What Happens When We Don’t Listen?

"See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands;” Isaiah 49:16 (NIV)

By Alexandra Copeland

One of the most important truths to know about our Heavenly Father is that He is all knowing. He is the Alpha and the Omega; the Beginning and the End. He is the Creator of all, and He knows the outcome of a thing before it begins. He knows every detail of our lives. Even though we have all the limitations of time and space, God is not bound by them. He set them up for our enjoyment and learning within this realm. However, we must always remember that He knows what is best. He knows the optimum way to achieve positive results, and this is one of the reasons why His Word is so awesomely important for us. It gives us a blueprint for being successful in our every endeavor. 

In Isaiah 49:15, Heavenly Father reminds us how precious a baby is to its mother, yet during breastfeeding time, she can become so programmed to the task that she forgets the baby is feeding upon her breast; but God assures us that He never forgets us. He never loses track of the promise of His provision. He knows that we are depending on Him for everything, and He has promised to never let us down. He tells us in Isaiah 49:16 (NIV), “See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands;”

We don’t often see ourselves the way that Heavenly Father sees us. Some of us are so down on ourselves, and others think too much of themselves. God knows us so intimately because we are engraved on the palms of His hands. There isn’t anything about us that He doesn’t know. Still He looks at us and does not see our faults. He sees Jesus Christ! He sees the Christ in us because that is who we are. This is our identity. Colossians 3:3 (NKJV) tells us, “For you died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” We are new creations in Christ, and our old way of approaching life should vamoose. We’ve got a new and infinitely better way of living, and God guarantees that it is a way of life, truth, love, and light. If God says it, it must be so.

The Word of God is our blueprint, and too many of us are not following it as closely as we should. We strike out with our own agendas, and we don’t remind ourselves how incredibly important it is to seek the Kingdom of God and His righteousness in all that we do. Once we get something in our heads, we pursue it vigorously and expect that God will co-sign it. This isn’t how it works. God doesn’t want us to make mistakes and missteps. He wants to teach us through the Holy Spirit that indwells us to walk in wisdom and faith; and to grow in our love for Him and each other while doing so.

At any given moment, there are a thousand and one distractions that are designed by the enemy to steal our focus away from God. Why? Because the enemy knows that if we follow God’s blueprint and begin to see with spiritual eyes the rewards that He’s going to give us, we will get on board with God’s plan. We’ll grow stronger in spiritual strength and begin to live out of our spirits rather than out of the flesh. If we knew the glory that we can operate within our everyday lives, there’s no way that we would choose to live any other way. The enemy seeks to undermine this by bombarding us. We don’t see our glorious potential in Christ. We see the problems, and we see what the world offers us; we make these things more real than the spiritual.

The Apostle Paul has set us straight on this issue in 2Corinthians 4:18 (NLT). He said, “So we don’t look at the troubles we can see now; rather, we fix our gaze on things that cannot be seen. For the things we see now will soon be gone, but the things we cannot see will last forever.” Everything that is tangible is corrupting and decaying moment by moment. It won’t last. The spiritual blessings that God has given us, those will last an eternity. So we need to fix our eyes on Jesus Christ. God tells us in Hebrews 12:2 (NIV) that he is “the pioneer and perfecter of faith. For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.”

God has set the race before us. We didn’t set it. Our lives belong to Him. HE schools us, not the other way around. He gives us a powerful Word through the scriptures, through the Holy Spirit, or through prophets, teachers, and preachers; it can even be through an unsuspecting person; whoever or however it is that we hear it, we need to make absolutely sure that we abide by God’s Word. We need to steer ourselves away from the temptation to skimp out, or prioritize something higher than what He says. We do this a lot when we don’t want to spend the time in prayer, seeking God through the Holy Spirit, or when we don’t receive the answers from Him that we expect. We get emotional and tantrum our way through to results. This kind of tactic will leave us depleted, and the results will be less than satisfactory.

Most of us have known from the beginning of our walks with Christ that we have to spend quality time nurturing our relationships with God. It is important to Him that we receive divine direction so that we are led in the right way. He will share His heart with us, but many of us haven’t listened to even the small pieces of direction that we’ve received, and we’ve done things our own way. When this happens, we get bruised and battered. We become emotional because we feel as if God hasn’t heard our cries.

In Ephesians 4:15(NIV), God tells us the goal. It says, “Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is, Christ.” We’ve got to get out of our emotions and begin to live by faith. Heavenly Father has already seen the end result of the situation you’re facing. He’s seen the outcome of whatever it is that you are endeavoring to achieve. He knows what is best, and our responsibility is to believe wholeheartedly that He’ll lead, guide, and direct us.

As we become more clear about the mission of Jesus Christ, we become more clear about our own lives. This is the bottom line. God is after a relationship with us through our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. It’s a relationship where we greet Him every morning and delight with great anticipation about what He’s going to do to bless us and have us be a blessing to others.

The only way that we can hear is through our intimacy with God. Knowledge is great, but it’s the intimacy that produces the character and nature of God in us. As we get connected to Him and find out His heart through His Word and through the Holy Spirit that indwells us, we can have this beautiful communion with Him all the time. This is what He’s after, and it should be the greatest joy of our lives to listen for His guidance and direction every day, and to follow wherever and however He leads.■

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Scripture quotations marked (NLT) are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved.