Have You Ever Been Alone With God?

Yesterday's and today's "My Utmost For His Highest" are key to practicing Silence & Solitude and the rest of the Prayer disciplines (contemplative, listening, etc.), the title for both is Have You Ever Been Alone With God? Yesterday's was about Our Solitude with Him, and it talks about how Jesus takes us alone and expounds only on the things when we can understand them and how God is making us spell out our own souls. That tells me that I should not be comparing myself with how my brother or sister is doing, but should be focusing on what God is doing in me. To back this up, Oswald says that this expounding is slow work, so slow that it takes God all time and eternity to make a man and woman after His own purpose. It is a slow and sometimes painful process. This reminds me of the times when Jesus asked His disciples, "are you yet without understanding?" as He did in Matthew 15:16.

Chambers tells us that we have to allow God to take us through all the crooks and crannies of our character. I wonder if my crooks and crannies are like a maze. He tells us that we don't know all there is to know about ourselves and that we need to give up the idea that we understand ourselves. God is the only One who truly understands us. I must admit that I have tried to understand me and found that I don't. Last night, I heard something that was key...we, or rather I desire to be God, desire to be the Creator and not the creature. For me, this is all about intellect and wanting and trying to know everything. Which is the same sin of Lucifer.

Last year, I heard God tell me that He wanted me to teach to learn. For a while I didn't know what that meant, and still only have a small taste of what it means. You have to know that I love to read books and I love studying the Bible! But, it was for the wrong reasons...to obtain knowledge. Obtaining knowledge in itself isn't wrong, but, if it doesn't bring life to me, then I do not need to obtain it. Again, last night, someone said something that really made me sit up and take notice...they said (actually it was part of a prayer) that God is not interested in right and wrong, but in life and death. I can now see how all my studying of the Bible and reading of books didn't bring me life, because I was only getting knowledge and not applying what I was learning. So, I believe that part of what God meant when He told me to teach to learn is to teach from out of my life experience, not from a book. That, for me, is difficult because it makes me have to really study...me...my life...it makes me really have to get in a mode of listening to God...it makes me have to depend more on God, than on what I have obtained through just my knowledge.

Sunday, my Pastor mentioned this book by Frederick Buechner: Listening To Your Life. Spiritual Disciplines help me to listen to my life...the life that God has given me in Him.