PRETENDING
The Lord may move us in many ways, but the fastest is when he clearly speaks to us. ‘My sheep hear my voice’ and when we do we never ask if it was the Shepherd, because ‘He calls us by name.’ He desires to speak and that leaves us to listen. Meditation is listening, not speaking.
One of the easiest things to do is to pretend to meditate, pretend to pray, and pretend to hear. We can pretend to know God a certain way and possibly have to pretend to ourselves and others, that we may believe what we say and do. When we pretend to believe, we believe nothing except the pretense. We can even learn to ‘make believe’ which is pretending to believe. When certain conditions exist we can pretend to be sad, and sometimes pretend to be happy. We can pretend to pray and pretend to worship, and most of the time others know little of our pretending because it is so commonly expected and accepted. If one does not know what is real then pretense is the only thing that is real; that is, make-believe.
But perhaps this is one of those ‘fake it till you make it’ deals. Nah… I don’t think the Kingdom realm is a very good place to try out the ‘fake it’ thing.
“And the sheep listen to the voice of the shepherd. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he brings all his sheep out, he goes ahead of them, and they follow him because they know his voice. But they will never follow a stranger. They will run away from him because they don’t know his voice.”
Jesus