May 25, 2025 | Ptr Joby Soriano
Principle 1: Listen – God desires to speak to us to reveal His will and be actively involved in leading us.
How does God get us to listen to Him? He speaks to us through His Word, through prayer, His Spirit inside of us, and even godly individuals and difficult circumstances. If we are deaf in those areas, God gets our attention through a trial in our life, like a loss of a job, a family dispute, a health issue, a broken relationship or a personal disaster. In those times, we listen more intently to Him but some of us still don’t listen at all. Then what does God do? God, in His love for us will cause us to experience a “desert experience” just so that we will stop and hear Him.
When distractions prevent us from giving our undivided attention to God, He has a way of taking us aside to get our undivided attention. He knows how stubborn the human heart is. He knows that if He is to accomplish His deepest work. He teaches us His lessons to prepare us to be used in His Kingdom. In the desert, God changes us and removes things that hinder us. He forces us to draw deep upon His grace. When He has accomplished what He wants in our lives. He will take us out of the ‘desert’. He has given each of us a mission to fulfill that can only be fulfilled alter we have spent adequate time preparing for the ‘desert.’ Fear not the ‘desert’ for it is where we will hear God’s voice like never before. It is also where we will have the idols of our lives removed. What must we do when God tells us to do something?
Principle 2: Believe – God is sovereign, loving and wise. We must believe even when we don’t understand.
Listening to God in our ‘desert’ experience is one of the greatest keys to living the Christian life. However, it must be linked with radical obedience. We hear, and then we do. James 1:22, “But be doers of the Word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves.”
Radical obedience means immediate obedience that fulfills God’s command to its fullest measure, compliance without exemptions. When Jesus says, “love your enemies,” then we must love our enemies without excuses! Now when we counsel people, focus on their heart because if the heart does not believe, the life will not change inwardly. Many of us tell people to go to Bible studies or do this or that. That is external. What we want them to do is to learn to first listen to God and believe Him. How we listen to God’s commands and what we do with it will determine what we receive from Him. It’s the Law of Use: “Use It or Lose.”
I Kings 17:7-9 “Sometime later the brook dried up because there had been no rain in the land. Then the word of the Lord came to him: Go at once to Zarephath of Sidon and stay there. I have commanded a widow in that place to supply you with food.’” Elijah was doing the will of God and yet the brook dried up. We must realize that the Word of God did not come earlier or later because when the brook dried up, then and only then did God tell Elijah the next step.
Principle 3: Obedience – God guides us step by step. We are to trust our God one day at a time.
God did not tell Elijah, “You go to Cherith and after that you go to Zarephath.” God does not tell us the next step until we obey the first one. If we were Elijah, would we go to Zarephath which is over a hundred sixty kilometers? Who will take care of him in Zarephath? A widow. In the Bible the widows stand for the poorest of the poor. God was developing the faith of Elijah that was why His commands were not easy to understand. But every command has a promise and if we want to receive the promise, we must believe and then obey. After obeying what must we do?
Principle 4: Wait – God’s divine delays are not denials. God is seldom early and never late. God’s timing is perfect.
For many, waiting is the hardest part of the process. God often has to apply His divine delays in order to accomplish His purposes. Jesus had to let Lazarus die for the miracle that was about to take place have its full effect. If Jesus had simply healed Lazarus, the impact of the miracle would not have been as newsworthy as resurrecting a man who had been dead for 4 days. This is Jesus’ greatest “public miracle” in His whole ministry.
We can choose to remain ordinary and indifferent in our lives by simply remaining as we are today. Or we can choose to develop and become all that God wants us to be by submitting to God’s School of Faith, undergoing the process like Elijah and the widow to experience God’s mighty hand at work in our lives. Elijah went on to do great miracles for God’s glory and became all that God wanted him to be.