ICS Daily Devotions
Listening to God
Luke 5:16 (NKJV) So He Himself often withdrew into the wilderness and prayed.
God does speak to us, and if we obey the inner promptings, remarkable things can happen!
According to Joyce Hugget’s book “Listening To God”, there are eight different phases of listening to God (the latter four phases will be covered in part 2 of the devotional). The first phase is relaxation and silence, where we deliberately let go of all tension, worries and frustration. It takes some time to come to this position, but in order for our spirit man to tune in to God, we must learn to tune out the external disturbances and voices from our soul (mind and emotion). This takes us to the second phase of awareness of God’s presence, where a profound sense of security is found in the Heavenly Father’s presence.
The third phase is surrender. To be real in the presence of God means we hand back to God all that we are, feel and want to be apart from Him—our job, security, struggles, pain, success and failures. We continually remind ourselves that our identity is in Christ and we refuse the futile struggle of trying to please men.
The fourth phase is acceptance where we allow ourselves to be moulded by God through the conviction of the Holy Spirit, and not condemnation by the devil, because through the blood of Jesus, God remembers our past sins no more. Instead, we invite God to shine His light on current specific situations, sins and attitudes which block our ability to hear God. The Holy Spirit will reveal to us the areas where we need to change. There will be no peace in our hearts until we surrender to Him, obey His command and renounce them. He will prune us so we can be fruitful. Because it is a spiritual warfare, there will be rationalising, reasoning and struggles as to why we shouldn’t release or forgive certain people, but these have to do with pride, self-righteousness, lofty thoughts and the carnality that refuses to submit to the Lordship of Jesus Christ.
We often think we are tormenting those who have wronged us by harbouring bitterness or hatred against them, but in fact, we are keeping our mind and emotions imprisoned, and we are the ones who are not free! Therefore, we must take hold of every thought and bring it into captivity to obey Christ by forgiving. The Lord Jesus requires us to forgive seventy times seven, so we are to release these people to the Lord. Take note of when you have released them, so when these thoughts come again, you can remind yourself that it has been dealt with!
It is a process of changing into His likeness. We will hear Him very clearly in this process, and it will be the same voice speaking to us whether we are at work or in our daily living.
Sermon Series: From the Closet to the Board Room (Part 1) – Listening to God
