Turn Your Radio On

I've been teaching on the Holy Spirit the past few Wednesday nights at church, and I've talked about how the Holy Spirit leads and guides. Many struggle with the concept of "hearing" the voice of God. The problem is that we think in terms of the human body, but we need to think in spiritual terms. I have a saying that I teach my church which may help the reader. We are not a physical body that a happens to have a spirit; but rather, we are spiritual beings that happen to be in a human body. When this body is gone, the spirit will live on. With that understanding, realize that our spirit communicates with the Holy Spirit, and that is spirit to spirit. We "hear" with our spirit. As we develop a more intimate relationship with the Lord, we come to know his "voice." Jesus, speaking of the Holy Spirit said that he will lead us into all truth. It is God's desire to communicate with us on a daily basis. Another thing I have taught my church is that prayer is much more about hearing God than it is speaking. In fact, in the Gospel of Matthew where the disciples asked Jesus to teach them to pray, and Jesus answered with what we call the Lord's Prayer, the term that is translated "pray" literally means "to catch" or "to set a trap." The implication is to "catch what God is speaking." It is vital to our Christian faith walk that we learn to catch what God is speaking to us as we go through our daily lives.

An example of this is something that happened today. As I was going through the day, just taking care of business, I felt an incredibly strong urge or prompting of the Holy Spirit to get away and pray specifically for two people. I sent both of them a text message a short time later asking if they were OK. One of them I never heard from, the other, a teenager who attends my church, did respond and said she was OK, other than being really stressed because she was working with a group of grade school kids and had been at a museum and they were acting up some. I didn't concern myself further, knowing that the Holy Spirit had prompted me to pray, and I had done what I knew to do. The rest was up the God. I actually had pretty much dismissed this from my mind until a short while ago my phone rang and it was this young lady thanking me for praying. She said, "I should have been on that bus." I did not have a clue what she was talking about until she filled me in. One of the buses that was bringing the kids back from the Quad Cities had the windshield blow out of it and several of the kids were taken to the hospital. Amanda told me that she was supposed to be on that bus, but they had made a change and put her and her kids on a different bus for the trip home. She knew nothing about it either, until she came in and her father told her what had happened. She said, "Oh my God, I was supposed to be on that bus!" And then she remembered my message that I felt such an overwhelming prompting to pray for her. She said she knew that God had intervened and kept her and her kids off that bus.

OK, some will say coincidence. Say what you want, but God is speaking, and if we will only listen, he wants to direct our lives. The question is, will we listen. I'm suddenly reminded of the old song, "Turn Your Radio On."