listening to the Lord

On a Friday there are never so many folk around the place.

Which in some ways is good. It means there's the chance to get on with things in a concentrated way.

I was glad of the 'space' this being-on-my-own afforded me today. There was much that I needed to do.

I wanted to try and get clear in my mind the message God means me to bring. Or messages more like. Sunday morning and night. Two very different 'words'.

It was the evening one I was working on throughout the bulk of the time. Listening in to what the Lord is saying to us here. It's his word, not mine, that I'm seeking to bring. So the heart of my task is this listening to him.

Which takes time. And often a sort of quiet 'isolation'.

How do I know that I'm hearing him? It's hard to put into words. It's kind of like a gnawing sense that this is what he's saying. Like a fire in my heart that won't go out at all.

Over time you start to recognise his 'voice', the fact that he is speaking and the drift of what he says.

Like last night. I hadn't planned on a travelling up to the hospital then. But I found this spreading pressure on my heart to go and see the daughter of the lady who was up there in the hospital.

And calling on her and learning that she was up at the side of her mother's hospital bed, I knew I had to go.

I'd have wished (as I said in yesterday's post) that I might have made it in time and been there before she had died. But I wasn't. I arrived just moments too late.

I called by this afternoon on the daughter (a lady of seventy). She couldn't get over the fact I arrived when I did and was there at that moment of deepest, immediate grief. I'd been, she declared, a 'God-send'. I found that really encouraging.

Her perception, I think, was right. It was a case of being sent by God. I was very aware of that. Hearing his voice, discerning his gentle 'nudges' and just going where he led.

The bottom line in all I do is simply this. God speaks.

That's the basic reality on which my life is built. He speaks: and, as Charles Wesley in his famous hymn once wrote - and listening to his voice, new life the dead receive.

When I stand on a Sunday morning or night and start to preach, I'm seeking to bring God's word. And as I do just that, it is my expectation that things happen.

People who are spiritually dead, emotionally drained, physically spent - they find themselves revived, renewed, transformed.

So I don't like to think of what I'm doing on a day such as this as simply 'crafting sermons'. As if my work was simply a case of constructing a good bit of script. It's not.

I'm seeking to listen to God. To hear his word. To figure it out in such a way that when I start to preach, it's not my words at all. It's God who'll speak.

And when he speaks, things happen.

I can't predict just what. That's part of what makes it always so exciting.

I never can tell just what it is that is taking place in people's lives. I just know something is. Something God himself is doing in their lives.

And Fridays, when I'm on my own, are somehow an important part of all the massive drama of the Sunday when it comes.

Where have I heard all that before?!