Today, we continue to explore Being Available to God & God’s Call as part of our Year of Listening Up series. Having introduced it last week and sharing some context, I thought it would be an interesting exercise to read what some other bloggers have said on the topic.

I gathered seven blog posts from different sources that touch on the topic, reference different scriptures and really help round out an understanding of what it means to be available to God, how to make ourselves available to God and how we might be used when we do make ourselves available to God.

[callout]Have You Written about Being Available to God? If so, feel free to add it in the comments of this post.[/callout]

Being Available to God & God’s Call – 7 Posts

To Find Yourself, Focus On God – Rick Warren. Warren uses Matthew 10:39 to set up Jesus’s understanding of his life, using his teaching in the temple at age twelve and his declaration “It is finished” as bookends. In so doing, her encourages us and teaches us to have an ability to profess at the end of our lives that: “I did it. I used my life the way God wanted me. I may have had a rocky start. But I used the rest of my life the way God wanted me to use it. And I put him first.” To do that, though, we have to stop finding ourselves and start focusing on him.

An Everyday Family on Mission: Being Available – CRM Empowering Leaders. In this post, the simple concept of being neighborly, present often and intentionally using your porch as a mission field is discussed. You will see how relationships with those around you can be formed, connections made and a focus on connecting and how and where you connect may mean turning other opportunities away so you can focus on where God wants you available.

Be Ready To Move With God – Greg Faulls. Greg references Ephesians and Paul’s teaching about putting on the full armor of God to illustrate readiness for God’s prompting in our lives. “Being responsive, able to change directions, quick to take advantage of an opportunity, immediate in taking defensive posture.” Then he shares four benefits of that readiness in detail: you are able to make the most of all opportunities, you are prepared for all divine opportunities and challenges, you are mentally predetermined to say yes to God’s prompting, and you display flexibility to do the will of God.

Giving God A Blank Page To Plan Out Your Life – Ron Edmondson. Using Ephesians 5:10 as his beacon, Edmondson explains personal difficulty in allowing God to truly use us with freely and clearly with no clutter. “I certainly want to follow His lead, but I think many times my page is loaded with my own agenda. If I want my page to be completely blank, then I need to offer it back to God, with nothing on the paper.”

God’s Not Done With You Yet – Perry Noble. A wonderfully touching and inspiring poem that reminds us we’re in a state of constant repair for our brokenness. Go to the site, read it all, but here’s a quick taste:

You must not give up.
You must remain strong.
Fix your eyes on the cross,
not what you did wrong.

Creative in the Image of God – Frank Viola. This is an interview with David Baroni about his book called, Creative in the Image of God in which he discusses how we are to see God, how God sees us and how we are to see others through the eyes of Jesus. More than anything else, I hope that readers are reminded of their identity in Christ and the creative potential they have as sons and daughters of the Creator. In addition, Viola and Baroni expound upon the idea that “One of the most important factors in being creative is having the ability to listen well.”

4 Piercing Truths About the Way God Works in the World – J.D. Greear. I’m going to confess, I have never studied the Song of Deborah in Judges 5. In fact, if you were to play one of those trivia games like “In the Bible or Not in the Bible” I might have gone with the latter had I not been about to go to it to verify. That’s one of the reasons I am so intrigued by this post. As Greear points on, in 5:32, we learn that “God curses spectators.” We are to be active Christians. Simply doing nothing is not pleasing to God.

[callout]Have You Written about Being Available to God? Or, do you know of a great one to share? Please add it here in the comments of this post.[/callout]

This post is part of the “A Year of Listening Up” project here at 1Glories. The project is based upon the life lessons and Listen Up, Kids (LUK) wisdom shared in the book, Listen Up, Kids, which is available for purchase in in paperback and Kindle formats at Amazon.com.