You Have Heard My Voice

Lamentations 3:55-58

I called on Your name, O LORD,
From the lowest pit.
You have heard my voice:
"Do not hide Your ear
From my sighing, from my cry for help."
You drew near on the day I called on You,
And said, "Do not fear!"
O Lord, You have pleaded the case for my soul;
You have redeemed my life.

We call on the name of The Lord — more often than not — when we need Him to fix something; get us out of a troubling situation or a difficult relationship, and surely He leaps into action and in an instant everything is peachy once again. Fortunately for us He doesn’t work like that. Our God knows us too well and operates on a far more creative level than we can ever know.

The prophet Jeremiah says here that when we call out His Name, because we are in the lowest pit, He hears and brings us words of reassurance, and says “Do not fear!” That is what we need to hear, whatever the problem may be. It may be all that we need to hear, for just as He awaits our cry, He desires that we hear Him; that we are in a hearing relationship with Him. What do we understand by ‘hearing’, when our cries come from the heart and make no sound?

In my ‘salad days’ as a Christian, I once asked a spirit-filled man of God what he understood by hearing God’s voice. He balled his fist and tapped his stomach with it, telling me it was ‘a gut response’, often a deep one that left no doubt of the Holy Spirit having spoken. He added that there were times that he had got things wrong, but that the fault was his — running ahead of God; not waiting on understanding Him.

Just as The Lord is patient (or longsuffering) with us, we must wait upon The Lord. Just as He hears us, He asks us to listen for His response, and take time to acknowledge and give thanks to Him.

MEDITATE ON THESE THINGS

ISAIAH 40:31
But those who wait on the LORD
Shall renew their strength;
They shall mount up with wings like eagles,
They shall run and not be weary,
They shall walk and not faint.

PSALM 55:16-19
As for me, I will call upon God,
And the LORD shall save me.
Evening and morning and at noon
I will pray, and cry aloud,
And He shall hear my voice.
He has redeemed my soul in peace from the battle that was against me,
For there were many against me.
God will hear, and afflict them,
Even He who abides from of old.

HEAR MY VOICE — Lisa Bevill

A HOLY COMMAND
Oswald Chambers on LOVE
— Love with all your HEART --

WE LIMIT OURSELVES and our conceptions of God by ignoring the side of the Divine Nature best symbolized by womanhood, and the Comforter, be it reverently said, surely represents this side of the Divine Nature. It is the Comforter Who sheds abroad the love of God in our hearts. It is the Comforter Who baptizes us into oneness with Jesus, in the amazing language of Scripture, until we are indwelt by a mysterious union with God. It is the Comforter Who brings forth the fruit of love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, meekness, temperance.
[from ‘Christian Discipline’]

LISTEN TO THIS MEDITATION BY CLICKING ON THE LINK BELOW…

22-09-24__472__you_have_heard_my_voice.m4a
File Size:	2487 kb
File Type:	m4a

Download File

---