Listen Up!!

Listen Up!!

 

To stay properly organized as an active and healthy part of your life, your spiritual health depends on constant communication with the divine. You keep spiritual things straight and aligned mostly by talking with God. Talk about the past so that you can distinguish trivial exaggerated concerns, that may otherwise plague your focus, from the experiences that are truly important. Talk with Him about the nature of your present life and your plans for the future and together determine where you are going and why you are going there. Allow your spirit to receive judgment, advice and direction to ensure you have divine reason for proceeding in your journey. Listen to yourself while in conversation so that you organize and arrange your faith course in a way that you can articulate, at least to yourself. Prioritize that which God directs and dispense and discard that which is foolish. Talk with Him both to remember and forget. 

 

If you are able to hear God’s voice regularly, the presence of His active voice in your life becomes the reason for all you do. If you are a follower of Christ, it is the highest purpose of your existence, and will be in every cycle for eternities, to convert his spiritual communications to you from the abstract into the concrete. What you receive from God may arrive somewhat passively; a thought, a prompt, an impulse or a feeling. Your part requires active effort. 

“For I came down from Heaven not to do my own will, but the will of him that sent me.” (RE John 5:14)

 

He doesn’t work with you so He can know you better. He works with you so you can know you better. As you know yourself better, you are in an improved position to expand your efforts in doing his will. However, since He knows you better than you know yourself, ensure you enquire of Him what it is you should seek so that you ask not amiss. I have, and do, often pursue in prayer the things I think I need/want/desire without asking the Lord what He thinks first. When that is the case, I find really, I’m mostly just auditioning my thoughts before Him in prayer hoping they’re aligned with His will without really Knowing. The audition kind of praying is akin to trusting in the arm of flesh, your flesh, which, according to Nephi, brings cursing. (RE 2 Nephi 3;8) Of all the things you don’t want to do in your personal prayers, inviting trouble and displeasure from the Lord, intentionally or otherwise, should be at the top of your list. Relying on Him for what you should include in your petition alters your approach to prayer. It causes you to pause and listen first, then proceed. Wait for the response before you continue. If you don’t hear, feel or sense it, poke around in your mind and soul until you bump into it, it’s there. It may be faint, but it’s there. Only occasionally in my query have I found His response to be something profound, deep, philosophical, or weighty. And then there is always the uncertainty, “was that me, in my own head, or was that the Lord?” This morning in the first of many prayers, the response came back clearly, “Pray for whatever it is you think is important and what you may need.” That response from Him is easily candidate for “hmmm…, was that me in my head, or was that the Lord.?” As it turns out, it was the Lord. But even in that seemingly benign response, which gave license for a sort of carnal arm of flesh prayer, it caused me to pause for a moment and consider what I think is important before proceeding, knowing I would be presenting before God things I think I value and find meaningful and essential. It changed my prayer. Not always, but occasionally I find myself invited to pray following the order of prayer. Repeating phrase-by-phrase that which I hear the Lord say. It is on those occasions that I feel of ONE MIND, ONE SINGLE MIND, and endeavor to filter out anything in my mind that could contaminate our prayer and try to be a complete ally to God’s will.

 

Because God speaks, everything changes continually. His speaking and your listening, hearing and doing alters and revises your life constantly and repetitively. It is the fuel that powers all spiritual ascension. If you’ve ever been through the LDS temple, you know that when you come to the veil, preliminary to entering into His presence, you render an accounting of your journey there and present what you have gathered along the way, in this case symbolic temple signs and tokens, to converse with Him and continue your journey. Someday however, it won’t be symbolic, it will be real. And when that day comes, it will be the life you have lived by doing the will of Him whom you left to come here that are the signs, tokens and petition you present. It will be those things that you received from heaven and converted from spiritual communications, the abstract and immaterial, to the concrete. Those are the things that make up His will. 

In the Glossary of Gospel Terms, the term 'Pray Always' shares the following -- "To retain a personal connection with heaven; particularly, to retain that connection through the holy ghost and through Christ's Spirit that one seeks to always have.  If this is a lively connection, one is able to avoid being "sifted." If it lapses into darkness, one is vulnerable to being taken captive."

 

While he was alive, I should have listened more carefully to my dad; I’d be a better man.  

 

While I’m alive, I should listen more carefully to my Father; it’ll make me a better son.

 

 

Signed

 

John The-Not-So-Beloved