Does it sometimes feel like God isn’t speaking to you, or he’s not showing you his will? Why is he quiet? Why does it seem like he withholds perspective from us, even when we ask? Well, perhaps it’s us with the hearing or vision problem. Maybe you’ve been journeying through your life with a sleep mask on your eyes and ear plugs in your ears. Through Jesus’s teaching in the parable of the soils he teaches us how we can live in a way as to see and hear clearly. So, listen up! God speaks.

What are you doing with what God’s given you? Throughout his teaching, Jesus calls his disciples to selflessness—in doing so, he’s giving you an opportunity to participate in something eternal. He wants to leverage who you are to make this world more like heaven. It will be a sacrifice to think outside of yourself and put the needs of another before you. But there is nothing like the feeling of being used by God to make an impact on his Kingdom. It’s counterintuitive, but you need to lose your life to find it.

For some of us, church has simply become a place to get our souls fed and our personal spiritual needs met. After church, perhaps you make a beeline for the door without any regard for a shared spiritual journey. If your experience of Christian community is lonely, then you haven’t fully experienced Christian community! But it’s not too late. Don’t let your past experiences with people prevent you from letting God give you a new experience with people. You were created for connection.

The final name given to Jesus in Isaiah 9:6 is Prince of Peace. God’s very essence is to provide peace—peace when life doesn’t go according to plan; peace that’s stronger than stress and louder than fear; peace that leaps beyond a Christian cliché. But if you want to experience that peace personally, you’ll need to come into close contact with its source. Peace is a person, so put yourself in his presence.

One of the greatest attributes of our Everlasting Father is his never-ending love. You might be new to faith and only just catching a glimpse of God’s love, or maybe you’ve journeyed with him for decades and think you’ve wrapped your head around his love. Either way, God loves you even more than you can think or imagine. God’s love is who he is, and being loved by him is who you are. God never stops loving you.

Scripture reassures us over and over of God’s might. God is mighty in mercy; God is mighty in the face of our fragilities; God is mighty to immerse himself in our lives. We’re all broken human beings, and thankfully Jesus isn’t waiting for you to get your act together before he comes to save you. In his might, God did the impossible—he entered the world as a child and as our savior. May your faith and your life be an example that God is mighty to save.

Much like the Israelites, we often exclude God from our daily lives. Even as we exclude him, we then are prone to blame him for the messes we make and get angry at him for not intervening as we’d like. A passage in Isaiah 8 reveals God’s response to a world that rejects him and is subsequently angry with him—he sends us a Messiah. Despite our mess collectively and your mess individually, Jesus, our wonderful counselor, came anyway. Take Jesus’s yolk upon you and trust his wonderful wisdom.

We need hope like we need food or water—hope empowers us to keep trying, keep loving, keep smiling, and keep getting out of bed in the morning. And while it’s a good thing to hope for good things, you desperately need a greater hope to fall back on if life hands you disappointment. A hope that’s bigger than health or wealth; a hope that’s bigger than success, affirmation, or admiration; hope that’s bigger than the hope you have in your spouse, children, or mentor. You need to put your hope in someone, not something—put your hope in God.

It’s not a hard concept to realize that God is omnipresent—he’s so big and so powerful, and he’s everywhere, all the time. But one aspect of God’s omnipresence that you may not have considered is that he wants to make every area of your life his home as well. He wants to take up residence in your heart and be involved in your life, working for your good and for his glory. May you live out the reality that God is not just with you, but he’s also for you.