Can You Hear Me Now?
1 Samuel 3:1-10
Back when Tara was pregnant with Jonathan, she was traveling a lot to play her violin. Because she would be gone for extended periods of time, we bought a prepaid cell phone. Unfortunately for us, most of the places she traveled were in southern Ohio and West Virginia, where cell phone reception was spotty at best, ruining the whole purpose for having gotten that phone. Then we moved to New Knoxville, where our particular carrier didn’t have reception either. I got pretty annoyed at that guy who would go around on commercials asking, “Can you hear me now?”
As hard as it is to believe in this 3G world, there are times and places where we don’t get cell phone reception. It’s really amazing not only how helpful these things are, but also how addicting they are and how upset we sometimes get when someone isn’t answering their cell phone. I remember when I was the associate pastor at Stonybrook UMC; pretty much weekly I would go back to the senior pastor’s office and we would pray together. Inevitably, his cell phone would ring. He would ignore it. Then his desk phone would start ringing on the “private” number, and he’d say to me, “I’ve got to get that; it’s my wife. If I don’t get it, she’ll get all worried about me.”
We have an expectation that we can get in touch with pretty much whoever we want, pretty much whenever we want. After all, we’re extremely busy and we need whatever it is we need right this minute. This reflects our general attitude that faster is better and now is best. This attitude often carries through to our prayer lives; I’ve had people tell me, “I want to know God’s will for my life” when what they really want is for me, in two or three easy sentences, to tell them what they want to hear. They’d rather not hear, “Meditate on the Word of God and see what God has to say to you.” Sometimes God speaks hard words.
God had some hard words to speak to Israel, but first someone had to listen. Last week we looked at Hannah, one of the great heroes of the Bible, who trusted God so whole-heartedly that she dedicated her son to Him and though she cared deeply for him and made sure to take care of his needs, bringing clothes to him every year, he was raised in the Temple, where The boy Samuel ministered before the LORD under Eli. In those days the word of the LORD was rare; there were not many visions.
I wonder what people then would have thought about the United Church of Christ’s advertising campaign “God’s still speaking.” They’d probably respond much as people do today. I remember watching a TV program about the Bible in which they interviewed several so-called experts, one of whom was a pastor of some sort. He told the TV audience that the Bible was a book about a certain place and time, written to and about them, and that its only relevance today was historical. He had about him a scholarly, condescending air, as if he was rolling his eyes at us provincials who think that God might talk to us.
Funny. Maybe God might just try to speak to us. Even though they were living in a time in which it seemed God was silent, He began to call Samuel. I read that account this morning; twice Samuel heard his name called, and twice he went to Eli. I can only imagine how ticked off Eli was; it was almost dawn. Eli is old and tired and nearly blind, and here comes Sam, saying, “Here I am; You called me.” Eli responded, “Just let me sleep! Can’t you read a clock? It’s not even 6 in the morning!”
Finally, Eli got it. Someone was calling Samuel. Maybe it just might be God. So Eli told him what to do. Then Eli realized that the LORD was calling the boy. So Eli told Samuel, "Go and lie down, and if he calls you, say, 'Speak, LORD, for your servant is listening.' " So Samuel went and lay down in his place. The LORD came and stood there, calling as at the other times, "Samuel! Samuel!" Then Samuel said, "Speak, for your servant is listening."
When Samuel begins to listen to the LORD, the LORD speaks to him, and he becomes the prophet of the nation. There is something really interesting here. We know that Samuel’s mother, Hannah, was a woman of prayer. Not just a praying woman, but a true woman of prayer. We know that Samuel had been dedicated to the LORD and he was brought up in the Temple. But 1 Samuel 3:7 gives us a very important insight. Now Samuel did not yet know the LORD: The word of the LORD had not yet been revealed to him. This is huge! Samuel had probably served the LORD in the Temple for around ten years, yet he did not yet know the LORD. If you base your relationship with Jesus or your assurance of heaven on your longevity in a particular church or even on a list of the positions you have held, you’ve missed the mark. That’s not the point at all. I will probably get criticism for this, but I’m going to go ahead and say it. There are some people among us who have been here for many, many years who do not yet know the LORD.
Maybe you’re one who has been serving in the church for years, and you don’t yet know the LORD.
Samuel lived in a dark time, when God wasn’t speaking much. Or maybe it wasn’t so much that God wasn’t speaking, but that nobody was listening.
In 1 Kings:19, there is a fantastic story about Elijah, who has already faced down 450 prophets of Ba’al and the evil queen Jezebel, but is now afraid for his life. He is depressed and scared, but an angel appeared to him, gave him food and water, and encouraged him. Now we find Elijah in a cave on Mt. Horeb.
And the word of the LORD came to him: "What are you doing here, Elijah?"
He replied, "I have been very zealous for the LORD God Almighty. The Israelites have rejected your covenant, broken down your altars, and put your prophets to death with the sword. I am the only one left, and now they are trying to kill me too."
The LORD said, "Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the LORD, for the LORD is about to pass by." Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper.
God’s voice wasn’t the earthquake, the wind, or the fire. God’s voice was a gentle whisper. Sometimes I talk about God’s “holy 2x4” that He has to bring upside my head to get me to understand something, but that’s not God’s day-to-day way of speaking. God speaks quietly. The truth is, if we really want to hear from God, the key skill we need is listening.
I believe we’re in a period like what Amos prophesied: (Amos 8:11) “The Days are coming,” declares the Sovereign Lord, “when I will send a famine through the land – not a famine of food or a thirst for water, but a famine of hearing the words of the LORD.”
But this isn’t like a regular famine, in which it never rains and everything dries up. It’s like the famines in many war-torn areas of Africa, which were once rich and fertile, but they have been ravaged by years of war, which has not only killed their crops, but has left the formerly lush and fertile ground barren and pockmarked with craters and unexploded ordinance. And the warlords who perpetuate this famine? They are pastors who are driven by politics and personal desires instead of by the Holy Spirit. They are Sunday morning church-goers who stiff their waiters at noon, who lie, cheat and steal to get ahead, who gossip, who do everything but share Jesus. They are parents who don’t teach their children about Jesus. They are long-time church members who don’t personally know Jesus. They are Christians who don’t ever read their Bibles or listen to God speaking. This has left our country, founded on Christian principles, a post-Christian nation, pockmarked with craters and scorched earth.
The saddest thing about this: we live in famine-ravaged America, where there is a famine of hearing the words of the LORD, yet there doesn’t have to be a famine! As Jesus quoted from Deuteronomy 8:3, “Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD.”
We have the word of God available for us whenever we want it! Yet we still don’t hear from the LORD. Why not? Because we don’t listen. Understand this: we can’t just go about our 21st century American lives and expect to hear from God whenever we want to. God doesn’t shout over the din of our ever-so-noisy lives. God doesn’t shoe-horn His way into our too-busy, always going, lives. Remember Elijah and the quiet whisper? We as Americans generally reject anything supernatural, and we have really limited how God will speak to us. Did you know that right now, in Muslim countries closed to the Gospel, where Bibles are as rare as honest politicians (just kidding), Muslims are having visions of Jesus Christ and are converting to Christianity. According to Karel Sanders, a missionary in South Africa, among African Muslims, “42% of the new believers come to Christ through visions, dreams, angelic appearances and hearing God's voice.” But because we don’t believe in that which we cannot see, we don’t listen to God speaking through visions or dreams. And that is a shame.
Because I don’t believe that we need to be living in a time of famine of the word of the LORD. We are living in Holy Spirit time; the Holy Spirit was already given to us. We area already in the times of which Joel spoke (Joel 2:28-29) when he said this: I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and your daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions. Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days and they will prophesy. The Apostle Peter rightly identified this outpouring of the Spirit with the Day of Pentecost in Acts 2. And now that we, all of us who have accepted Jesus Christ, have that same Holy Spirit, men, women, and children have been commissioned as visionaries and dreamers.
In fact, the Holy Spirit has commissioned us as new Samuels, ones who hear from God and boldly speak His Word. You have been commissioned. Now you have a job to do.
You might be saying, “wait a minute! I’ve never seen a vision! I’ve never dreamed a dream! God doesn’t speak to me like He did to Samuel!” Hasn’t He? Or maybe, like Samuel, you just haven’t recognized His voice.
Sacrifice is needed to hear from God regularly. Now I’m not talking about Old Testament animal sacrifice. I’m talking about the sacrifice of our lifestyle and of some of our beliefs. We must sacrifice the modernist belief that God doesn’t speak anymore. Now, I know some people have used this very statement to support their own unbiblical views, but here’s the thing: we have a responsibility to check everything with the Bible. If something doesn’t have biblical support, it must not be a word from God. In the Old Testament, there were stiff requirements for prophets; if you predicted something would happen, if it didn’t come true, you were a false prophet. And the penalty for false prophecy was death. So if you think you have a word from God, you’d better check to see if it really is from God. This might mean you have to slow down your lifestyle enough to read the Bible and understand how it all fits together and to actually know God and see if the word fits with His character.
It also means you have to be sensitive to the quiet voice of the Holy Spirit. I saw a cartoon with a guy sitting in front of a computer listening to his iPod, praying, “Dear God, how come I can never hear your voice?” To hear from God, we’ve got a responsibility to listen! And start to recognize that voice. For once, Eli had good advice for young Samuel. When you hear the voice, when you think it might be God, respond to Him saying, “Speak, LORD, for your servant is listening.”
Back when Tara was pregnant with Jonathan, she was traveling a lot to play her violin. Because she would be gone for extended periods of time, we bought a prepaid cell phone. Unfortunately for us, most of the places she traveled were in southern Ohio and West Virginia, where cell phone reception was spotty at best, ruining the whole purpose for having gotten that phone. Then we moved to New Knoxville, where our particular carrier didn’t have reception either. I got pretty annoyed at that guy who would go around on commercials asking, “Can you hear me now?”
As hard as it is to believe in this 3G world, there are times and places where we don’t get cell phone reception. It’s really amazing not only how helpful these things are, but also how addicting they are and how upset we sometimes get when someone isn’t answering their cell phone. I remember when I was the associate pastor at Stonybrook UMC; pretty much weekly I would go back to the senior pastor’s office and we would pray together. Inevitably, his cell phone would ring. He would ignore it. Then his desk phone would start ringing on the “private” number, and he’d say to me, “I’ve got to get that; it’s my wife. If I don’t get it, she’ll get all worried about me.”
We have an expectation that we can get in touch with pretty much whoever we want, pretty much whenever we want. After all, we’re extremely busy and we need whatever it is we need right this minute. This reflects our general attitude that faster is better and now is best. This attitude often carries through to our prayer lives; I’ve had people tell me, “I want to know God’s will for my life” when what they really want is for me, in two or three easy sentences, to tell them what they want to hear. They’d rather not hear, “Meditate on the Word of God and see what God has to say to you.” Sometimes God speaks hard words.
God had some hard words to speak to Israel, but first someone had to listen. Last week we looked at Hannah, one of the great heroes of the Bible, who trusted God so whole-heartedly that she dedicated her son to Him and though she cared deeply for him and made sure to take care of his needs, bringing clothes to him every year, he was raised in the Temple, where The boy Samuel ministered before the LORD under Eli. In those days the word of the LORD was rare; there were not many visions.
I wonder what people then would have thought about the United Church of Christ’s advertising campaign “God’s still speaking.” They’d probably respond much as people do today. I remember watching a TV program about the Bible in which they interviewed several so-called experts, one of whom was a pastor of some sort. He told the TV audience that the Bible was a book about a certain place and time, written to and about them, and that its only relevance today was historical. He had about him a scholarly, condescending air, as if he was rolling his eyes at us provincials who think that God might talk to us.
Funny. Maybe God might just try to speak to us. Even though they were living in a time in which it seemed God was silent, He began to call Samuel. I read that account this morning; twice Samuel heard his name called, and twice he went to Eli. I can only imagine how ticked off Eli was; it was almost dawn. Eli is old and tired and nearly blind, and here comes Sam, saying, “Here I am; You called me.” Eli responded, “Just let me sleep! Can’t you read a clock? It’s not even 6 in the morning!”
Finally, Eli got it. Someone was calling Samuel. Maybe it just might be God. So Eli told him what to do. Then Eli realized that the LORD was calling the boy. So Eli told Samuel, "Go and lie down, and if he calls you, say, 'Speak, LORD, for your servant is listening.' " So Samuel went and lay down in his place. The LORD came and stood there, calling as at the other times, "Samuel! Samuel!" Then Samuel said, "Speak, for your servant is listening."
When Samuel begins to listen to the LORD, the LORD speaks to him, and he becomes the prophet of the nation. There is something really interesting here. We know that Samuel’s mother, Hannah, was a woman of prayer. Not just a praying woman, but a true woman of prayer. We know that Samuel had been dedicated to the LORD and he was brought up in the Temple. But 1 Samuel 3:7 gives us a very important insight. Now Samuel did not yet know the LORD: The word of the LORD had not yet been revealed to him. This is huge! Samuel had probably served the LORD in the Temple for around ten years, yet he did not yet know the LORD. If you base your relationship with Jesus or your assurance of heaven on your longevity in a particular church or even on a list of the positions you have held, you’ve missed the mark. That’s not the point at all. I will probably get criticism for this, but I’m going to go ahead and say it. There are some people among us who have been here for many, many years who do not yet know the LORD.
Maybe you’re one who has been serving in the church for years, and you don’t yet know the LORD.
Samuel lived in a dark time, when God wasn’t speaking much. Or maybe it wasn’t so much that God wasn’t speaking, but that nobody was listening.
In 1 Kings:19, there is a fantastic story about Elijah, who has already faced down 450 prophets of Ba’al and the evil queen Jezebel, but is now afraid for his life. He is depressed and scared, but an angel appeared to him, gave him food and water, and encouraged him. Now we find Elijah in a cave on Mt. Horeb.
And the word of the LORD came to him: "What are you doing here, Elijah?"
He replied, "I have been very zealous for the LORD God Almighty. The Israelites have rejected your covenant, broken down your altars, and put your prophets to death with the sword. I am the only one left, and now they are trying to kill me too."
The LORD said, "Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the LORD, for the LORD is about to pass by." Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper.
God’s voice wasn’t the earthquake, the wind, or the fire. God’s voice was a gentle whisper. Sometimes I talk about God’s “holy 2x4” that He has to bring upside my head to get me to understand something, but that’s not God’s day-to-day way of speaking. God speaks quietly. The truth is, if we really want to hear from God, the key skill we need is listening.
I believe we’re in a period like what Amos prophesied: (Amos 8:11) “The Days are coming,” declares the Sovereign Lord, “when I will send a famine through the land – not a famine of food or a thirst for water, but a famine of hearing the words of the LORD.”
But this isn’t like a regular famine, in which it never rains and everything dries up. It’s like the famines in many war-torn areas of Africa, which were once rich and fertile, but they have been ravaged by years of war, which has not only killed their crops, but has left the formerly lush and fertile ground barren and pockmarked with craters and unexploded ordinance. And the warlords who perpetuate this famine? They are pastors who are driven by politics and personal desires instead of by the Holy Spirit. They are Sunday morning church-goers who stiff their waiters at noon, who lie, cheat and steal to get ahead, who gossip, who do everything but share Jesus. They are parents who don’t teach their children about Jesus. They are long-time church members who don’t personally know Jesus. They are Christians who don’t ever read their Bibles or listen to God speaking. This has left our country, founded on Christian principles, a post-Christian nation, pockmarked with craters and scorched earth.
The saddest thing about this: we live in famine-ravaged America, where there is a famine of hearing the words of the LORD, yet there doesn’t have to be a famine! As Jesus quoted from Deuteronomy 8:3, “Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD.”
We have the word of God available for us whenever we want it! Yet we still don’t hear from the LORD. Why not? Because we don’t listen. Understand this: we can’t just go about our 21st century American lives and expect to hear from God whenever we want to. God doesn’t shout over the din of our ever-so-noisy lives. God doesn’t shoe-horn His way into our too-busy, always going, lives. Remember Elijah and the quiet whisper? We as Americans generally reject anything supernatural, and we have really limited how God will speak to us. Did you know that right now, in Muslim countries closed to the Gospel, where Bibles are as rare as honest politicians (just kidding), Muslims are having visions of Jesus Christ and are converting to Christianity. According to Karel Sanders, a missionary in South Africa, among African Muslims, “42% of the new believers come to Christ through visions, dreams, angelic appearances and hearing God's voice.” But because we don’t believe in that which we cannot see, we don’t listen to God speaking through visions or dreams. And that is a shame.
Because I don’t believe that we need to be living in a time of famine of the word of the LORD. We are living in Holy Spirit time; the Holy Spirit was already given to us. We area already in the times of which Joel spoke (Joel 2:28-29) when he said this: I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and your daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions. Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days and they will prophesy. The Apostle Peter rightly identified this outpouring of the Spirit with the Day of Pentecost in Acts 2. And now that we, all of us who have accepted Jesus Christ, have that same Holy Spirit, men, women, and children have been commissioned as visionaries and dreamers.
In fact, the Holy Spirit has commissioned us as new Samuels, ones who hear from God and boldly speak His Word. You have been commissioned. Now you have a job to do.
You might be saying, “wait a minute! I’ve never seen a vision! I’ve never dreamed a dream! God doesn’t speak to me like He did to Samuel!” Hasn’t He? Or maybe, like Samuel, you just haven’t recognized His voice.
Sacrifice is needed to hear from God regularly. Now I’m not talking about Old Testament animal sacrifice. I’m talking about the sacrifice of our lifestyle and of some of our beliefs. We must sacrifice the modernist belief that God doesn’t speak anymore. Now, I know some people have used this very statement to support their own unbiblical views, but here’s the thing: we have a responsibility to check everything with the Bible. If something doesn’t have biblical support, it must not be a word from God. In the Old Testament, there were stiff requirements for prophets; if you predicted something would happen, if it didn’t come true, you were a false prophet. And the penalty for false prophecy was death. So if you think you have a word from God, you’d better check to see if it really is from God. This might mean you have to slow down your lifestyle enough to read the Bible and understand how it all fits together and to actually know God and see if the word fits with His character.
It also means you have to be sensitive to the quiet voice of the Holy Spirit. I saw a cartoon with a guy sitting in front of a computer listening to his iPod, praying, “Dear God, how come I can never hear your voice?” To hear from God, we’ve got a responsibility to listen! And start to recognize that voice. For once, Eli had good advice for young Samuel. When you hear the voice, when you think it might be God, respond to Him saying, “Speak, LORD, for your servant is listening.”
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