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Noteworthy

September 2nd, 2010 by blog

By Rhema Stevenson

Writing.

Don’t like it.

Not a fan.

You can certainly say it’s one of the reasons why I decided to become an engineer. The thought of having to spend my years in university writing essays and reports would make me froth at the mouth. Give me the complexity of numbers and equations any day. I can honestly say I even freaked out a bit when they began introducing letters to mathematical equations.

For as long as I could remember, I was never one for writing notes during a sermon. Every week I would lean in and try to absorb everything that was being said, and every week I would forget. Sermons are often so full of Scripture and developed thought that I found it hard to retain everything by simply sitting and listening. This compelled me to begin taking notes. Even if I had no intentions to file the note for future reference, writing down key thoughts helped burn them into my memory much more effectively. It helped make the sermon an interactive, relational experience instead of simply a passive one.

Through writing, I have greatly improved at listening, learning, studying and memorizing God’s word, and it offers me another avenue to hear Him speak to me personally. It’s a helpful, tangible testimony to God’s grace to look back and see his Word preached throughout my life. It has helped me to see promptings in my soul that were worked out over a period of time to later bear fruit.

So let me ask you: how is your listening? We come to Church to get our marching orders from God, through his Word, through the preacher. What good is it to us if we simply show up on Sunday and have the message leave our minds as we leave the Church? We want to walk out each time knowing who God is, and how He wants us to respond. That is why we sit there fully engaged. That is why we listen. All the way through we are to be actively engaged, not by speaking, but by listening, and then planning out our obedience.

I challenge you to examine yourself on Sunday, as I examined myself, and make changes so that you are not simply a spectator, but a participant. How do you best listen so that you are able to apply what you hear and grow in your understanding of Him?

For me it’s most definitely writing.

I’ve learned to like it.

I’m now a fan.