Hearing and Responding to the Right Voice
5 Now Moses was faithful in all God’s house as a servant, to testify to the things that were to be spoken later, 6 but Christ is faithful over God’s house as a son. And we are his house, if indeed we hold fast our confidence and our boasting in our hope.
7 Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says,
“Today, if you hear his voice,
8 do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion,
on the day of testing in the wilderness,
9 where your fathers put me to the test
and saw my works for forty years.
10 Therefore I was provoked with that generation,
and said, ’They always go astray in their heart;
they have not known my ways.’
11 As I swore in my wrath,
‘They shall not enter my rest.’ ”
The hard part here is to know when you are hearing God’s voice and when you just woke up on the wrong side of the bed. Sometimes it seems like a lot of our bad decisions or moods comes from eating or drinking too much of one thing or not enough of another.
But Paul isn’t talking about how you act at your job or respond to your spouse, he’s talking about something that will come up a lot in this letter: holding on to our faith in Jesus.
The Lord is always cheering us on to have faith in Jesus. God works all things to the good of those who love Him and are called into His family, and that best good that exists is to be in Christ.
So today, if you experience anything that could be used to grow your faith and trust in Jesus, don’t resist Him. Don’t harden your hearts and grumble against the Lord’s work in your life. This doesn’t mean take everything passively, but it does mean that instead of reacting or surrendering based on our moods, we can instead look for God and respond to Him.
It changes your whole perspective. It really does.
Instead of being mad at how stupid your car is, you start to look for God working in your conversation with the mechanics. Instead of trying to control your kids’ lives because they aren’t doing what you want (because they aren’t you, they are different) you start to pay attention to what God may be showing them. Or what God may be showing you.
We’ll talk more about God’s rest later, but doesn’t this already sound more restful? Instead of being in constant react mode with the world, we can be in constant reception mode to Jesus? That sounds like a great way to go through our day. Let’s pray for one another that’d we’d learn how that works.
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