June 29, 2009
Pay Attention
Sharon Jaynes
Today’s Truth
“Listen and hear my voice; pay attention and hear what I say” (Isaiah 28:7 NIV).
Friend To Friend
Every weekday morning, my husband’s alarm clock goes off at 5:30. He gets up, showers, shaves, brushes his teeth, gets dressed, and places his jingling keys in his pocket. He clears his throat, blows his nose, and well, other noisy things. When he opens and closes the door leading to the garage, the alarm in the bedroom beeps three times... loudly. This happens every day and I don’t hear a thing. I sleep right through it. My body has grown so accustomed to his routine that I don’t even hear the noise.
We can grow so accustomed to lies that we don’t even realize the noise is there. Our alarm may beep, but we ignore the alert. Our senses grow dim.
David talked to himself regularly. In one Psalm he wrote, “Awake, my soul!” (Psalm 57:8) The Hebrew word translated “awake” is used 80 times in the Old Testament. It means to rouse oneself or stir up. It could be translated, “Pay attention! Open your eyes!”
We can get used to the lies and not even realize that they are there. Now it’s time to wake up! Pay attention! Be on the alert! Watch out! Don’t be lulled into the hum of Satan’s lies about who you are, what you have, and where you are. “Awake, O my soul!” To win the war, we must wake up to the battle and become un-desensitized to the lies.
Let me give you another example. Come sit with me in an airplane just before take off…
Here we go again, I mused as the flight attendant began her routine instructions. I grabbed the latest copy of Sky Mall magazine tucked in the seat pocket in front of me and began flipping through the pages. The man to my right continued reading the headlines in the day’s paper. The woman to my left was a first time flyer and paid close attention.
I glanced around the plane and noticed very few people listening to the flight attendant’s life saving instructions. Then it hit me. The frequent flyers paid little attention, not because we were being rude, but because we had heard it all before. The safety procedures were routine information. The hum of the flight attendant’s voice merged with the roar of the engine, so we ignored her.
But you better believe that if the pilot announced in mid-flight that a crash landing was imminent, all of us “been there, done that” passengers who did not pay attention to the emergency procedures would all be reviewing those safety instruction cards in the seat pocket in front of us quicker than you could say “buckle your seat belts.”
Friend, sometimes in our Girlfriends in God devotions, we review safety instructions that you most likely have heard before, but I want you to read these truths from the Bible as if you are in danger of a crash landing. We never know when life will hit turbulence. Scrambling for the life jacket and fumbling with the oxygen mask on the way down is not the answer. We can be prepared so that when the storms of life hit, when the engines fail, when the machine runs out of gas, we’ll be ready to land safely on the ground.
As you begin detecting lies in your thought life, look objectively at any thoughts and attitudes that do not line up with Christ’s teachings. When you recognize and expose the lie, you disarm its destructive potential in your life. Our power depends on believing the truth and I pray that God will open our eyes to the power available to each and every one of us (Ephesians 1:18, 19).
Buckle up! Let’s get ready to fly!
Let’s Pray
Father God, open the eyes of my heart that I might know You better. Help me hear Your voice and see Your handiwork in my life more clearly. Help me to never get lulled into the rhythm of life and become immune to Your gentle nudges. I pray Your words will be fresh and new every time I read them. I cry out with the psalmist, David, “Awake my soul!” I pray that I will be alert to the spiritual workings around me and on guard with the Sword of the Spirit ready to meet whatever comes.
In Jesus’ Name,
Amen.
Now It’s Your Turn
Pick a familiar passage in the Bible - perhaps Psalm 100, Psalm 23 - or any number of your favorite chapters. Then pray that God will show you something that you have never seen before in the verses.
If you’d like to comment on today’s devotion, visit Sharon’s blog at http://sharonjaynes.com/blog/
More From The Girlfriends
Today’s devotion was taken from Sharon’s book, I’m Not Good Enough and Other Lies Women Tell Themselves. We need to pay attention to the lies we tells ourselves, such as I’m not good enough, nobody loves me, I’m a failure, and God doesn’t care about me. We need to replace those lies with liberating truth and begin seeing ourselves as God sees us. But be warned…this book could change your life!
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Originally published Monday, 29 June 2009.
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