IS GOD LISTENING?

Certain passages become more amazing over the years as you study the Bible more and as you learn more about our great God. Look at these verses from Exodus 2, for instance:

23. During those many days, the king of Egypt died, and the people of Israel groaned because of their slavery and cried out for help. Their cry for rescue from slavery came up to God. 24. And God heard their groaning, and God remembered His covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. God saw the people of Israel—and God knew.

I’ve really liked these verses for a long time. I remember jotting the key phrases from this passage at the top of the page in my Bible: God heard…God remembered…God saw…God knew. It was profoundly comforting to me to know that God was that intimately involved with the people of Israel and to know that He promises the same to me throughout Scripture.

As time has passed, though, and as I have dug hungrily into God’s Word, the astounding greatness of our God has slowly become clearer, and as a result, it takes my breath away to think that He really is listening to our cries and prayers. Peter tells us that the eyes of the Lord are upon the righteous and His ears are open unto their prayer. It used to be that my focus was on the fact that His ears and eyes were upon me; now, my heart finds its comfort in the fact that it is Almighty God who is doing the seeing and listening.

Does it not astound you to think that our God, who tells us that as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are His ways above our ways, cares about our struggles and that His ear is tuned to hear us when we call? The verses above are so staggering. As David asked, “What is man that Thou art mindful of Him?” The underlying truths in this little section of verses must not be taken lightly.

·        God hears our groans, our sobs, our cries, our prayers, our supplication

·        God remembers His promises, His covenants, His spoken and written Word

·        God sees us. He is not so busy wrapping up the end of the age that He cannot always see exactly what is going on in our lives.

·        God knows. It isn’t that I don’t think that God knows; my trouble is that I don’t take time to lay hold of this truth. I am, oh, so weighed down with struggles sometimes and I don’t stop to think that God knows all about it.

The best part comes now. Not only does God hear and remember and see and know, He can do something about it. In fact, over the last year or so, I have come to the conclusion that He is the only one that can do something about my life situations! If you look at the very next verse, Chapter Three, verse 1, God sets his deliverance in motion

My goal is to be in a continual mode of reminding myself about the interest my great God has in my life, moment by moment. God is listening. The Bible is bursting with stories of how He heard the prayers of His people. By faith, we call upon Him. By faith, we know He is listening. By faith, we wait for His power and intervention in our trials of life.