Put yourself in a darkened room. Those five people are with you, and you are sitting with your back to them. Have them, each in their turn, speak one word. Your name. Can you give the name of each speaker, without looking back?
The answer is likely a "yes".
What if it were the top ten, fifteen, twenty? The bigger the group gets, the more inaccurate the identifications will become.
Why is that? It’s not that we’re stupid or lazy. The answer is the deciding factor is TIME.
Time is the investment; familiarity is the return, and relationship is the interest. We cannot have familiarity unless we invest time.
Was He in the room?...
Even though he has never taken human form–purely on the basis of time invested–did Satan have a right to be in that room? As strange as it may seem, we often find it easier to listen to his whispered lies than to Christ’s shouted truths.
Often, we cry out to God, because we feel ignored, or neglected, or confused. Make no mistake; he does not want us to feel that way...
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Are we by chance griping about lack of contact, not because Jesus is silent, but because we lack the familiarity with Him to know His voice when we hear it?
If we have not invested the time, how dare we expect the return?!
The comfort, the healing, the growth, the peace, the clarity, the future that we seek through Him–are they there being held out to us. Are the blessings we plead for standing unnoticed before us, because we don’t understand their form?
In one of my favorite books, Max Lucado said it this way:
Once, there was a man who dared God to speak.
Burn the bush, like You did for Moses, God;
And I will follow.
Collapse the walls, like You did forJoshua,God;
And I will fight.
Still the waves, like You did on Galilee,God;
And I will listen.
And so the man sat by a bush, near a wall, close to the sea;
and he waited for God to speak. . . .
And God heard the man, so God answered.
He sent fire, not for a bush, but for a church.
He brought down a wall, not of brick, but of sin.
He stilled a storm, not of the sea, but of a soul.
And God waited for the man to respond.
And He waited. . . .
And He waited. . . .
And waited.
But because the man was looking at bushes, not hearts;
Bricks and not lives,
Seas and not souls,
He decided that God had done nothing.
Finally, he looked to God and asked, Have You lost Your power?
And God looked at him and asked, Have you lost your hearing?
Jesus wants us to know His voice and be familiar with His ways(John 10:10–11, 27).
He wants to be in our darkened room’s group of five... In fact, He prefers to be and belongs at the top of our lists.
May, our response, when He lovingly speaks our name be, "Oh, that’s my friend, Jesus. He’s my Savior, my guide, and the holder of my future."
