He Knows Your Name

Scripture:

1 Samuel 3:1–20 NLT

Meanwhile, the boy Samuel served the Lord by assisting Eli. Now in those days messages from the Lord were very rare, and visions were quite uncommon. One night Eli, who was almost blind by now, had gone to bed. The lamp of God had not yet gone out, and Samuel was sleeping in the Tabernacle near the Ark of God. Suddenly the Lord called out, “Samuel!” “Yes?” Samuel replied. “What is it?” He got up and ran to Eli. “Here I am. Did you call me?” “I didn’t call you,” Eli replied. “Go back to bed.” So he did. Then the Lord called out again, “Samuel!” Again Samuel got up and went to Eli. “Here I am. Did you call me?” “I didn’t call you, my son,” Eli said. “Go back to bed.” Samuel did not yet know the Lord because he had never had a message from the Lord before. So the Lord called a third time, and once more Samuel got up and went to Eli. “Here I am. Did you call me?” Then Eli realized it was the Lord who was calling the boy. So he said to Samuel, “Go and lie down again, and if someone calls again, say, ‘Speak, Lord, your servant is listening.’ ” So Samuel went back to bed. And the Lord came and called as before, “Samuel! Samuel!” And Samuel replied, “Speak, your servant is listening.” Then the Lord said to Samuel, “I am about to do a shocking thing in Israel. I am going to carry out all my threats against Eli and his family, from beginning to end. I have warned him that judgment is coming upon his family forever, because his sons are blaspheming God and he hasn’t disciplined them. So I have vowed that the sins of Eli and his sons will never be forgiven by sacrifices or offerings.” Samuel stayed in bed until morning, then got up and opened the doors of the Tabernacle as usual. He was afraid to tell Eli what the Lord had said to him. But Eli called out to him, “Samuel, my son.” “Here I am,” Samuel replied. “What did the Lord say to you? Tell me everything. And may God strike you and even kill you if you hide anything from me!” So Samuel told Eli everything; he didn’t hold anything back. “It is the Lord’s will,” Eli replied. “Let him do what he thinks best.” As Samuel grew up, the Lord was with him, and everything Samuel said proved to be reliable. And all Israel, from Dan in the north to Beersheba in the south, knew that Samuel was confirmed as a prophet of the Lord.

People are messy

I heard a sermon this week by a prison chaplain who considers himself a Christian, an agnostic, and an atheist all at the same time. That doesn’t make sense to me. I think you have to pick one of those labels and stick with it. I’m not sure those words mean the same things to him as they do to me.

Sometimes people just don’t fit our expectations and understanding. I met a young lady who was a muslim, who reached out from the Middle East where her mother was very sick and unable to get the medicine she needed. She asked us to pray to Jesus for help. If you asked her, she would tell you she is a muslim, not a Christian, but she is willing to pray to and ask Jesus for help.

There are people I’ve met who have a relationship with Jesus, but unlike me, they cannot tell others. If they do, they will likely lose their jobs, lose their customers, and lose their families. When I am faced with my shyness, I remember these people, and my feelings being uncomfortable talking about God and where I see Him working fly away quickly.

Who is responsible for keeping us all in line?

I often feel like someone needs to step up and take charge of this mess.

Someone needs to get those who want to claim to be two, three, or four very different things to choose which they are going to be.

Someone needs to who we do or do not take prayer requests from and how we should pray for them.

Someone needs to share the faith for those who are not doing it themselves.

We want a priest to go to God for us and come back and tell us what they have found out. If we could just get someone to go hear from God and come back to the pulpit to tell us everything is ok. Nothing has changed, we can breathe a little easier.

But somedays it seems too quiet. We are not hearing what we want to hear.

Is this what the end times feel like?

God did not make us to pass notes through mediators to get to Him.

Thesis: God knows you and speaks to you, not just to those around you.

When God Gets Quiet

What do you do when God gets quiet in your life?

Just as God’s presence can invoke both fear and joy in our lives, God’s silence can invoke different things for us at different times in our life.

Our scripture today is about people hearing God at a time when God was silent.

In fact, God had been quiet for so long, that most people got used to it and began to call it normal.

Even the priests, who were the ones supposedly going to God, stopped hearing and seeing Him.

Losing God’s Voice

Many of you have had the experience of losing your hearing or losing your vision. For most of us it is not something that happens all at once. It happens gradually, over many years sometimes. Often we don’t even notice it ourselves until someone else points it out for us.

God had not left the people, but Eli and his sons, the family of priests, had left God in order to satisfy their own desires. They didn’t choose to be born into the family of priests, nor did the choose to act like priests to help keep the people connected to God. They had plugged their ears and blocked their eyes to God with their own sin.

Starting Small

Into that blindness and deafness, God searched for someone who would be His messenger. There he found little Samuel, whose mother had been one of the last people to honestly seek him. Samuel would have been quite young at the time, probably not yet a teenager.

I don’t know all that this means, but I think it is a powerful truth that the first word that God’s people heard from him after this long, uncomfortable period of silence was a child’s name. “Samuel”

Not “Hey you” or “Behold, it is I, the God of the universe”… no, God starts out calling this child by name.

Chosen

Samuel heard his name and woke up, but he didn’t recognize God’s voice. He thought it was Eli, his adopted father-figure. Twice, he went to check and Eli, sleepy and confused, sent him back to bed. The third time God called Samuel’s name though, Eli remembered God and gave Samuel the instructions he needed to speak with God.

Has anyone ever pointed out ways that God was speaking to you? Were you surprised?

I wonder how Samuel felt. If anyone should hear from God, it should be Eli, or at least his sons. Samuel was adopted into this family and was only there because his mom promised to give him to serve in the Tabernacle if God would allow her to have a baby. Was he curious? Did he understand what it meant to have God call you by name?

The Messenger

First God calls out to us. Then he gives us a message.

We do not get to choose what message God gives us, but we can choose what we do with it.

I’m sure young Samuel wished he had good news to deliver to Eli. What was that message?

“I am about to do a shocking thing in Israel. I am going to carry out all my threats against Eli and his family, from beginning to end. I have warned him that judgment is coming upon his family forever, because his sons are blaspheming God and he hasn’t disciplined them. So I have vowed that the sins of Eli and his sons will never be forgiven by sacrifices or offerings.”

Some people believe that the Old Testament is where you find the bad news of sin and judgment and the New Testament is where you find the good news of grace and mercy. They might feel bad for Samuel, being a messenger of God who was unfortunately born on the Bad News side of the Bible.

Those of you who are reading through the Bible this year and starting in the Old Testament will discover differently. There is plenty of sin and judment, mercy and grace, all throughout the Bible. We can see it right here in the message Samuel is given to deliver.

The Message

God admits that the judment He is about to bring is shocking. This is not God’s normal way of treating His people. Yet He does not make threats here. He tells them that He is about to make good on the warnings they have already been given.

Wait a minute! Warnings have already been given? But I thought it said that God wasn’t speaking to the people much. That is not what God’s message implies though. Could it be that God was still speaking, but everyone stopped listening? Or, perhaps God stopped speaking to them when His words were not followed. What was the use gving them messages to lead His people if they themselves would not turn from their sin and obey Him.

So instead of speaking through the traditional sources - the priests - God chooses to speak through the next available person. Samuel, the boy-prophet of God.

Courage to Speak

God calls people to share his words with others, but that does not mean we always do it faithfully. Eli knew this firsthand. He had neglected to discipline his disobedient family, and so he encouraged Samuel to have the courage to tell him the truth. Samuel was afraid. This was his family too, after all. But Samuel’s fear did not hold him back from being faithful in sharing that message.

Preachers, Worship Leaders, Teachers, and Parents are all given influence over others with their words and their actions. They lead their people closwer to or further away from God. Thankfully, they don’t have to come up with the message on their own. God is willing to share His message with us all, if we are willing to listen and obey.

It would be easy to think that God only picks certain, special people to carry His word to others, but remember how God broke the silence here. He called Samuel by name. Just like he had called Eli by name years before. Just as he called Moses from the moutain, Abraham from his homeland, and Noah from the world before the Flood. He calls his disciples by name, sometimes even giving them a new name, like Peter.

Moses and his view on Prophets:

Numbers 11:26–29 NLT

Two men, Eldad and Medad, had stayed behind in the camp. They were listed among the elders, but they had not gone out to the Tabernacle. Yet the Spirit rested upon them as well, so they prophesied there in the camp. A young man ran and reported to Moses, “Eldad and Medad are prophesying in the camp!” Joshua son of Nun, who had been Moses’ assistant since his youth, protested, “Moses, my master, make them stop!” But Moses replied, “Are you jealous for my sake? I wish that all the Lord’s people were prophets and that the Lord would put his Spirit upon them all!”

Moses had his prayer answered at Pentecost when God gave His Holy Spirit to all who choose to follow and join His family.

He calls you by name as well. He calls your name and asks that you come and follow Him as He shows you who He created you to be and what to share with the people He has placed in your life.

That is where we get our courage. When we are tempted to keep things to ourselves, or to say other things about God instead, we need to remember that God speaks to specific people, in specific times, and specific places. What He says stands true forever, but He does not sit up in heaven shouting down at a bunch of people that he can barely see. He speaks to us as that loving parent, who not only knows our names, but also how many hairs we have on our heads. There is no detail that escapes Him. So we can trust that if God gives us something to say, He is going to make sure we can get the message to whomever needs to hear it.

Accountability

There is one final piece to this powerful gift of briging God’s message to others. We need to make sure that the word is truly from God. Prophets in the Bible were tested by seeing if the words they shared revealed themselves to be true. They were not allowed to be like the weatherman who can change the percent chance for rain on Friday, every couple hours until Friday arrives. Those who use God as a way to get their own desires, or to try to fix other people, are guilty of the same sin of blasphemy that Eli and his sons committed.

God calls us to share what we have learned from Him. We can tell others when we don’t know for sure. The best prophets invited their people to seek God with them rather than just give out answers.

It is not just prophets with this role though. It is all of us. We are all messy people and we all have people in our lives who need to hear from God. We have heard here lately about the power of words in our lives. Well, God uses His words to call you by name.

Will you answer Him?

Will you listen?

Will you obey?

Will you share the words He gives you?