Have you ever noticed that people sure give God a lot to listen to? We have all the cases of the Israelites grumbling (like we never do), and Adam and Eve lying and Cain lying (etc) and Moses saying he wasn’t good enough. Some of the accounts make me wonder if I would have had the courage to say what was recorded to God. Like when Abraham argues for the protection of any righteous of Sodom – over and over again. Or when Gideon says he’ll do what God asked if God would show him a sign, and then immediately asks for another one. He listened to chapters and chapters of Job’s friends giving bad advice and Job cursing the day he was born.
But then. . . it is easy to judge the bible characters. Not so easy to evaluate the things I’ve been praying or crying out to Him. I often take comfort in the Psalms. They release the emotion of the writer. They tell us it is ok to be human. Emotions aren’t bad. We just have to be careful how we act in our emotion. There are happy psalms and angry psalms and sad psalms, but there is only one God. He listens. He listens to everything we throw at him. He knows what we are going through, he knows when we are upset, but he still listens. He isn’t surprised by the things we say. He can handle our anger and disappointments. He can even handle when we blame him for our problems, unjustly. Sometimes God breaks through and deals with things, but most times God just waits until we are done with our pity party and then he tells us what we needed to hear. Maybe even it was something we should have already listened to. (Lord, let us be willing to listen when you speak.)
Love listens. Love listens to the unlovely things we say and still loves us. That is amazing!
1 John 5:14-15 “And this is the confidence that we have toward him, that if we ask anything according to his will he hears us. And if we know that he hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the requests that we have asked of him.
