I remember well one of our first groups of interns serving at the Paris Prayer Conference. They were given several days to ‘figure out’ the Paris metro system before taking a group of participants to different sites each day for prayer. On day one of the conference, they brought all the participants from their hotel to our m
ain meeting place. When they arrived, I ‘tested’ them by asking what metro line they had taken to get to the meeting place. “You took line 6, right?” Their reply caught me by surprise: “No, we took line 3! It looked like a shorter route.” I had always taken line 6 to get to the meeting place. I knew what to do to get to the meeting place. Where in the world did they come up with the idea of taking line 3?
How I felt then, was how I felt today when Rebecca & I read this comment in the devotional, Saving Grace, by Jack Miller: “Depend on the Holy Spirit. He is the sovereign one. If you want to know how to exercise your gifts with love, ask the Father to give you the Spirit with his control, presence, and guidance. Ask him to humble your heart, to make you depend on him, to help you to listen to him with sensitivity, and to give you an obedient heart. It is often the case that we don’t listen to the Spirit because we’ve made up our minds that we already know what we should do.”
God does want us to make plans, but those plans should involve daily listening to the Spirit to see if He is moving us in a different direction; to work in a different way or to just do something differently than the way we always did it before.
It’s not a daily ‘throwing out’ of our plans and direction. It’s a daily re-submitting of our hearts and plans into His hands.
It starts by asking the Father for the Spirit, and listening collectively to His voice.
Filed under: Holy Spirit, Planning, Prayer, Uncategorized |
Thoughts Along The Journey 
Great reflection, David. I at times feel like God needs to use a crowbar to dislodge my soul from following the flesh to following the Spirit – every day! Eph. 2:10 helps me want to consider what the “good works that God has prepared beforehand for me to walk in.” – and that on a daily basis. May we all give attention to the voice of God’s Spirit in all we undertake in His service!
I love that ‘crowbar’ image as it helps to underscore the battle that rages in our hearts and how selfish and self seeking we can be apart from Christ.