Monday 18 Jun 2018

June 18: Psalm 66:16-20

Key Verse: Psalm 66:19
but God has surely listened and has heard my prayer.

Devotion:
We are very lucky that God listens to our prayers. Right from an early time the Jews have pushed the idea God would not hear people if they were sinners; which causes a very big issue that nobody in this world is without sin, ergo, God would not hear us!

In the Gospel of John we have a story of a blind man being made to see through Jesus’ miracle… I wonder what it would have been like for this man to have been blind from birth and then suddenly being able to see again after Jesus gave him his sight. It is not something any of us could probably be able to imagine because we would either have continued with our sight, maybe have lost it after an accident, or would have never had our sight. And yet, even though everyone knew this man was blind from birth and could quite clearly see now, they refused to accept the truth about Jesus.

You see, mankind has made up their own rules right from the start and has tried to justify everything we do by changing the rules slightly from time to time. Our wants and desires should not be the things making up the rules. The truth as it came from God should be what the rules are based on – and we try to do that because many of our earliest laws all include God in them, but the more we change stuff, the more we leave God out of it. Just like the people looking at impossible situations in the bible, when we see something that we cannot explain, we try to look for a logical or scientific reason for it to happen rather than accepting that it is the will of God. When things happen in our lives we assume that there must be some shallow reason because we are human. We close off our minds to the depth and wisdom of our Very God!

The Psalmist lays it out quite clearly here – they had been taught God would not hear them if they were sinners, but God did hear him even though he was a sinner. What glorious news! God listens to us all! We have a way of asking Him to forgive us! Kinda makes complete sense after you look at it like that… But we get caught up in our lives and our rules and allow them to block God out of our lives far too easily. Try and remember God can and does listen to all our prayers and even all of our thoughts and doings. We need to pray that we can have our eyes opened to God’s will in our lives even though we seem to work against it all the time…

Points to Ponder:
What would you do if you could suddenly hear everyone’s thoughts?

How would you react if you could verbally hear God speaking?