Listening

This week we'll be looking at Jeremiah 33 - a passage chosen by the older of my two sons.

¹ While Jeremiah was still confined in the courtyard of the guard, the word of the LORD came to him a second time: ² "This is what the LORD says, he who made the earth, the LORD who formed it and established it—the LORD is his name: ³ 'Call to me and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know.' ⁴ For this is what the LORD, the God of Israel, says about the houses in this city and the royal palaces of Judah that have been torn down to be used against the siege ramps and the sword ⁵ in the fight with the Babylonians : 'They will be filled with the dead bodies of the men I will slay in my anger and wrath. I will hide my face from this city because of all its wickedness.

Jeremiah 33:1-5 (NIV)

I want to focus on verse 3 here today.

• call to me - God wants us to call out to Him. He doesn't want us to just silently pray to Him, but to call out aloudand at times even loudly.
• I will answer you - We can know that God will respond to us when we call out to Him. He will respond to us. The Hebrew word used here can also be translated "to sing, utter tunefully." Think of of it like a song that's a duet. One person sings and then the other sings back. Our calling out to God and Him responding to us is like a song that God has written. We may not know what the rest of the song is going to sound like, but we can trust that God is a great songwriter!
• tell you great and unsearchable things - there are great things that we couldn't otherwise know that God will make obvious to us
• you do not know - There are things we don't know. That's OK.

We know that we can call out to God whenever we want. We can know that He will always respond. However, we may not always know what His response is. I find it helpful to think of songs when thinking of this. It may be that the first time we hear a song, we don't like it or we don't even pay attention that well. As we become attuned to the song and we've perhaps heard it again and again, we may recognize the beauty of the song. It may be that we've been listening to a song over and over and now we are just paying attention to a neat little guitar part that we never noticed before. Maybe somebody just told us about how much they like that guitar part that we never noticed. It's the same way with listening for God's responses. We need to be paying attention and we need to be in tune with what to listen for. Have you called out and not heard God's response.... keep listening!