Praying and Listening

I am just back from the NE Synod Assembly.  For those who don’t know, it is a meeting of all the Lutheran churches (ELCA) in the New England area.  I was one of two delegates from my church.

The last thing I attended was a workshop on evangelism.  It was an enlightening presentation on how to help your church grow and how to invite people in.  But something was emphasized over and over again.  PRAY.

Now you might think this is blatantly obvious but sometimes the obvious is missed in the day-to-day events of life. We get so caught up in what to do and how to do it that we forget that we need to check in with God.  Maybe He has other plans.  Maybe He would rather wait with this idea because He has something else He wants handled.  So we should ask Him.

Is asking Him enough?  No…not nearly.  Just because you ask God for His blessing  on a project does not mean His answer is automatically “yes”.  It could be “maybe”.  Could be “no”.  But I hear over and over again that people say that God approves of what they are doing because they prayed about it.  For example, when President George W. Bush prayed about the Iraq war.  Pictures were shown of him walking the grounds of the White House praying about invading Iraq.  But just because he prayed does not mean that God said “yes”.

We need to LISTEN.  Praying is not a one sided conversation.  It is a dialog between us and God.  We need to ask but we need to listen for the answer.  God will answer.   In the form of a Bible verse, a thought that enters your mind that you might not have thought yourself, something a friend says, etc.  God speaks to us in a thousand different ways.  But we can’t hear Him if we don’t listen.

This all leads to God lighting a fire under me today.  In other words, He nudged me today (see previous post).  I am going to start a prayer group at church.  I’m going to invite people to the prayer group.  I’ve never done this before so I am going to pray about it.  And listen for God’s guidance.

Praying and listening.  How to have an open communication with God.