In his book "Die Pomporrel konsert", Ferdinand Deist tells a story about a minister who prepared his sermons for the 10 Pentecost prayer meetings well in advance. He delivered the first two sermons but when he gave the people an opportunity to pray, very few people prayed. After the second meeting he asked one of the elders to accompany him to his study where he showed him the remaining eight sermons. He told the elder that the lacklustre prayers were a sign to him that the Lord rejected the sermons.

 

He then threw the eight neatly-written sermons into the fire, and said the remainder of the meetings would be in the Lord’s hands as he had done his best. That evening at the meeting he read some verses from Genesis about the Spirit of God who was moving over the water and then told the congregation that there was an opportunity for prayer. Suddenly people started to pray, sometimes two at the same time, and this happened for the rest of the meetings.

 

This story made me wonder what the Lord thinks about all our preaching and talking. How much of what we say and believe is not our own ideas about who God is and what God does and how we want him to perform for our pleasure.

 

Our verse for today tells us that the Spirit leads us into the truth about God, but so often we expect God to fit into our boxed ideas about him. The minister in the story was honest with himself and knew that in spite of his hard work, his sermons were not what God wanted to say to his church.

 

We should listen very carefully to what the Spirit tells us so that we will not carry our own message about God into the world, but the real truth.

 

Prayer: Please open my ears, Spirit of God, so that I can hear what you want me to hear clearly. Amen