Language of the Spirit

God has really been drawing me in recently to seek His voice. With the events of this week there have been a lot of questions that I have been asking. Most of the time my question has been about trying to understand what He is doing, such as, “God, what are you doing in this?”

As the school year nears its end, I can’t help but realize that I need some new goals for the summer. Right at the top of that list is to understand the language of the Spirit. While I might have maturity, character, and other things down solidly, I feel that I am definitely lacking in the area of understanding the Holy Spirit and even what my own spirit is feeling in any given circumstance.

Growing up one of my biggest frustrations was never feeling like I could hear God. I would ask God about things and never hear his answers. It was like a person who is only five feet tall trying to dunk (yes, Muggsy Bogues dunked a few times, but he was 5’3”). After so many times of trying and never getting an answer I began to expect that I would not hear God’s voice. I would even tell people that I don’t hear God or worse yet, that I can’t hear Him.

Since then I have learned that it is not a good thing to say things like that about yourself because they become true. They also create an escape route out of any circumstance that would require that ability (some even call it an excuse!).

Without going into the details of what I was asking in one of the situations, I basically said, “God, I know you are good, but I don’t like this and you gotta make it stop by a certain day or I’m gonna make changes so that it has to stop.” Well, I said that Friday night and on Saturday it was fixed. My deadline was tomorrow night, so I am pretty happy that God worked ahead of schedule.

With what God has put on my heart to do, I understand the importance of being in step with Him and with what He is doing. Jesus healed everyone who came to Him, but not everyone in the world got healed while He was in ministry. He went where the Father sent Him. While I love the idea of praying for every person I ever come across that has a healing need, the reality is that it is not practical for one person to try to bring healing to the entire world. There must be an army of believers who are mobilized, not just one who takes on the task of praying for each person they come across who sneezes or wears glasses.

I want to walk into a store and understand that the Holy Spirit wants to do something, not spend every free moment out in the city looking for the next person with a limp. I know that my schedule will become such that I will be traveling enough that I will be trying to get the most out of my time at home so it wouldn’t be practical if I returned home just to spend hours at the store because I kept seeing people needing physical healing. Many of the great Healing Revivalists of the 1950s got burned out because they would minister constantly and people would line up for prayer at their homes. The majority of them were only in effective ministry for a few years. I don’t believe that God would want us to do something that we can’t keep up for very long. Jesus would even go away to be with God. He would just go hide up in the mountains so that He couldn’t be bothered. We should probably do something like that. Minister and then rest. Jesus knew what the Father was doing. I want to follow His lead.