SERMON QUOTE
“This is the game changer. The intervention of God – more technically – ‘the call of God,’ changes everything.”
DEVOTIONAL THOUGHT
In the Bible, God sometimes got people’s attention in BIG ways. Like a talking snake in a beautiful garden, or people waking up one morning and finding that everyone in town spoke a different language, or a flood that lasted forty days and nights and wiped out everyone on the face of the earth who wasn’t aboard Noah’s boat. All these attention-getters happened in the first chapters of the Bible.
But then, the big attention getters stopped for awhile. Things went quiet for around 400 years, the approximate amount of time between The Flood and Abraham. One day, something happened that stopped Abraham in his tracks. The Bible doesn’t tell us exactly what it was, but it got Abraham’s attention.
Abraham turned his back on the multiple gods of his father and his native Babylon. Later, he also left Heran, his secure hometown where he had come many years earlier with his family, a town like Ur, also filled with idol worshippers. He traveled hundreds of miles to find a place where he could establish a nation where people worshipped The One True God in Heaven. The Divine Intervention that happened for Abraham, which was so un-spectacular that Scripture doesn’t even record exactly what it was, had life changing and life giving consequences for the world, and for us, today. The story of redemption began with one man who paid attention to some event, some circumstance, or some spoken word that he took as God’s Word to him.
I wonder what might happen for us today if we paid attention to God’s interventions in our lives. A circumstance. An event. A song. Some spoken or written word. God speaks to us today in many, mostly ordinary ways. But we have to have ears that are constantly listening for God to speak. God may have some surprising things in store for us, just as He had in store for Abraham.
AUTHOR BIO
Ruth Senter has been attending Christ Church for 22 years and served as Women’s Ministry Director for about 2 1/2 years. She also taught Christ Church Lake Forest’s Women’s Morning Bible Break for many years.
PRAYER
Lord, give me the spiritual ears to hear You today, the eyes to see You even in the most ordinary moments; for You call me to live awake and attentive to Your presence, in step with what You are calling me to be and do.