‘Ignore the inner unction of the Spirit at your peril’

Have you ever been leaving the house and ‘felt’ you should take an umbrella with you even though the sky is clear and the weather forecast has predicted a dry day, and then it starts raining in the afternoon and you say ‘thank God I took my umbrella with me?’
Or have you ever been getting ready for bed and heard someone/something prompting inside you saying, ‘go downstairs and check the kitchen light is off’ and you think, ‘I’m sure I turned it off’, but you go to make sure anyway and find that, indeed it is still on?
Or have you ever been driving to work and for seemingly no reason decided to take a different road from your daily route and then discovered later on the traffic news that there was a major accident and hold up on the road you avoided?
Or have thoughts of a friend ever randomly dropped into your mind making you feel uneasy and so you call them, only to find out that they are in trouble of some sort and in need of your help?

Well, whether you have experienced any of the above scenarios or not, you need to know that it is not a coincidence, not fate and not just your mind conjuring things up. It is the Spirit of God speaking to you in a still small voice that is barely recognisable – which is why we ignore it on more occasions than we pay attention to it. I want to share a small testimony with you that took place the other day, to demonstrate the deliverance and joy of obeying the inner unctions of the Holy Spirit, and the detriment of not doing so.

The incident occurred in one of the national hospitals where my husband and I had gone to pray for a friend’s mother who had been admitted with paralysis. It was lunch-time visiting hours and the hospital was crowded with friends and family coming to visit sick patients. Only one lift was working, so the lobby area was congested with people pressing in to get into the next lift. After about five minutes of being pushed around, my husband and I decided to take the stairs and walk up to the 8th floor where our friend’s mother was. On arrival at the ward I reached to the outer pocket of my bag to get my phone and check her bed number, when to my horror I saw that the pocket was already half open and that my wallet was missing. I immediately knew that it had been stolen during the commotion downstairs on the ground floor. Anger, frustration and then despair overcame me as I started to recall the four credit cards (2 Kenyan and 2 British) and driving license that were in my wallet. I felt stressed just thinking how I would manage to cancel the cards and then have to wait for new ones, especially the British ones and my driving license.

Thankfully my husband snapped me out of my worry and we made a short declaration that the convict would just discard the wallet somewhere where we could find it, with all the cards left intact. After about an hour of praying for our friend’s mother we went back downstairs and discussed how we would find the wallet. My husband ‘felt’ we should check in the dustbins and so although I thought it was a futile exercise, I agreed. Another question was where to start when there were so many bins around? We trusted God to guide us and started searching. We looked in one bin - no nothing, then another bin – again not there. We noticed people around us looking at us very strangely, but continued anyway. The third bin had a pizza box lying over the top of the rubbish so we moved it to one side, and there lying in the trash was my wallet. I couldn’t believe it. I checked inside, and in exact accord with what we had prayed for, the cash was gone, but all the cards were there. God had delivered me from a potentially stressful and incredibly inconveniencing situation, just by a little inner unction. In addition, there were many bins around, but by responding to God’s prompting, we went in the right direction

So, God does speak and He is speaking to us all the time every day. This is just one situation to prove that. Think how many times you have probably unnecessarily suffered from a bad incident, because you ignored the prompting of God’s Spirit telling you what to do, passing it off as ‘silly thoughts’ or a ‘ridiculous idea’. Don’t make that mistake again. Listen to and obey the promptings of God within you.