Must I Listen?

February 12 Daily Devotional

Must I Listen? And they said unto Moses, Speak thou with us and we will hear: but let not God speak with us, lest we die.  Exodus 20:19 We do not consciously disobey God, we simply do not heed Him. God has given us His commands; there they are, but we do not pay any attention to them, not because of wilful disobedience but because we do not love and respect Him. “If ye love Me, ye will keep My commandments” (RV). When once we realize that we have been “disrespecting” God all the time, we are covered with shame and humiliation because we have not heeded Him. “Speak thou with us…: but let not God speak with us.” We show how little we love God by preferring to listen to His servants only. We like to listen to personal testimonies, but we do not desire that God Himself should speak to us. Why are we so terrified lest God should speak to us? Because we know that if God does speak, either the thing must be done or we must tell God we will not obey Him. If it is only the servant’s voice we hear, we feel it is not imperative, we can say, “Well, that is simply your own idea, though I don’t deny it is probably God’s truth.” Am I putting God in the humiliating position of having treated me as a child of His whilst all the time I have been ignoring Him? When I do hear Him, the humiliation I have put on Him comes back on me – “Lord, why was I so dull and so obstinate?” This is always the result when once we do hear God. The real delight of hearing Him is tempered with shame in having been so long in hearing Him. From My Utmost for His Highest Classic Edition Bible in One Year: Leviticus 13; Matthew 26:26-50

WISDOM FROM OSWALD CHAMBERS Beware of isolation; beware of the idea that you have to develop a holy life alone. It is impossible to develop a holy life alone; you will develop into an oddity and a peculiarism, into something utterly unlike what God wants you to be. The only way to develop spiritually is to go into the society of God’s own children, and you will soon find how God alters your set. God does not contradict our social instincts; He alters them. from Biblical Psychology, 189 L

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My Utmost for His Highest © 1992 by Oswald Chambers Publications Association, Ltd. Original edition © 1935 by Dodd, Mead & Company, Inc. Copyright renewed 1963 by Oswald Chambers Publications Association, Ltd. All rights reserved. United States publication rights are held by Discovery House, which is affiliated with Our Daily Bread Ministries. Scripture taken from the New King James Version. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

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