LISTEN WHEN YOUR LORD IS SPEAKING
1 Samuel 3:1-10
Pastor Jeremy Mattek – January 18, 2015
Maybe you can answer the following questions for me (answers are in the footnotes)
1.According to International Law, if an airplane crashed on the exact border between two countries, would the unidentified survivors be buried in the country they were travelling to, or the country they were travelling from?[1]
2.Is there a federal law against a man marrying his widow’s sister?[2]
3.A man builds an ordinary house with four sides, except each side has a southern exposure. A bear comes to the door and rings the doorbell. What color is the bear?[3]
4.How many of each animal did Moses bring on the ark during the flood?[4]
5.You’re driving a bus. The bus drives three blocks and picks up two people. It drives three more blocks and one person gets off. It drives around the corner and picks up five people. It goes around another corner and collides with an 18-passenger fan full of Scandinavian circus clowns. How old is the bus driver?[5]
If you got all five of those questions correct, then you are a very good listener (or you’ve heard the questions before and you knew what to listen for). Either way, all the information you needed in order to find the correct answer was in each of the questions. Those questions were designed to emphasize that good listening is really important if you want to find the right answers to really important things. Of course, there are many things more important than the answers to those five questions.
I was scheduled to preach at a special Dr. King worship service this past Friday morning at Wisconsin Lutheran High School. When I woke up early that morning, I looked at my phone and saw that I had missed three phone calls and seven text messages. The phone calls were all from the President of WISCO, Pastor Fisher. So I called him Friday morning. He told me there was a shooting at WISCO the previous night. Two families showed up at the basketball game ready to fight. The parent of a student from another school pulled a gun and fired a shot, which hit the knee-cap of a 15-year-old, and went straight into the shoe of a WISCO teacher, going between two of his toes. Pastor Fisher was glad it didn’t turn out worse, but he was incredibly frustrated not only because the families showed up that night ready to fight because of some nasty things the student had posted on Facebook earlier that day, but also because, in his chapel devotion he had given at WISCO that very morning, one of the specific points he made was how foolish it is to carry out arguments on Facebook because nothing good ever comes from it. She was there. She heard the words. But she obviously didn’t listen.
That’s a pretty extreme exampleof what can happen when we don’t listen. But in God’s kingdom, listening has always been incredibly important. In the book of Proverbs, the bible’s book of wisdom, the most frequent command given is “Listen.” And most every time what it wants us to listen to is the Word God speaks to you. And for good reason.
The book of Hebrews calls the Word of God “the power of God;” the way we mere humans access the power of God himself. The book of Ephesians calls the Word “the Sword of the Spirit,” sharper than any enemy’s weapon, able to slice through any of Satan’s temptations so that nothing keeps you from being happy forever in a place where Jesus sets you free from every burden. Peter says that the promises in the Word contain “divine power” that give us “everything we need for life.” Everything we need. On the average day, do you feel like you have everything you need? Or do you feel like something’s missing?
If you sometimes do, there’s really only one of two reasons. Either God is lying when he says his Word contains everything you need, or everything we could ever need is there, but we’re just not listening. Not the way we should be.
The young man in today’s sermon discovered this lesson in a very unique way. We think Samuel was 12 years old when the Lord spoke to him in a sentence that was far less confusing than the ones I started this sermon with. And yet, he didn’t understand what the Lord was saying until Eli told him exactly what he needed to do to hear every good thing the Lord wanted to give him.
1 The boy Samuel ministered before the Lord under Eli. In those days the word of the Lord was rare; there were not many visions.2 One night Eli, whose eyes were becoming so weak that he could barely see, was lying down in his usual place.3 The lamp of God had not yet gone out, and Samuel was lying down in the temple of the Lord, where the ark of God was.4 Then the Lord called Samuel. Samuel answered, “Here I am.”5 And he ran to Eli and said, “Here I am; you called me.” But Eli said, “I did not call; go back and lie down.” So he went and lay down.6 Again the Lord called, “Samuel!” And Samuel got up and went to Eli and said, “Here I am; you called me.” “My son,” Eli said, “I did not call; go back and lie down.”7 Now Samuel did not yet know the Lord: The word of the Lord had not yet been revealed to him.8 The Lord called Samuel a third time, and Samuel got up and went to Eli and said, “Here I am; you called me.” Then Eli realized that the Lord was calling the boy.9 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.10 The Lord came and stood there, calling as at the other times, “Samuel! Samuel!” Then Samuel said, “Speak, for your servant is listening.”
There’s a story about a Native American and his friend who were walking through Manhattan. It was during the noon lunch hour and the streets were filled with people and lots of sound. Cabs honking their horns, sirens wailing, people yelling. Suddenly, the Native American said, “I hear a cricket.” “What?” his friend said. “You must be crazy. You couldn’t possibly hear a cricket in all this noise.” “No, I’m sure of it,” he said, and then walked across the street to a big concrete planter where some shrubs were growing, looked into the bushes, reached his hand in, and pulled out a cricket. “That’s amazing,” the man said. “Not really,” he replied. “My ears are no different than yours. It just depends on what you’re listening for, and I’ll prove it.” Then he reached into his pocket, pulled out a few coins, dropped them on the sidewalk, and then watched as every head within 20 feet turned to look at them. “It all depends on what you’re listening for,” he said.
I don’t know if that story’s true, but it illustrates an important point. Listening is an intentional activity. Just try to get the average Packers fan to listen to your request to help with the dishes during the game today, and you’ll see that we listen to what we want to hear. Listening is an activity. And listening to the Lord was an activity that Samuel was not in the habit of doing. The first three times the Lord spoke to Samuel, he didn’t hear the Lord speaking.
Would you? Would you recognize the voice of the Lord if he spoke to you today? In the middle of all the noise you hear on a daily basis – the tasks on your calendar, the demands of your job, the needs of your family, the kids complaining, the bills you have to pay; in addition to all the wonderful surprises that get thrown on your plate, is it easy for you to hear the Lord every day? There’s one way to tell if it is.
Cade Pope is 12-years-old, and he lives in Oklahoma. You might know that Oklahoma doesn’t have an NFL football team. But Cade likes football and he wanted to have a favorite team to cheer for. So he wrote a letter to every team in the NFL asking who he should support. Only one team responded. The owner send him a hand-written letter that said, “Cade, we would be honored [to be] your team.” The letter also came with a football helmet that had been signed by one of their Pro Bowl linebackers. Do you know which team that was? It was the Carolina Panthers. Cade now cheers for the Carolina Panthers, not because they’re going to win the Super Bowl, but because they showed that they were listening to him.
God looks for the same thing Cade did. He looks for evidence in our lives that we’re listening to him. How much time do you spend every day with God? I’m not asking how much time you spend praying. That’s not “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.” That’s “Listen, Lord, for your servant is speaking.” And it’s not the same thing. How much time do you spend listening to the Word of the Lord every day? Is that something you’re able to calculate?
Do you know that 10 years ago, as a human race, we sent 14 billion emails every day? Today, 10 years later, we send 247 billion. Ten years ago, we send 400,000 text messages every day. Today, 10 years later, we send over 200 billion. 10 years ago, the average person was connected online 2.7 hours per day. Today, 10 years later, the average person is connected online for 18 hours of every day - on our computers, phones, televisions, even now on our watches. We haven’t added any hours to the day over the last 10 years, but we’re using more hours to connect to email, text messages, and internet. How much time do you spend connecting to God?
And before you say, “Well, God is with me all the time,” don’t miss what we read in verse one. In verse one, when it said, “in those days the word of the Lord was rare,” that wasn’t because the Word wasn’t there or because the Lord stopped talking. It was because the people stopped taking the time to listen. They stopped going to God. They stopped worshipping. They stopped following his laws. They stopped teaching his Word to their children. In John 8, when Jesus addressed a group of people who had done the same thing, he explained what it meant: “Whoever belongs to God hears what God says. The reason you do not hear is because you do not belong to God.”
And if you go through the bible and look at every time God’s people stopped listening to his Word, the same thing always happened. Nothing good. That’s when other nations came in and destroyed them. That’s when David committed adultery. That’s when Eve took a bite of the fruit. That’s when Judas hanged himself. God didn’t tell them to do those things. God didn’t even want those things to happen. But God won’t force us to listen to him. And neither will he reward us when we don’t.
When someone decides to hold onto a grudge instead of forgiving someone, God doesn’t stop the relationship from going bad. When someone goes outside of God’s will for marriage, he doesn’t still give them the deep, lasting satisfaction you see in couples who’ve been doing it right for a long time. When someone refuses to pick up the Sword of the Spirit, he doesn’t stop them from being sliced to pieces by Satan and all his temptations. When a person fails to put on the full armor of God, he doesn’t stop the arrows of discouragement, doubt, and depression from slicing into them. God doesn’t want those things to happen. But he’s not going to force us to take the time to receive the good things he so desperately wants to give his children. That’s what listening is. It’s trusting that God can care for us better than anyone. And that’s saying something.
When Martin Pistorius was 12-years-old, he became sick with cryptococcal meningitis and fell into a coma. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t speak. He couldn’t do anything. For 12 years. Every day during those 12 years, his father would get up at 5am, dress him, take him to the care center, take him home, give him a bath, feed him, change him, and put him to bed. Every night, he would set an alarm to go off every two hours so he could turn Martin’s body so he wouldn’t get bed sores. He did that for 12 years until one day, Martin woke up. And after he did, he told everyone that while he was in the coma, he could hear them. He was listening. He heard his dad talk to him about what was going on in the world. He heard the television every day when they rolled his wheelchair in front of it (which is why he absolutely hates the big purple dinosaur named Barney). And he even heard his mom walk into the room one day and say to him, “I hope you die.” That was hard for Martin to hear. But he understands why she said it. She didn’t want anything bad for him. She wanted him to stop suffering.
But when Jesus heard people say the same thing, it really was because they wanted something bad to happen. When he heard the shouts of “Crucify,” they really did want him to suffer in the worst ways the human race could ever invent or imagine. When he heard the sound of his own flesh being ripped off the bone, the sound of spit landing on his skin, and the sound of an iron hammer pounding iron nails right through him again and again and again, he knew exactly what it meant. And then when he hung on a cross, slowly crumbling under the weight of sins that did not belong to him; and as he begged his Father to help, and then acutely listened as his Father responded by saying … nothing, he knew what that meant too. That it was finished. That we were forgiven for all the times we’ve ever been too busy, too lazy, or too arrogant to listen to the message we hear so clearly at the cross of Jesus – that God really does love you more than anything, and really will go that far in order that you might belong to him. And now you do.
For 12 years, the Martin’s dad wanted just one thing. Every day as he carried the limp body of his son,he just wanted it find strength to stand on its own again. And then one day he did. And he’s been standing by his side every day ever since. Did you notice what the Lord did the fourth time he called to Samuel? Did you notice what he did when Samuel was finally ready to listen to the message the Lord was so patiently sending him? It was the same thing Jesus did on the third day after his limp body was buried in a grave. In verse 10, it says that “the LORD came and stood there.” He stood there right next to him. In Psalm 109 King David tells us to praise the Lord because “he stands at the right hand of the needy one, and saves his life from [everything].”
That’s why we come to hear the Word every Sunday. That’s why we start each day by listening to it. That’s why we read it with our spouses and teach it to our children. In a world full of so much noise, that’s why we need to listen to the voice of the Lord more acutely than anything. Because we are needy. Because our lives need saving. And in the Word, we find one voice softly and tenderly calling with one very simple truth: that we already are – safe; that we already do – have everything we could ever need; because we already have him, who is always listening to your every cry, and is ready to stand by your side through anything.
And that would have really upset one person. Samuel’s mom.
You might remember that Samuel was a miracle baby. Samuel’s mother went up to the temple every year for many years to pray for a son. And finally, after many years of many journeys, God finally gave her one. And she was so thankful to the Lord for finally being able to hold a son in her hands … that she gave him away. She dedicated his entire life to the Lord by giving him to Eli to raise in the temple. That was when Samuel was very young. And now, at least a decade later, it was obvious that Eli didn’t teach the Word to Samuel the way mom was hoping. She wanted Samuel to be closer to the Lord than anyone, but about a decade after she dropped him off, he didn’t even recognize the Lord when the Lord called his name.
Peter says that the promises in the Word contain “divine power” that give us “everything we need for life.” Everything we need. On the average day, do you feel like you have everything you need? Or is something missing that’s preventing you from being happy?