Week 10: According to Richard Foster, “Listening to the Lord is the first thing, the second thing, and the third thing necessary to successful intercession.” Before you bring prayer requests before God this week, spend at least five minutes quietly sitting before the Lord, actively “listening” for guidance from the Holy Spirit. Note any changes this brings to your prayers.
“If you do all the talking when you pray, how will you ever hear God’s answers?” A.W. Tozer
Most people tend to be better at talking than listening. Nowhere is that discrepancy greater than when it comes to God. Wouldn’t it make sense that, in the presence of the One who knows all our thoughts anyway, we don’t spend our entire prayer time talking?
Why don’t we listen for and to God? Two common reasons relate to our beliefs and our schedules. Some may believe that God doesn’t speak to us directly. And, since the length of the average Christian’s prayer time is five minutes, there is a reason for that lack of belief. Most of us have never stayed silent in prayer for more than a few moments.
In this week’s prompt, Richard Foster’s statement leads to a different approach to listening. If we do listen during prayer, we typically wait until after we are done with our list of requests, hoping that God will give us a quick answer for at least one of them. What would happen if we spent five minutes or more listening for and to God before we interceded for the needs of others and ourselves? Instead of a laundry list of brief requests, what if we waited for a nudge from the Holy Spirit to guide us to a more substantial spiritual intervention for one person or situation?
That could change everything!
Do you have any situations where listening has impacted your prayers? Please share them in the comments below.–Patrick
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