Daily writing prompt

What are your daily habits?

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I have the daily habit of trying to see and hear beyond soundbites. In today’s culture of anything goes lifestyles and religions, that’s not an easy thing to do.

The Bible warns us: “Even from your own number men will arise and distort the truth in order to draw away disciples after them. So be on your guard!” One way that is being done is through Bible soundbites. Here’s an example:

This is the ignored and forgotten part of a sentence in the Bible. “. . . but God has revealed it to us by the Spirit.” The first part says: “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no heart has imagined, what God has prepared for those who love Him . . .” The first part without the second part is an incomplete soundbite that is often quoted alone. That misleads people into believing that their experience of God is limited to what their eyes can see and what their ears can hear, but the truth is that God is trying to supernaturally reveal Himself to people all the time, yet we rarely open the invisible eyes and ears of our heart. When the eyes and the ears of our heart are shut down, our seeing and hearing are limited to the physical world, and we can’t see and hear the glory of the Lord. Where are the Christ-followers who will warn people “day and night with their tears?”

The Holy Spirit wants to show you things that eye can’t see, and ear can hear. Learn to look and listen with your heart. The best glasses and the best hearing aids are a humble heart that’s hungering and thirsting to experience more and more of Jesus.

Knowing God involves more than the human eye can see or the ear can hear. It requires insight that only God can reveal to people. Unless you literally perceive the actual presence of God, He will seem like only a theory in your mind. If you aren’t allowing God to constantly work in your heart, Bible knowledge will do you little good. Sound doctrine and teaching require more than religious head knowledge!

To settle for less than continually interacting with “Christ in you the hope of glory,” is to miss the whole point of Christianity. If instead of becoming institutionalized Christians would let the risen Jesus continually revitalize them from within, their faith would be ever on fire!

Unless you see and hear directly from God, with the invisible eyes and ears of your heart, you will never know what it means to be led by the Spirit. You won’t know what it is to have the Holy Spirit warn you.

True Christianity is a Spirit-led lifestyle. (See Romans 8:14.) The only credentials that a Christ-follower needs are the name of Jesus and a lifestyle of being led by His Spirit.

Learn to look and listen
With the eyes and ears
Of your heart
And God’s Spirit will start
To show you more than
You can ask or think.

By the free gift
Of God’s grace
People are invited
To taste and see
That the Lord is good,
And to be led
By His Spirit
Into a lifestyle
Of joyous surrender
To His presence
And His will.