Can You Hear Me Now?: God on Mute
You all know that I love the show LOST (coming back to ABC on January 31st with a two hour season premiere – but that is beside the point). I don’t have TIVO or a DVR to record the show, so if I miss an episode, I will often watch it on my computer the following week. I really enjoy settling in and taking in the mystery that is about to unfold. On one particular viewing; however, I could not get the connection for my computer to work properly. Over and over again, I had the video playing, but no sound coming out. I rebooted. Didn’t work. Frustration was oozing out of me. Why does this not work? Who runs this website? Who needs to be fired? Then I caught in the corner of my eye, the symbol at the bottom right corner of my computer. It was on mute.
God gets a lot of the blame when we don’t “hear” from him. What does it mean when God is silent? How can we hear Him when He is talking? Does He still talk?
These are some of the questions we want to explore this week as we continue our study on prayer.
January 16th, 2008 at 4:37 pm
That really resonates with me. So often, I am not ready to listen to God. I already know the answer I want to hear and am not will to open myself up to what God would have to tell me. Sometimes it is so hard to surrender myself so that I can listen to God.
January 16th, 2008 at 10:38 pm
In the past I have thought of unanswered prayer as God not hearing my requests or refusing to answer, but I am very slowly learning that prayer is about sharing. If prayer is about relationship, then God’s silence can be an invitation to pursue him and learn more. It can be his way of telling me that he loves me so much that a quick answer won’t cut it because he wants to know me, the real me. These quotes have helped me see prayer differently.
“Prayer begins with the assumption that the intimate, all-knowing God knows every thought and intent of the heart before it is conceived or spoken. Prayer does not inform God; rather it draws us into his presence and invites him into our life. Prayer is involvement through the spoken word. In that sense, prayer of any kind and about any subject delights God’s heart. The Lord desires for us to want him, adore him, thank him, need him, love him. To ask God to reveal, confirm, instruct, guide, heal, bless, convict, or comfort invites him to enter our situation and accomplish what he desires.” (Dr. Dan Allender)
“When we open our hearts to be honest with God in prayer, he hears us and steps through the door to be with us, totally unfazed by the mess of our interior world. The thing that keeps God out of our lives is not our sin. It is our compulsion to pretend, to cover up our nakedness with fig leaves, to climb sycamore trees in order to see without being seen.” (from God on Mute by Pete Greig)
January 17th, 2008 at 12:33 am
This is also an isssue that I have had so many times. I felt that God just didn’t hear me-maybe I didn’t pray “right” or often enough. However, after hearing Paul speak this past weekend, I realize that however I pray is the “right” way and maybe God just wasn’t answering in MY time. He also made me really think about how often I pray for something or someone. When he said that he and his wife had been praying for 40 years for her mother without any results-whoa!!! That really blew me away. I now think that maybe I just gave up praying too soon for some of the prayers that I saw as not being answered. I have definitely had some new ideas to think about as far as my prayer life is concerned and I am anxious to put them into practice.