Prayer Misconception #6: "God will get His message through to me even if I don't pray."

            Misconception Number 6:  But if God wants to get a message through to me, He’ll do it.  I don’t really have to put so much effort into praying and listening, do I? 

            While we may not hear His voice with our physical ears or see His presence go by as they did in the Bible times, God is still active in this world.  He is always speaking.  But . . . we only hear Him if we listen.  Matthew 11:15:  “He who has ears, let him hear.”

            Actually, I should say, more accurately, we only listen if we want to.  I think that many of us do hear Him, but we ignore it.  I do not think that He forces us to listen to His voice, but His message only gets through to those who tune their ears to listen.  (God waited for Moses, Samuel, and Isaiah to show their willingness to listen before He spoke to them.  He caught their attention, they tuned in to Him, and then He spoke.)  I want to look a little deeper into a passage that taught me about learning to listen for God’s voice and the process that we oftentimes have to go through to get there.  I wrote this when a friend was going through a hard time, to encourage her through the trial.  So there may be some parts that sound a little out-of-place.  But just go with it. 

            1 Kings 19:11-13:

            The Lord said, ‘Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.’  Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind.  After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake.  After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire.  And after the fire came a gentle whisper.  When Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over his face and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave.

            Learning to hear the voice of God has been one of my goals for a long time. And so I am keenly interested in any verses that teach us how to do that.  As I was considering these verses, a few thoughts hit me, some lessons I learned from it.

            This passage happens just after Elijah fears for his life because Jezebel has threatened him with death.  So he runs.  He runs and runs and prays to die because he can’t do it anymore.  He feels no better than those who came before him.  Then after some sleep and some food baked by angels, he runs some more.  Forty days and forty nights of running, before he finally makes it to Horeb, the mountain of God.  The rest goes like this, starting at verse 9:

            There he went into a cave and spent the night.  And the word of the Lord came to him: ‘What are you doing here, Elijah?’  He replied, ‘I have been very zealous for the Lord God Almighty.  The Israelites have rejected your covenant, broken down your altars, and put your prophets to death with the sword.  I am the only one left, and now they are trying to kill me too!”  The Lord said, ‘Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.’
            Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind.  After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake.  After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire.  And after the fire came a gentle whisper.  When Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over his face and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave.
            Then a voice said to him, ‘What are you doing here, Elijah?’  He replied, ‘I have been very zealous for the Lord God Almighty.  The Israelites have rejected your covenant, broken down your altars, and put your prophets to death with the sword.  I am the only one left, and now they are trying to kill me too!’  The Lord said to him, ‘Go back the way you came. . .’

            And he was told to go back to anoint three people.
            Okay, now.  There are a few things that stand out to me as I read this. 

            1.  First of all, if the Lord had a command to give Elijah, why not just do it somewhere along the way?  If He was going to have Elijah “go back” and anoint people, why let him run for over a month away from where he needed to be and feed him along the way so that he could run even farther?  God could have stopped him and said, “Hey, I have a message for you that will save you a lot of running and wasted energy.”  But He didn’t. 

            Why?
            I don’t really know for sure, but I have a few ideas.  (Remember that I am no Bible scholar, though.)  Horeb (Sinai) was a sacred place to meet God.  It’s where Moses met with God.  Elijah was running to a place where God’s presence was known to be.  Holy ground.  While I’m sure God could have given His message anywhere along the way, I think that God knew what He was doing by letting Elijah despair and run in fear and exhaust himself.
            Sometimes, that’s the only way we will be desperate enough to seek Him and be willing to do whatever He asks.  Sometimes, we need to be at the point where we are so exhausted and overwhelmed that we have lost all sense of self-sufficiency, self-confidence and self-importance.  We have to get to the point of despairing and fearing that we’ll die in our situation before we become truly desperate for God, desperate enough to run for miles and miles after Him.  And so sometimes He lets us run for miles and miles, so that we can be in a place to experience His presence and hear His whisper.
            I think He wants us to want Him that much, and He knows it’s best for us . . .  to realize that He is the only thing we want, that He is the only thing we can truly rely on, and that we want nothing more than to be close to Him, to remain in Him, and to do what He asks us to do. 
            Just as Elijah ran to a place where God manifested Himself, we need to consider it of great importance to get ourselves into a position - mentally and physically - to be receptive to Him.  This comes with the daily disciplines of immersing ourselves in the Word, praying often, meditating on the Lord, and cleaning up our lives as the Spirit leads. 

            2.  I find it interesting that after Elijah got to the mountain, things got . . . scarier.

            First, a wind tore the mountains apart.  Yikes!  Why did You call me out into this wind?  It’s breaking rocks!  I came to seek comfort in You, but what are You trying to do here? 
            And then an earthquake.  Okay, Lord, surely that was You passing by?  You can stop all the theatrics now!  I hear You! 
            And then a fire.  Why can’t You just talk to me like everyone else does?  I would have listened.  What did I do to deserve this?
            But the Lord wasn’t in any of that.  Sure, He caused them to happen, but He wasn’t talking through them.  His presence wasn’t in those events.  But after all that wild stuff, His presence passed by … in a whisper. 
            And through all this, Elijah was able to learn by comparison what is and isn’t the presence of the Lord. 
            I think sometimes that’s how it is for us in life.  We want God to step in quickly with thunder and lightning and rumbling, and dramatically give us our answers.  We want big, clear signs in the heavens that suggest His presence. 
            But through the trials we learn that He whispers. 
            I know that, for me, I had an inflated sense of self that made me self-sufficient, cocky, and smug.  As though I was doing God favors or earning my keep by being the “good Christian” that I was.  And so God allowed trials in my life. 
            I had to go through the mountain-breaking winds that broke through walls of fear and self-sufficiency and pride.  I had to go through the earthquakes that shook my confidence in everything that I relied on outside of God: my confidence in myself and in my wisdom and abilities.  And I had to go through fires, the refining fires that burn off all the dross, so that He could purify the silver and make it into a shiny surface to better reflect Him.
            And only then could I learn to hear His quiet voice, His quiet leading.  Only then could I train myself to listen for it and did I learn to hunger for it.  And only then did I feel the need to cover my face before Him in humility.  I wasn’t as great as I thought I was.  Compared to His glory, I was nothing. Compared to His greatness, I was weak and helpless and insignificant. 
            But . . . (and this is crucial) He loves me anyway.  I don’t have to earn His love or favor by being “good enough.”  He loves me in my weakness and His strength shines through me only when I embrace my weakness.  It’s through humility that we learn to really “see” Him. 

            3.  But in order to hear His whisper, to feel His presence, we have to slow down and get into a receptive position.  We have to stop trying so hard to force things and to do things ourselves.  It’s in our weakness and self-insufficiency where we learn to need Him, to wait on Him, to hear Him, to listen instead of talk, to follow instead of lead, to embrace grace instead of trying to earn our way or make our way, and to lean on Him instead of standing on our own two feet while trying to keep all the balls up in the air. 

            Like Elijah, we need to stop and simply stand in His presence, quietly and expectantly waiting for His whisper.  We can’t rush God; we simply have to wait on Him and trust His timing. 
            But we don’t like to slow down in our society, to wait on God to speak.  It’s time-consuming.  It’s too much effort.  It encroaches on our busy lives.  It makes us feel out of control, waiting on someone else.  And we don’t want to hear whispers.  We want loud and bold and exciting. 
            In our day and age of “Entertain Me,” many of us would much prefer that God talk to us in earth-shaking, loud, exciting ways during some Christian retreat or conference instead of making us stand out on the mountain alone, waiting for Him to pass by, listening for a quiet whisper.
            Or would we? 
            For God’s whisper was enough to make Elijah cover his face.  The wind and earthquake and fire did not make him cover his face.  But God’s whisper did.  God’s whisper was enough to humble him.  For he knew he was in the presence of God Almighty. 
            To hear His whisper when you need Him most - to know that the God of the universe is speaking to you and reaching out to you when you are afraid and despairing and running after Him - is an incredibly humbling thing, so humbling that it changes us.  It lifts us up off the floor where we have fallen down exhausted and it emboldens us, giving us the strength to face the trials, to face whatever Jezebel comes our way. 
            And all because God whispered.

            4.  And what did God end up saying to Elijah after he experienced God’s presence, after he heard His whisper?  I find this interesting. 
            God asked him the exact same question that He asked in the beginning.  And Elijah answered the same way.  Why is that?  Why is it any different after the whisper than it was before?  Why the redundancy?
            My best guess is that before the wind, earthquake, and fire - before hearing the whisper of God - Elijah had a much different attitude and frame of mind.  I’m guessing his first answer was full of fear and concern and despair, as if he was freaking out and rattled off all the things he was afraid of, the things that terrified him and made him want to die.
            “I’ve been zealous for You, Lord.  But nothing’s working out.  And now, they’re all after me.  Oooh, they’re after me and they want to kill me.  Where have You been in all this, when I’ve been so faithful to You?  I’ve been zealous for You, and You’ve bailed on me!  Oh, woe is me.  Just take me now!”
            But after the wind, earthquake, and fire - after sensing God’s presence and hearing His whisper, and being humbled enough to cover his face - Elijah had a chance to answer this same question again. 
            But this time, I wonder if it was not in despair and fear, but in humility and a firm faith.  He had run to his God.  He desperately sought the only One that he could rely on.  He fell down in weakness before the Lord. 
            And God whispered to him. 
            And Elijah’s faith was renewed.  He was strengthened in his spirit.  He was trusting instead of despairing.  He was leaning on the Lord’s strength instead of his own.  And now he could now pour out all the fears and doubts within him again.  Yet not in despair.  But in the faith that God was there and that God would give him direction and help.
            My guess is that the second time he answered, he answered with a firm faith in God and a deep trust that made him willing to hear the instructions that God would give him.
            “Lord, I know that all of this bad stuff has happened.  I’ve been zealous for You and everything went wrong. And now they want to kill me.  But now I know that You’re with me … and so what are we going to do about it?”
            And only now could he handle hearing “Go back the way you came.”  To hear that before - when he was despairing and exhausted - probably would have killed him.  And so God didn’t reveal His plans for Elijah before he was ready to hear them.  God had mercy on him and only revealed what He knew he could handle. 
            But now, Elijah had been in God’s presence.  He had heard God’s whisper.  And now he could go forth in God’s strength, doing what God asked him to do because he knew that God was always near, like the whisper of the wind in the trees.

            5.  Earth-shaking events don’t always happen and aren’t always the means that God speaks to us.  That’s not how God usually does His work and His leading.  But God is always whispering.  And if we don’t hear, it’s because we aren’t listening or we haven’t sought the Lord or we are looking for Him in the wrong places and wrong ways or we haven’t learned how insufficient and not-in-control we really are. 
            Do we quiet ourselves enough to hear from the Lord?  Do we seek Him in His Word and in prayer?  Do we live in ways that makes us receptive to His whisper and nudges, or do we act like He will just have to get through to us if He wants to?  Are we willing to hang in there through the wind, earthquake, and fire so that we can hear that gentle whisper?  Are we really? 
            God moves slower than we do.  And He speaks more quietly than the loud, attention-getting things that scream at us all day long in our world.  If you are desperate for His presence and are seeking Him with all your heart, He will eventually whisper.  But you will have to hang in there through the silence, the persecution, the miles of running, the wind, the earthquakes, the fires.  Keep running towards Him and hang in there until He rewards your diligent search for Him with His presence and His whisper.  And you’ll know that it is Him when the fear and despair are replaced by a humility and an awe that make you cover your face before Him and that make you bold and confident enough to face the trials and to obey Him.

            Hang in there!  His whisper is worth it!