Tonight I want to start off with a little brain teaser. If you have heard this before, please don’t ruin it for everyone else and just keep your thoughts to yourself. I’ll read the question and then you guys can have a minute or two to think.
Once you have gotten the answer right, again, please don’t ruin it for everyone else and blurt out how you got to your answer. All I want to hear is your answer to the problem when I call on you and then I will let you know if you are right or not. So, here is the question:
You are driving a bus. You go east 12 miles, and turn south and go 2 miles and take on 9 passengers, and then you turn west and go 3 miles and let off 4 passengers. How old is the bus driver?
***Give the youth a chance to answer the question and eventually ask one of them to explain the question and how to find the right answer***
The main problem that many people have when trying to answer this brain teaser is listening. A lot of the times, we latch onto certain information that we think is important in a question and then somehow, miss the most important part. When I first read this question earlier this morning, like many of you, I latched onto the directions (east, south, west), the distance and the number of passengers on the bus. Those are things that that are important right?
When I got to the end and it asked how old the bus driver is, I just was dumb founded. “Wait a minute,” I thought, “how are we going to find the age of the buss driver from the information given.” I took a minute and looked at the numbers are wondered if there was some secret message in the numbers and maybe, if you added them together or something, it would work. It wasn’t for a few moments that I finally realized that the clue to this teaser was a simple, three letter word that starts the whole question off. “YOU are the bus driver.”
How often is it though that we have this same problem with listening in real life? Your Mom asks you to do something and you aren’t quite paying attention and latter on you get in trouble for not doing what you were supposed to. You get your homework back from your teacher with a big fat F on it and when you inquire to your teacher, he tells you that you didn’t follow all the directions – directions you missed because you were talking with the cute boy behind you and weren’t listening to the teacher.
Listening is so important in life and crucial to make relationships work. We all have built into us the need and want to be listened to. Being listened to communicates things like worth, value, love, and respect. How do you feel when you are pouring your heart out to a parent or a friend and then find out that they weren’t listening to you? You feel hurt, upset, and like they don’t care about you. Listening is so important and yet we live in a day and age where there are so many distractions to listening that it makes it more and more difficult to do.
***Ask the youth what distracts them most from listening***
As we continue to talk about the importance of taking in “Daily Nutrition” as we jump deeper and deeper into a relationship with Christ, a huge component that I think we constantly forget is the importance of listening to God. So many people talk about prayer and reading the Bible and serving and all the other great and wonderful things; but not a lot of people talk about listening to God.
Again, listening is so important to any relationship, and that includes our relationship with Jesus. And in some ways, I would argue that it is even more important because I think the God of the Universe and the Creator of all things is someone to pay attention to when he speaks. How often do we read our Bibles, which as we talked about last week is the Word of God, but yet just have it go in one ear and out the other? How often do we pray by just throwing up all these requests to God but yet never take them time to listen to what He may want to say?
For our time tonight, I want to look at a passage in 1 Samuel 3:1-10 that will give us some insight to listening to God in our lives.
***Have a youth read 1 Samuel 3:1-10***
Notice what verse one says again. “In those days messages from the Lord were very rare, and visions were quite uncommon.” Some of you may think that this is not unlike the times that we live in today. Well, I think I would agree with you but it is important to understand what this verse is getting at.
Some people might argue that this verse says that God wasn’t speaking to many people in the days that Samuel was a boy. Well, only God knows if he was or wasn’t speaking but the root of the problem was that people had given up listening a long time ago. In the chapters that precede what we just read, it tells about Eli, the priests, sons and how they were wicked and “had no respect for the Lord.” They did whatever they wanted and didn’t care about the work God had called them to do. They just ignored Him and what He was saying.
That is why messages from the Lord were rare and visions were uncommon. It wasn’t that God wasn’t speaking, it was that fact that no one was listening to relay the messages of God to the rest of the people. Therefore, it seemed that God was silent for years and years but yet really no one was listening. I think the same is true for our times today. I think God is speaking all the time to many people but, for the most part, we don’t listen. I want to spend the rest of our time looking at four reasons why we are missing God’s message today and not listening.
First, I think a lot of it is because of how busy and crazy we are. Our schedules are so loaded up with thing after thing that we don’t ever take time to just stop and listen to God. In Psalms 46:10, the writer says to “Be still, and know that I am God.” How often are we still and do we take the time to just listen to God? Notice that God doesn’t speak to Samuel in the busyness of the day but instead at night as he is lying down to go to bed. It was when Samuel was still from the busyness of his day. For us today, we don’t even get that. A lot of you fall asleep doing your homework or reading. When you do fall asleep, many of you have headphones in or music on. There is hardly any time where we are still and quite. We are overloading ourselves with so much that we are drowning out God’s voice.
Second, just like what I described about the brain teaser, I think we are all too often focused on all the wrong things. I think a lot of the times, if we thought about God speaking to us we tend to think of everything in grand terms. Meaning like there would be flashes of lighting and booms of thunder and clouds and smoke that would accompany God’s message to us. There would be angels singing and trumpets blasting and all these other things that would make us sit up and take notice going, “Ok, God. You got my attention.”
Notice again, that this is not the way God speaks to Samuel. Instead, he calls out to him quietly in the night. Sometimes God does use dramatic things to get our attention – he speaks to Moses from a burning bush, he speaks to a guy named Balaam through is donkey and he speaks to Mary through angels. But, more often than not, they are the exceptions and instead, God speaks to us in quite and simple ways.
There is a great story in 1 Kings about a prophet named Elijah who is on a mountain top waiting for God to come so that they could speak. As he is on the mountain and “mighty windstorm hits the mountain” but yet God was not in the wind. After that there was an earthquake, but again God was not in the earthquake. After that there was fire but again, no God. Finally, there was a gentle whisper and at that Elijah came out of the cave he was waiting in and spoke to God.
God, I think most often speaks to us in very simple ways – through His words of the Bible, through other people, through nature, our consciences, and even a soft voice – but yet we are all too often looking for the big, huge message when in fact he is already talking and we just aren’t listening.
Third, I think we miss God’s message so often because we have forgotten what God sounds like. In the midst of all the voices and message that we take in every day it is hard to pick God’s voice out of it all. This is especially hard if we are not spending any time with Him. Samuel didn’t recognize God’s voice because he had never heard it. It took God calling three times for him to finally realize, thanks to Eli, what was going on.
Think of it this way, the best way to learn a foreign language like Spanish is repetition and spending time listening to it and repeating what you hear. If you do that for a time and then take a break for a while, coming back to it can be difficult because you don’t remember everything. I think it works the same way with us listening to God. If we are not spending the time reading His words and hanging out with Him, His words and language will become foreign to us and we will miss things because we don’t understand anymore.
Fourth, and finally, I think the last thing that prevents us from listening to God is because we simply don’t want to. God calls out to Samuel, he doesn’t just start speaking. He finally delivers the message when Samuel responds to God and says, “Speak, your servant is listening.” Samuel could have chosen – out of fear, out of not wanting to know what God had to say, or any other reason – to just ignore God but instead he choose to respond and purposefully listen to what God had to say.
God is speaking today whether you believe it or not. My challenge to all of us tonight is to start listening. It is so important to make sure that we are taking time to “be still” and take the time to separate ourselves from the world and everything going on around us. This will help us to hear God’s still, small voice and fresh our souls with what and how God sounds like. On top of all that, we must respond as God calls our name. He will not force Himself on us but instead wait for us to be ready and purposefully listen to His leading. The question is, are you ready?
