God Says... "Call to me and I will answer."

By Peter Pollock

"  God doesn’t hear me..."

How often do we say, or at least THINK this?

Probably all of us know or believe that God DOES hear us… but what we’re really saying is that he doesn’t respond.

I can’t even count how many times my kids have said to me “You’re not listening” when I’m hearing everything they say.

What they really mean is “You’re not responding the way I want or when I want!”

The problem they have is that they don’t always have all of the information I have or they can’t see the bigger picture the way I can.

They use the word ‘listening’ to mean ‘responding the way I want.’

By that definition, God rarely ‘listens’ to me.

A different way of thinking.

None of us are ever going to convince God to do what we want, when we want. It’s just not going to happen.

God knows an infinite amount more than us and sees EVERYTHING.

We only see a tiny amount and we know a lot less than we think we do.

The only answer here is for us to change our way of thinking. We need to go from thinking ‘God’s not listening to me’ to ‘maybe I’m not listening to God.'

I have a brother-in-law and sister-in-law who at the moment are in the midst of a BIG upheaval in their lives.

They don’t have long until they have to move out of the house they’ve been in for years and they feel it’s time to move on from the church they’re at.

They are crying out to God constantly for direction but they don’t seem to be getting an answer right now.

It would be easy for them to say “God doesn’t hear us,” but they understand that we have to have a different way of thinking.

God DOES hear them but maybe he’s just waiting for the right time to bring them the answer or maybe he’s already given them the answer and they’re not prepared to accept it yet.

How many times has that happened to you, that you’ve known in your heart what God wants you to do but it hasn’t been at the top of YOUR list of ways forward so you’ve ignored it and continued to ask God for an answer when the answer has already been given?

In Jeremiah 33:3, God says this to Jeremiah:

"Call to me and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know."

That’s a promise, a certainty.

It’s not conditional on anything except that Jeremiah calls out to God.

Of course, the promise does not say “I will answer you instantly and the answer will be exactly what you want to hear”, but it DOES say that God will tell us things we do not already know.

In other words, if we already know the answer because it has already been given to us, he’s not going to tell us anything new because there’s nothing new to be told but if we’re asking a new question, he PROMISES us that he will give us the answer… in His time.

I want to challenge you today to carefully look at your heart and see if you’re harboring anger or resentment toward God because of an answer you think you should have heard from him that you didn’t get?

Are you accusing God of not hearing you or not caring about you just because, for reasons you can’t possibly see or understand, he hasn’t told you exactly what you want to hear?

If so, it’s time to let go and trust God. Just know that he loves you and he has promised he will tell you everything you need to know, when you need to know it.

Call out to him and he WILL answer you!

Peter is a fellow blogger who is a husband, stay-at-home dad, aspiring author, website host and web designer who tries to make God the center of everything he does. He's walking out his salvation and learning and struggling just like the rest of us!