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If God wanted to speak to you today, what barrier would he have to overcome? When you feel that you just can’t connect with God, you can be sure of one thing: It isn’t God’s fault. He hasn’t moved. He waits with anticipation to have fellowship with you. So, when barriers come between you and God, it’s because you’ve allowed them to be there.
We talked about how the busyness of our lives is one of our main problems. Another one is that we are often just too self-absorbed. Life is all about us. Our thoughts center on us; we are the center of our world, and so God just can’t penetrate that barrier.
We’ve been led to believe that all we need to live a fulfilling life is to have good self-esteem, but what I’ve come to learn is that self is not my solution; self is my problem! True, I need to see my worth in Christ and appreciate who I am in him but striving for more good self-esteem or self-confidence just makes me self-focused, and that inevitably takes me down the wrong path.
If you want to listen to God—really hear what he wants to say to you—you have to take yourself off the throne of your heart and let God be God again. I find that almost daily I have to remember to make God the highest priority in my life; to actually go through my daily activities with the conscious awareness that it’s not all about me, it’s all about God. It’s so easy to become self-absorbed, so you have to stand guard against it all the time.
Jesus gave us principles that seem contradictory to our self-focused minds, like, if you want to save your life, you have to lose it, and if you want to be first, you have to willing to be last, and if you will humble yourself, he will exalt you. But, you see, the weird thing is that when you do it Jesus’ way—the backwards way, if you please—you discover that it works. Your burdens are lighter, your joy is greater, your peace is secure when you get yourself out of the way so that you can hear the voice of God.
If God wanted to speak to you today, would he have to break through your barrier of being so self-focused that you can’t hear him? I challenge you to determine to get through one day without talking about yourself; make a conscious effort not to think about yourself, your problems, your concerns, whatever. Just ask God to make you aware of how self-absorbed you are, and to deliver you. I think you’ll be amazed at what you discover, and you’ll also find that when God breaks through that barrier, his voice will strengthen and sustain you like nothing else.