Stop, look, and listen sounds like advice to train children, but it is very important if you want to live a spiritual life. Before you think about something, why not stop, look and listen, to the Spirit of God first?
The Bible is filled with examples of things not being what they first appear to be. We need to learn to Stop (thinking, calculating, concluding), to Look (with our spiritual eyes into the spiritual realm at the same time that we are looking at the natural realm) and Listen (for the Holy Spirit) if we want to know what is really going on.
It takes great training not to rely on our natural sight. In 2 Kings 6 we have a story of Elisha’s servant, who is terrified at the enemy that he is seeing (with his natural eyes) all around him. But then, Elisha prayed for him (2 Kings 6:17):
“Then Elisha prayed, “O LORD, open his eyes and let him see!” The LORD opened the young man’s eyes, and when he looked up, he saw that the hillside around Elisha was filled with horses and chariots of fire.”
When the servant looked with his spiritual eyes, the situation he saw was vastly different than what he had seen with his natural eyes.
The spiritual realm is reality. God in His realm existed before He made the earth. The earth is subject to God’s design, and the spiritual realm is still the pre-eminent realm. If we live without the spirit we are forced to operate under the limitations and corruption of the world. However, what occurs in the natural realm is still subject to the spiritual realm.
While living in the natural realm, we always want to be responding by the spirit. This way, we will make the right choices, the right responses, and the right decisions.
Years ago, Greg and I were in downtown Jerusalem very late in the afternoon. When we returned to our car, it had a boot on the wheel. Apparently, we had committed a violation of some sort, even though we had parked among several other cars that morning. Ours was the only one that had been detained.
Greg took a paper off the windshield, and we read it inside the car. One side was printed in Hebrew, the other in Arabic, neither of which was very helpful for us!
It was getting dark, stores and shops were closed, and the streets were empty. We really had no idea what to do next, because we couldn’t leave. If we moved the car with the tire lock on it, the tire would be destroyed.
Suddenly, a stranger walked up to the car and tapped on Greg’s window. Pointing at Greg, he said, “You need help. Come with me.” Then he pointed at me and said, “Stay here.”
Israel seemed like a very foreign land to us, especially in that moment. Twenty years ago in Jerusalem, there was no English on the buildings or streets outside of the tourist areas, and it was very easy for travelers to become disoriented.
Greg got out of the car and followed the man for a couple of blocks. They came to the middle of a large courtyard. Standing next to him, the man told Greg to go through an archway, up the stairs, through a certain door, and how much money to give the police inside. Greg followed the man’s hand as he pointed out the directions, but as he turned to thank him, the man was gone. Not gone as in walking away gone, but gone as in nowhere to be seen.
Looking all around him, Greg realized the man couldn’t have run fast enough to get out of sight, and yet, he was not visible, either.
Having no other good options, Greg went through the archway, up the stairs, through the doorway the man had told him about, and paid the person at the counter. The man took the money and told him that was all he needed.
Greg returned and climbed into the driver’s seat. He started the car.
“What are you doing?” I asked, since the boot was still on the tire.
He told me what had happened and marveled at how quickly the men had come to remove the tire lock. He had come back immediately, and it was already gone.
That is when I had to tell him. No one had been on the street since he had left with the man. We got out of the car. We stood in the middle of what had been a very busy street hours early but was now deserted, and we stared at our rental car as if there was something very mysterious about it. Of course, it wasn’t so much mysterious as “unnatural.”
Then we got back into the car and drove away. Who was that man who had helped us? What happened to the tire lock on the car?
We are not advocating go off with strangers and following their instructions, leaving your wife alone on a deserted street in a foreign country . . . unless you are going with the Spirit of God in you.
We need to learn, and to teach our children, to be led by the Spirit. That doesn’t mean we don’t think or put aside common sense. It means that our thinking must include the direction and input of the Spirit of God within us. God, of course, can and will intervene in our lives as He chooses. Most of time, though, day in and day out, we have many opportunities to nurture our spiritual self, to cultivate the communion that will allow us not only to stop, look and listen, but to see and hear by the Spirit far beyond what we might imagine.
We stopped, we looked, we listened, and when it was over, we knew. God had sent an angel to help us.
Could we have done it without the angel’s help? Sure. We could have muddled around and possibly had the car towed; we could have found a cab, a policeman, etc. We might have spent hours and a lot more money doing something that turned out to be pretty simple, because we were able to respond to God’s provision for us. Our spirits, in communion with God, led us to respond to God’s provision. Remember how Jesus said, I only do what I see the Father doing (John 5:19). Jesus could walk and talk and remain in communion with His Father, and so can we (with our heavenly Father). That is the essence of spiritual living.
Today, stop, look and listen, at your life. Do you have peace or stress? Do you have unity in your relationships or strife? Do you have provision or want? (Not want as in a new 40″ flat panel HDTV, but want as in not having enough money to buy food for your children.)
I would submit that if your answers are the second, and not the first, you are looking with natural eyes, not spiritual.
Spiritual eyes will bring you into communion with God, and that is a place of peace no matter what is going on around you. Relationships, of course, require more than one party, but Jude 1:19 says: “These people are the ones who are creating divisions among you. They follow their natural instincts because they do not have God’s Spirit in them.”
Lastly, want is the icon of the worldly cultures we live in — contentment is not the outcome of lack of want. Contentment is the confidence, by our spirit in communion with God’s Spirit, that what we have today is exactly what we need, because God knows.
If we don’t stay in communion with God, it is hard to stay in the place of knowing that God knows, and if we are not confident that God knows, we will be thinking with our natural minds, before we stop, look and listen with our spirit.
