We speak to God and He speaks to us or vise-versa. Where do we get this idea that when we pray we do all the talking and God does all the listening? Did you ever have a conversation with a person, especially a close friend who never let you get a word in edgewise, and kept talking, and talking and talking and asking you more questions and giving you more requests and directions and requests, and talking, and talking and then said something like, “Well I have to go, so I’ll see you tomorrow?” Very frustrating isn’t it? How do you think God feels when we come to Him in prayer, with our shopping lists and read them off, item by item as if He can’t read or remember and ask Him a lot of questions and then say, Amen! Then go about our business and sometimes  never even giving a second thought to all we just told the God of Eternity. Do you ever think that God gets frustrated with our prayer life, our prayer lists, our prayer journals, our prayer agendas our ‘Five Point Prayer Plans?’

Note Exodus 3:4, the LORD Jehovah, the God of Redemption, this is “the angel of the LORD” v.2, called unto Moses out of the midst of the burning bush and said, “Moseh, Moseh!” Several times you find God calling someone’s name twice to get their attention and it usually works. Like “Abraham, Abraham, on Mt Moriah” as he was about to kill his son Isaac. And Moseh answers, “Here am I!” (hinneh) behold, see, look, here, ‘It’s me!’ And the dialogue continues for two chapters. God talks and Moses listens, or Moses talks and God listens: v.11, “Moses said unto God, Who am I?” v.12, God answers Moses, “Certainly I will be with thee, and this shall be a token unto thee:” v.13, Moses said unto God, “Behold, when I come unto the children of Israel and say the God of your father’s has sent me unto you, and they say to me, What is His name? What shall I say unto them?” v.14, God said unto Moses, “I AM THAT I AM: Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM has sent me unto you.” v.15, And God said moreover unto Moses, “Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, The LORD God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob has sent me unto you; this is My name forever;” Chapter 4:1, Moses answers God and says, “Behold, they will not believe me, nor hearken unto my voice;” v.2, The LORD said unto Moses, “What is that in your hand?” And Moses said, “A rod.” v.3 And the LORD said, “Cast it on the ground, and it became a serpent!” A bad one because Moses fled from it, (smart man) v.4, Now here is the faith verse, anybody can throw a rod on the ground, and anybody can run from a poisonous snake, but to bend down and pick it up by the tail, takes one of two things, mountain moving faith or blatant stupidity. Now I don’t have a doctorate in serpentology but I know one thing about bad snakes, good snakes, any snakes, “Never Pick Them Up By The Tail!” Go to the garage, get a shovel and whack off their head first, then scoop them up with the shovel and bury them! The only good snake is a dead snake. Anyway enough about snakes, back to our prayer lesson; this prayer dialogue between God and Moseh continued on throughout chapter four and the Pentateuch.

So, what we see is, ‘Prayer is a Two-Way Street!’ We speak to God and He speaks to us, very much like a normal conversation between two close friends. Jonah in chapter 4:9-11 has a similar dialogue with God. God says to Jonah, “Do you do well to be angry for the gourd?” Jonah answers God, “I do well to be angry, even unto death (ouch).” Then said the LORD, “You have had pity on the gourd, for which you have not labored, neither made it grow; which came up in a night and perished in a night. Should not I spare Nineveh that great city, in which are more than 120,000 people that can’t discern their right hand from their left hand and a lot of cattle?” So, again we see this two-way dialogue going on between God and one of His saints, which we call ‘Prayer.’ How much of this goes on in your prayer life? Do you take time to allow God to get a word in edgewise or put in His two shekels?

Can you imagine having lunch or coffee with the president of the United States of America (I don’t care what your political persuasion is or whether you would or wouldn’t have coffee in the White House) just bear with me, OK? oi vey! Anyway, you are asking him a lot of questions and doing all the talking, never giving him a chance to answer, then you get up, thank him for the coffee and leave. Do you think he would invite you over again? We need to cultivate a fine crop of listening in our prayer lives. How else will we ever know if God is paying attention if we don’t take time to listen to Him? Listening is the key to prayer and an art that appears to be lost today! What did young Samuel say in I Sam. 3:9-10, “Speak LORD for thy servant heareth.” What did young David say in Psalm 46:10, “Be still and know (yada) that I am God.” Or James the half brother of Yeshua/Jesus in James 1:19, “Therefore, let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath.” However, Solomon sums it up so beautifully in Ecc. 5:1-3, “Be more ready to hear, than to give the sacrifice of fools.”

Prayer is much more than just words and lists and journals and talking. It is listening as well, it is a two-way street. Like a coin, prayer also has two sides, one for talking and the other for listening. Chapters three and four of Exodus are a continual prayer between two close friends God and Moses. God and Abraham, God and Jacob, God and Enoch, God and Adam, God and Noah, God and Isaac, God and David, God and Daniel, God and Isaiah, and the list goes on but is your name on that list and if not why not? I have said it before the words ‘Listen and Silent’ have the exact same letters, but in order to listen you must be silent. That is why I like Psalm 46:10, “Be still (rapa) and know (yada) God.” Ask God to teach you to listen in your prayer life as well as to pray, and it is a learning process. Like teaching a grandchild to listen while hunting, like I said about fishing, it’s the same with hunting; you can go hunting or you can take a grandchild hunting but you can’t do both at the same time but it’s way more fun to teach a grandchild to hunt than to hunt. God would love nothing better than to teach you to listen as you pray, just ask Him and see!  “…Between The Lines…”

“LORD, God, Thank You for this thought today from Your precious Word on listening in our prayer time. LORD teach us to listen, as we pray and teach us that prayer is a Two-Way street, a two-sided coin and that both are very important. We love You LORD, thanks for today’s principles. In ha shem Yeshua’s name. Amen!”

“Portraits of Prayer in Exodus”  ‘Prayer is a Two-Way Street’  Ex. 4