “if this, then that”? Excerpt from “Outposts 100”.