Do You Hear That?
Notes
Transcript
As we read these words about the call of Samuel, the great prophet who would anoint the first and second king over Israel. As a young man he was serving the Lord in the temple where the ark of God was. And God calls - but Samuel doesn’t know how to recognize God’s voice. Eli, his mentor, still remembered how to hear God and gives Samuel great advice when he realized that the Lord was calling him.
So Eli told Samuel, “Go and lie down, and if he calls you, say, ‘Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.’ ”
When speaking with people about their prayer life, the thing most commonly said to be the hardest is “listening” to God.
How do you listen to God? How do you know what you’re hearing is from God and not some bias or worldly desire rising up in you?
That’s exactly what I’m sharing on today. We’ve been doing a series called the school of prayer. We’ve engaged several different passages from the Old and New Testaments seeking to understand what it is to pray.
One aspect that is often missed about prayer is that prayer is not a monologue - despite how it is often displayed even in our worship services.
Prayer is Dialogue
Prayer is Dialogue
So, if prayer is dialogue how is it that we are supposed to hear God? I have been encouraged by how many of you have been open about sharing your stories and how you have experienced God’s presence in their prayer life.
The question is how do you listen? How do you listen to God?
There’s a story I heard about a two men having lunch together. The topic of discussion: all the competing voices that seemed to pull you from one direction to the next always seemingly responding to the tyranny of the urgent. As they were leaving the restaurant on a busy street in the city one of the men said, “Shhh. Do you hear that?” The other man countered, “Hear what? How can you hear anything with the traffic.”
The first man began walking down the street and invited his friend to follow. “Listen. Do you hear it now?” The second man was still at a loss, so the first man continued to walk slowly down the street encouraging his friend to come along, straining to hear whatever it was he was supposed to be hearing. Stopping the first man asked, “Now do you hear it?”
“I can’t hear anything,” said the second man. Reaching into a bush nearly half a block from where they’d begun the first man cupped something in his hands. Opening his hands he showed his friend a cricket. “How could you hear that when we came out of the restaurant?”
As the cricket jumps from the man’s hand he answered his friend,
“You hear what you listen for.”
“You hear what you listen for.”
There’s a great truth there. We hear what we listen for.
The key is to listen, and yet listening itself raises the challenge. If we’re listening we have to be quiet. And that is where the challenge comes, doesn’t it?
When I ask people if they spend time in silence while praying the typical response is, “I try, but then comes all the noise.”
“Did I pay that bill.”
“Oh, I need to add that to my grocery list.”
“What should I have for lunch.”
“I need to call _____________.”
All the distractive noises often come, and they will continue to come, especially if that is what we’re listening for. There is actually a time you might want to have time to consider all of these things. Perhaps you could use this kind of listening to create a to-do list for the day. But it’s not exactly what you expect when you’re trying to hear from God.
It may be that these are important things for us to do, and indeed things God wants us to do. But are they the things that God is speaking to us? How do you listen to God? How do you hear God?
Anyone who’s read the Bible or the biographies of some of the great saints has read of women and men who seem to have one on one conversations with God. Who hasn’t wanted something like that? To know specifically what God is calling them to do, or how God is leading them to respond in a situation? I’ve wanted it and I’m sure many of you have too.
The first question we need to ask ourselves when we are wanting to hear from God is this:
Does God still speak?
Does God still speak?
Do we really believe that God still speaks? That is perhaps the same thing that was happening in the time of our Scripture with Eli and Samuel. In fact the chapter begins with the words,
“In those days the word of the LORD was rare.”
Personally, I believe God still speaks. The question we need to ask is how does God speak?
If God still speaks, how?
If God still speaks, how?
Perhaps the most obvious is our Bibles, as God’s Word. Paul wrote to his disciples Timothy, 2 Tim 3:16-17
All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.
God’s Word clearly continues to teach, rebuke, correct and train us, preparing us for the good works God has prepared for us to do.
In Hebrews 4:12 we read: Heb 4:12
For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.
So a primary way of hearing from God is to be grounded in God’s Word that we find in our Bibles. And still, good God fearing sisters and brothers have differing views of what to do in their own lives.
The Bible, though it gives us some guidance, never speaks specifically as to our career choice, family issues, or to some of the great decisions we make in our lives. Yet God does through the Bible invite us to pray about these very things.
If prayer is to be a conversation, then, how do we hear God’s response? The first step is listening for God’s response.
Listening for God’s Response
Listening for God’s Response
So here we are again, trying to listen for our Creator God in the midst of the cacophony of daily tugs, pulls, wants, needs, demands, and lists of to-do’s distracting us from the conversation we’re seeking to have.
As we discussed a couple weeks ago, we’re great at the ask. We’re good at presenting our list of requests before God, and then we’re not so good at the seeking ways in which God is communicating to us on what to do, nor about taking action when it’s communicated. Much of that is because we’re not so good at listening for what God is saying.
In his book Hearing the Heartbeat of God, Mike Neelley shares several ways that God might speak to us in answering our prayers.
He speaks of revelation through: Invitation; the Bible; people; books, music and art; the burden to pray; nature; emotions and feelings; insights and memories.
The first of these we’ve all responded to in being here this morning. Somehow, someway, God reached out to us and invited us to be a part of the faith family.
While here, we spend time in God’s Word and learn from it. We strive to grow closer to God, closer to one another as God calls us to love one another, and closer to our community as we’re called to serve.
The ways that we might not think of God speaking to us is through people, books, music, art. How often have I heard our clerk of Session, Kari say, “It was a total God thing,” when she met the right person at the right time, and heard the right message when she needed it most.
How often have you shared with me how a sermon, or even an off the cuff statement in a message really spoke to you sometimes in really profound ways. I don’t take any credit for that. I give that glory to God.
I can personally say there are times even my atheist friends have spoken into my life in profound ways that I really believe were messages from God.
Then we get to the emotions, memories, stories from our lives, and nature. So many lessons to learn.
It comes down to are we listening.
It’s not necessarily an auditory sound. It’s a feeling, a sense. There’s an idea that when someone loses one sense they have a heightened awareness of their other senses. I don’t think that’s true, it’s just they’re used to relying on their other senses to make up for what they lack. Years ago I was at the Y after getting out of the pool teaching. I didn’t have my hearing aids in, but could manage a conversation in a small room with certain voices. I was talking with our associate exec. and our lifeguard coordinator when I heard a thud. I whirled around and saw a young boy who had run into the wall across from the pool office. I checked to be sure he was okay and the exec. asked me, how I heard it. He and the coordinator had not heard anything. I’m not sure how I’d “heard” it or if I’d “heard” it or felt it.
The point here is that we need to be aware. When we choose to be aware that God is speaking, we are much more likely to hear - whether that comes from an audible voice, something in nature, a conversation with a friend, a memory or story from our life or however.
Last one I want to talk about is feeling prompted to pray - sometimes a name will come to mind. We don’t know why, but their name keeps coming to mind. In my life that is most often a prompting to pray. I will pray for them, and now I recognize it can also be a prompt to contact them. I’ll call or text them. More often than not they needed someone to talk to, to be encouraged, or were dealing with something serious. I try not to disregard those promptings anymore.
In closing,
Everyone Hears Differently
Everyone Hears Differently
Some people are more intuitive, some are more auditory, some more visual, etc.
Haviah Cunnington writes:
The Knower is intuitive. You might just know you are supposed to go somewhere or do something but don’t have a “word” or encounter to support the impression. The Hearer is likely to hear God saying specific things. Maybe it’s a verse or word or phrase that comes to mind. The Seer is a visionary. God gives them pictures and images, some which may so large as to cover a lifetime. The Feeler often senses God’s communication through emotion.
We all hear differently. Ask, Seek, and Knock - do something.
To God be the glory. AMEN
