{"id":470640,"date":"2025-02-13T02:31:33","date_gmt":"2025-02-12T21:01:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.com\/?p=470640"},"modified":"2025-02-13T02:31:34","modified_gmt":"2025-02-12T21:01:34","slug":"the-devotion-of-listening","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/2025\/02\/13\/the-devotion-of-listening\/","title":{"rendered":"The Devotion of Listening"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"has-vivid-red-color has-text-color has-link-color wp-elements-6cbe7d504cee04bec9d7ef719ee7cb3a\"><strong>Then Samuel said, \u201cSpeak, for your servant is listening.\u201d \u2014 1 Samuel 3:10<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Am I hearing what God is saying? Perhaps I\u2019ve listened well to one of his commands, but I\u2019ve turned a deaf ear to the rest. This is how I show God that I don\u2019t love or respect him: I act like I can\u2019t hear him, even though he is speaking to me clearly. Samuel deliberately turned his attention to God, and assured God that his ears were open.<br>Jesus said, \u201cYou are my friends if you do what I command\u201d (John 15:14). Am I being a friend to the Lord, or am I disobeying his commands? If I\u2019d been listening, I wouldn\u2019t have consciously disobeyed. Most of us don\u2019t care enough to listen. Our Lord might as well have said nothing at all.<br>The goal of my spiritual life is to be so closely identified with Jesus Christ that I always hear God and I know that he always hears me (John 17). When I am identified with the Lord like this, my ears are attuned to his voice at every moment and in every situation. A lily, a tree, the words of one of his servants: all may convey God\u2019s message. If I haven\u2019t cultivated this devotion of listening, his voice comes through to me only at certain times. Most of the time, caught up in serving or in my convictions, I pretend I\u2019m too busy to listen. Serving is a good thing, but if it drowns out God\u2019s voice, I know my devotion is running in the wrong direction.<br>Have I heard God\u2019s voice today, or have I become deaf to him?<br>By Oswald Chambers<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Then Samuel said, \u201cSpeak, for your servant is listening.\u201d \u2014 1 Samuel 3:10 Am I hearing what God is saying? Perhaps I\u2019ve listened well to one of his commands, but I\u2019ve turned a deaf ear to the rest. This is how I show God that I don\u2019t love or respect him: I act like I [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[686],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-470640","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daily-devotion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/470640","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=470640"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/470640\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=470640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=470640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=470640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}