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A Still Small Voice
We’re up and running again!!! Thanks for your patience. We’re excited about the new look to our site and would like to hear what you think. So, hit up the message boards and also we need you to re-sign our guestbook when you get a chance. We had to start over from scratch on that. And one other thing, we’d like to thank Lisa Gungor, our new “Featured Artist”, for all her help. Make sure to visit her website and buy her CD. It’s one of my favorites.
OK, that should do it for all the formalities. I didn’t really know what to write about this week. I have a list of column ideas that I want to write about, but none of them seemed right for this week. So, here I am, doing what I do every week, just throwing down words on a blank piece of paper and waiting on God to give me something to say.
I went to Albuquerque this past weekend. My sister-in-law, Siobhan, was having her baby shower and my sister, Celina, really wanted to go, so at the last minute we found a good price on
some plane tickets, and off we went. It was one of those things where I wanted to go, but I didn’t want to go. We were having an evangelist from Israel on Sunday at our church and I had just gone home a few weeks earlier so I didn’t know if I really wanted to spend money on another trip. Of course I wanted to go see my family, so after my sister did some arm twisting, I decided to go, and I’m glad I did.
I got a chance to go to church at Victory Outreach Albuquerque on Sunday morning and God really spoke to me. It was kind of funny how it happened. The message Josie Pineda spoke really got me thinking about my walk with Christ. At times we try to do things our own way and solve our problems the way we think they should be solved, when in fact God is trying to lead us in a different direction. Her message was titled “Stop Horsing Around” and she related our lives to a horse and a jockey. The jockey symbolized God and we were the horse. When the jockey is in control, and the horse is listening to the jockey’s commands, then the horse is able to run the race and win, but when the horse goes his own way, then God gets thrown off. As you know, we stress to “Put Him First” at this website and the message was just a reminder to me of where my focus needs to be.
The alter call came and I didn’t know if I should go up or not, then I saw my brother Dre go up so I said to myself, “I’ll just go pray for my brother.” He just finished school and moved to Albuquerque and has a baby girl on the way, so I was going to pray for direction in his life. Well, I made my way to the altar, but Dre decided he was going to stand right in the middle of the crowd, so I was maneuvering around people trying to get to him. Then right when I was getting closer, the ladies in front of me locked arms and formed a barrier between me and Dre. What was going on here? I was looking around trying to formulate a plan of how to navigate my way to reach him when I heard God speak to me.
I heard Him say, “geno, I brought you all the way from Houston for a reason, to hear this message. Don’t miss what I’m trying to speak into your life. Don’t worry about your brother, his life is in my hands and I have him right where I want him. It’s you that needs to hear from Me.”
At that moment, I started to break. I started thinking about how God orchestrates our lives to His perfection. He puts us at the right place in the right time so that we can hear from Him, but sometimes we miss it because we’re trying to go by our own agenda. Sometimes we get so focused on everything else that we forgot about what is most important.
Friday night my Pastor preached a message about prayer and how it is communication with God. He was talking about how we need to recognize our dependency on our Creator. Prayer cannot be replaced by good works and it should not be thought of as something mystical. It’s that one-on-one time spent with God that we need to have in order to make it as Christians. Without prayer, how can we even call ourselves Christians? How can we know what direction God’s taking us if we never ask Him or listen to His voice?
I was reading about Elijah the other day in 1 Kings 19:11-12. The scripture says, “Then He said, ‘Go out, and stand on the mountain before the Lord.’ And behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind tore into the mountains and broke the rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a still small voice.”
Sometimes we look to hear from God in all the wrong places. We expect to hear a word from Him at a revival service or through a special speaker. We think that God only speaks with a loud voice. We think He must be in the “wind”, the “earthquake” or the “fire”, when all along God is speaking in that “Still Small Voice”. We just don’t take the time to listen for His whisper.
I believe God continues to speak to every one of us. We get so busy in our lives that we forget to listen for His voice amongst all the confusion around us. I want to encourage you to stop everything you’re doing and just listen. He’s calling out to you in that “Still Small Voice”. Will you be to busy to hear His whisper?
w/muchluv,
geno
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