GENTLE WHISPER, HARD KNOCKS

I doubt most of us are as good as listening as we are at talking. Sometimes that inner voice of guiding will whisper in a given situation how we should act a given way. But we ignore it. Then later some disaster strikes.

I imagine most people have been in that situation. And in some cases we end up with a big “I told you so” screaming in our head, reminding that if we had listened to the whisper we could have missed the hard knock.

A few years ago on a commercial for car repairs they made this slogan famous of “pay me now or pay me later.” It was a subtle way of hinting about how often we all ignore some problems till they become a disaster.

God understands this element in our nature far too well. So often he will try to guide us in the right direction with a nudge or whisper. If we ignore it then he’ll hit up the side of the head with some hard knock of an emergency.

In so many cases this is often to do with the realm of learning to trust him. But since he is a loving God and Jesus is truly Lord over all aspects of our life, he does want the best for us in more than the area of faith.

So as a loving father he will try to guide us in certain directions with our lives. Sometimes it works, others it doesn’t. However, he doesn’t give up on us in the process.

What is so sad is the times when we have the ability and still “don’t get it” after the hard knock comes. Then it can lead to an even worse hard knock, but not always.

That is one of the dynamics of living we all must face. It isn’t always pleasant, but we can’t always avoid it.

On a spiritual level when it comes to the arena of trust, there is no end of lessons we need to learn. Real spiritual is not reaching a point where we have “arrived.” It is the insight to rely upon that gives us strength because of our experience to keep trusting.

The one major difference with the whispers and hard knocks in the spiritual realm is that if we ignore the whispers and hard knocks enough time and God sees a definite hardness of heart he will not continue to whisper. Some people think when they reach this point that the absence of testing is a blessing. Instead it sadly can mean that the holy spirit has been grieved away to the point that the person no longer feels the desire to want to trust God.

Amazingly, there are people who come to this crossroad, defiantly resist God’s will and even after making the wrong choice keep going to church. You can see the coldness in their eyes, the lack of joy in the tone of their voice and the absence of love or faith in their words. They are like the Pharisees, “whitewashed tomb filled with dead men’s bone.” I pray that we never stop hearing the whispers to our soul or refuse to accept the hard knock lessons when they come from the Lord.