The Listening Side of PrayerSample

Day 3: Be Alert & Ready

Have you ever been hit in the face when someone passed you a ball that you weren’t expecting? If you have, you know it doesn’t feel too great.

It can feel just as painful but with way more important consequences when God speaks and we’re not ready to listen.

Let me put it another way. Have you ever made a decision, and then later on, once you realized you made a bad decision, saw that God had been showing you the whole time to go the other way and you didn’t listen?

We’ve all been there. What we want to do now is learn from our mistakes and listen well in the first place. That way we can avoid all of the unnecessary headache.

When it comes to being prepared to listen to God, it’s a Spiritual battle as well as physical.  If we only try to spend time with God at the end of our day when we’re tired and ready to go to sleep, we’re probably not going to be very good listeners.

In Day 1 of this devotional we learned the importance of making time and space for God. We need to make sure that time and space includes us being alert and ready to participate. I would even go so far as to say we should do our best to eat healthy, exercise, and get sufficient rest so that we are able to spend time alone with God without falling asleep. While it is a sweet sleep to rest in God’s presence, none of us hears anything when we’re not awake. Unless God is giving us dreams and visions, which is possible, we need to be attentive to hear Him.