Week 15 Devotions

April 9 - - “There is a time for everything, a season for every activity under heaven.....A time to be quiet and a time to speak up” (Ecclesiastes 3:1,7). While many of us speak to the Lord when we pray and many do it quite often, how many of us take the time to be quiet and listen to the Lord? God specifically commands us to, “be silent, and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10). James reminds us to, “be quick to listen, slow to speak” (James 1:19). Most of us are much quicker at speaking to God than we are listening to God. Good listeners are not people who have inherited a chromosome or a gene that others of us haven’t. They are people who have practiced that skill, for it is in practicing that we become good at anything. They are people who have learned not to be afraid of the silence, but to welcome it and even treasure it. For, they know that it is in the silence, we most often hear God (see also I Kings 19:9-18). There was a time in Israel’s history when the Bible says, “in those days messages from the Lord were very rare, and visions were quite uncommon” (I Samuel 3:1). Why? Because few people sought the Lord’s will and few people listened when God did speak. Take Eli, for example. He is a priest of God, a spokesman for the Lord, but the Lord warned him on more than one occasion that his sons were totally disobedient to the Lord and Eli did little about it. His few words of warning to his boys were not heeded by his boys because there was no action from their father to back up those words. And when a nation’s spiritual leaders are not listening to the Lord, it is a good bet the people are not listening either. In fact, the Bible paints a rather bleak picture of the spiritual condition of Israel when it says, “The lamp of God had not yet gone out” (I Samuel 3:3). One gets the feeling from those words that even though it hadn’t gone out yet, it was close to doing so. God tried to speak to Samuel three times and Samuel mistook the voice he was hearing to be that of Eli, the priest. Finally, Eli gives the young boy great advice. “The next time you hear that voice, you say, ‘Yes, Lord, your servant is listening.’” (I Samuel 3:9). Samuel did hear the voice again. He did what Eli told him to. And, the Lord gave Samuel an important message. Maybe all of us need to spend more time simply listening for the Lord and giving him our full attention by asking him to, “speak, for your servant is listening.” April 12 - - When large crowds were following Jesus, he encouraged them to first count the cost before deciding whether to be his disciple. He used as an example the following illustration: “What king would ever dream of going to war without first sitting down with his counselors and dis-cussing whether his army of ten thousand is strong enough to defeat the twenty thousand soldiers who are marching against him?” (Luke 14:31). In other words, it is always a good idea to take stock in what we are doing before we do it. Unfortunately, some people will spend forever analyzing their situation and never act or make a decision to do something. Other people will never do something unless they’ve calculated exactly how it can be accomplished utilizing their own strength, intelligence, and resources. Still others count the cost, but they do so with God figured in the equation. When the men of Israel assembled to do battle against the Philistines and saw how many Philistine soldiers there were, many of the Israelites went AWOL. King Saul’s son, Jonathan, was tired of sitting around and doing nothing. He said to his armor bearer, “let’s see what’s going on in the Phili-stine camp” (I Samuel 14:1). Jonathan reminds his armor bearer, “the Lord can win a battle whether he has many warriors or only a few!” (I Sam.14:6). And then like Gideon who asked God for a sign before going into battle (Judges 6:36-40), Jonathan throws a fleece before the Lord. “We’ll cross over and let the enemy see us. If they say to us, ‘Stay where you are or we’ll kill you’, then we will stop and not go up to them. But if they say, ‘Come on up and fight’, then we will go up. That will be the Lord’s sign that He will help us defeat them” (I Sam.14:8-10). When the Philistines saw the two, they said, “Look, the Hebrews are crawling out of their holes! Come on up here and we’ll teach you a lesson!” (vss.11&12) That’s all the encouragement Jonathan needed to do battle because he said, “the Lord will help us defeat them!” And the Lord did. The two of them killed about twenty Philistine soldiers. When word spread what had happened, the rest of the Philistine army went into panic and were ultimately defeated. It was Jonathan’s faith, and that of his armor bearer, which inspired the entire Israelite army. Jesus’ words caution us not to be foolish in what we do, by first counting the cost and assessing our situation before we act. But, let us never forget the God factor because great faith always inspires other people to action also. Why don’t you consider being someone who walks by faith and in doing so, inspiring others to do the same?