God wants to take over our lives and fill them with his divine love and joy. For this to happen we need to put him first in our lives and prefer his will over our own. To become everything God intended us to be, we need to get out of our own way. Let’s do what we need to do in this moment to silence ourselves and listen to God.
How does God want to reveal himself to me at this time in my life? Even in my doubt, I can still listen to him. Even if I don’t have faith like Bartimaeus had, I can still ask for more. When we listen to God in the quiet, we can often hear how he is calling us to follow him more closely.
To follow Christ, I must listen to what he tells me. This is so obvious, and yet still so often forgotten. I am constantly tempted to put God in a box, and that box is my head. In a way, I answer my own prayers and don’t look for God’s answers. Listening requires sincere, genuine engagement in whatever the other person is saying. Do I sincerely and genuinely listen to God’s voice when I read Scripture? If James and John were listening to Christ’s message about how to be first in God’s kingdom, they would not have been concerned about whether they would be at Christ’s right and left in heaven. They would have first looked for how they could serve, not what reward they could get in return, and then they would have left the rest up to God. When the word of God enters our hearts, it lives through us and animates our actions. Am I listening to Jesus that much?
Eternal life is all around us waiting to be embraced. The rich man in this Sunday’s Gospel failed to appreciate the gifts he was already given, and therefore was destined to always want more. He wasn’t willing to give up what he had already obtained, and as a result he would not be able to see the graces God already gave him, and gives us all; the law, his love, the prophets, nature, his son, the Holy Spirit. All of these gifts and more are right before us. We simply need to be silent and eliminate the clutter in our life somehow, even if just for a while, in order to recognize and appreciate these gifts more.
So often we think we know the answers. We think we are doing good for God, but later notice that he was asking something different. This is what the disciples learned when Jesus told them to let the children come to him. Is there an area in my life where perhaps I think I’m doing the right thing, but maybe if I listened to God more closely I would notice that he was telling me to do the opposite? It’s in times like these when I need to listen to God more closely, because I may be missing an opportunity where God wants to let his grace flow more freely.
God watches us and admires every way we give him praise. Let’s use our lives to do just that, to praise him. Then we will see his will prevailing in our lives. If we turn our eyes to him instead of toward sin, we will see his glory. But so often we choose sin over him, thinking it’s the better choice. It never is. Have faith and seek him everywhere you go. He will not disappoint.
Jesus is here ready to speak to you. Follow him into the quiet recesses of your heart where he sits down and invites you to sit beside him. He is our Lord and savior, and nothing else in the world will fulfill our hearts, our souls, our passions, and our desires better than him and the truth, goodness and beauty he has in store for us.
Jesus speaks to us so intimately all of the time. He does not fail to reach us. It’s our stubbornness that fails to hear him when he answers us with the exact truth we need to hear or experience. God will not control our free will, because doing so would contradict love. Love is the key to the human heart. So God loves us with a perfect, unconditional love. That’s the way God designed us. He wants the relationship between us and him to be governed by the most powerful force he created. Do we love him? If we do, we will listen to him.
If we don’t know that God is calling us to listen in this Gospel, then we are deafer than the deaf man. God wants us to turn our spiritual ears—in other words, our hearts—toward him, so we are no longer deaf to his voice in our lives. What do we need to do to have a more open heart? In what way is God shouting to us, “Be opened!”
