NLT

Listening and Doing.  Jesus, made it very clear to His disciples those who follow Him, listens to what He says and then puts it into practice.  It is often been said that the difficult part of living for Jesus is not know what to do, it is doing it.  If we are honest with ourselves and with God, there have many times in our life that the Lord has very clearly spoken something to us through His word and we have not listened.  Or perhaps we have listened or not obeyed His voice. Jesus said that if we love Him we keep His commands. We can become so hard of hearing at times that the only one we listen to is ourselves.  We somehow decide that anything we want to do and anyway we want to act is in line with God's will and we attempt to justify it. The first key for me is to get to a place with God on a regular basis that I am ready to listen.  If we humble ourselves and say Lord we are ready to listen then God will speak but if we continue to refuse to listen, our loving Lord has not choice but to use circumstances to get our attention so that we might follow Jesus.   I heard something the other day that I thought really spoke to this point so well.  "God wants to speak to us in revelation what He is obligated to teach us in tribulation." When I heard that it reminded me that the Lord is constantly speaking to us but we are often too busy or too distracted to listen to His voice.  Is it possible that even today God is trying to speak to each of us about our life and our direction not only for the big things but also for the small ones?  James says in chapter one that if we listen to God's Word and don't do what it says we are fooling ourselves.

 That is exactly what we don't want to do, we have a desire to follow the Lord and His commands, to listen to His voice and promptings, but we must be willing to take those words and put them into action.  So often Christians (me included) try to rationalize why we shouldn't listen and obey, as if we know what is best in a given situation. If we truly want to follow Jesus we must listen and obey even when it goes contrary to our flesh or our own ideas. Think about the moments in your own life when God told you through His Word or through you own private prayer time, that you should forgive someone for a past hurt,  that would be very clear wouldn't it? (Colossians 3:13) But we can make every excuse for not listening and not obeying. Or if the Lord tells us to serve in some capacity or to serve someone else we will listen but not follow because our schedule is too full. 

What if we would take on a brand new pattern of our walk with Jesus, one in which we could say to the Lord, "I will hear your words and obey them." What do you think would happen?  I think we would start to be people that are more life our Master. People who learn to listen and obey, who learn to love like Jesus because Jesus tells us how to love,(Matt 5:43-47) people who learn to serve like Jesus because He tells us how to serve, (Mark 10:45) people who pray like Jesus because he tells us how to pray.  (Luke 18:1) There is freedom when we listen to His voice and obey His words.  The sooner you and I begin to sit at the feet of Jesus and listen and obey the sooner we will know the favor of God over each part of our life.  May you and I be people who listen and obey our Lord Jesus, in the big things and the small ones.   May God bless you with His favor as you obey His voice today.

But if you look carefully into the perfect law that sets you free, and if you do what it says and don't forget what you heard, then God will bless you for doing it.  James 1:22-25