Read and Listen

We need to have instruction from the Spirit of God if we expect to get anything in life right. That is righteousness – doing things according to the will of the Lord.

We must know what needs to be done. We can’t just do what seemed to work last time – we need fresh revelation about what the Lord is doing today. A friend may need encouragement, or rebuke. Knowing which one the Spirit is working in is important.

Timing is as important as the right action. He may call us to one thing today and a different thing next week. If we have put off speaking to someone for a week, the word we have to offer may be yesterday’s manna now – full of worms!

Learning as much as possible from the Scriptures makes us easy to speak to when the Spirit wants to say something to us or through us. If we are asking what to do, and He brings Joshua at Gilgal to mind, we may instantly see the answer. If He instead speaks “Peter and the girl at the fire,” we have a story with ideas we have already worked through in our minds, and may easily hear the word He is speaking to us, like a coach signaling “42” to a football team, instructing them to perform a set of maneuvers.

Read the Book. Listen to the Spirit. Be awesome.