Text: 1 Samuel 3: 1- 10.
How’s your hearing?
Have you ever noticed how some people have selective hearing? They only hear things they want to hear, usually when it benefits them; my dad was a bit like that. In the days before I met Lorraine and well before I crossed the threshold of an Army hall, I used to go to the local working men’s club with him. We would play snooker and have a few drinks, and I would notice just how selective his hearing was, how quickly it came and went. Whenever it got round to his turn to pay for the drinks his hearing would suddenly take a turn for the worse, only to miraculously return when someone said “Would you like another pint Les?” or “it’s your turn on the table!” Children have the same problem, how many times do you have to say to a child “tidy your room!” before you get a response, then compare it to the immediate response you get when you ask if they want some sweets or ice cream. I believe we’ve all been guilty at some point in our lives of pretending not to hear someone telling us something if it doesn’t suit us. How many times have the men in the room turned down the wife receptors in your ears, especially when there is something on the telly you want to watch? Sometimes we turn down the God receptors in our ears, in Ezekiel 12 verse 2, God says "these people have ears to hear but they never hear eyes to see, but they never see".
God knows people are like that, and throughout scripture we can hear him say: "Listen to me! Listen to me!"
In Deuteronomy 4: 1, he says “Hear now, O Israel, the decrees and laws I am about to teach you. Follow them so that you may live...” and again in Deuteronomy 6: 3-4, he says “Hear, O Israel, and be careful to obey so that it may go well with you and that you may increase greatly in a land flowing with milk and honey, just as the LORD, the God of your fathers, promised you. Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one.”
In Isaiah 55 verse 3, he says “Give ear and come to me; hear me, that your soul may live. I will make an everlasting covenant with you, my faithful love promised to David.”
Jesus himself is quoted 6 times in the synoptic gospels as saying “He that has ears let him hear.”
Why does God want us to listen?
Look again at what he is saying “Hear, O Israel, and be careful to obey so that it may go well with you ...”
“Give ear and come to me; hear me, that your soul may live. I will make an everlasting covenant with you, my faithful love promised to David.”
God is saying “I want to bless you. I want to give you what your heart desires… BUT I can’t if you won’t listen.”
God wants us to hear His voice because that’s the only way we’ll receive all the blessings He wants to give us. It should be so simple, yet we make it so complicated, why? Because from the day we are born our hearts are inclined towards deceit. In Jeremiah 17 verse 9 we read “The heart is deceitful above all things...” We hear only what we want to hear, and we put ourselves before God, we all do it even the most righteous among us does it occasionally because even the most righteous has a deceitful heart. How do we heal the deceitful heart, and open ourselves up to the full blessings God wants to place in our lives?
Let’s look again at 1 Samuel verses 3 and 4 "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. Then the LORD called Samuel. Samuel answered, ’Here I am.’"
I don’t know about you, but I just love the precise details of scripture. At first reading you could be forgiven for thinking they are insignificant, but I believe that the details are there for a reason. In these verses it’s not important to know that Samuel was sleeping, the importance is in knowing where he was sleeping. “Samuel was lying down in the temple of the LORD, where the ark of God was.”
The writer wanted us to see that when Samuel heard God’s voice he was sleeping NEXT to God.
James 4:8 tells us "Draw near to God and he will draw near to you."
If we’re going to hear God’s voice, and know His will – we have to be in the same room as He is, that’s why it’s important to come to church. However, just being in the same room doesn’t guarantee we will hear his voice.
Earlier I asked the question “How many times have the men in the room turned down the wife receptors in your ears, especially when there is something on the telly you want to watch?” Lorraine has a tendency to want to talk about something on her mind when I’m in the middle of watching something on the telly, it’s usually when I’m watching C.S.I. because she knows it’s a lost cause to try and talk when Doctor Who is on. Anyway I’m there watching C.S.I. and trying to work out who did what and to whom, when Lorraine comes in and opens up some in depth conversation, and it’s usually at the critical point either at the beginning where the details and clues are, if you can spot them or at the end when you get to find out if you was right. For some strange reason Lorraine gets frustrated if I continue to watch the programme while she is talking, and usually asks me to turn the sound off so I can hear her speak and pay attention to her. So what do I do? I turn the sound off and the subtitles on. So now I can hear her speak but I’m not really listening because I’m reading the subtitles and my mind is full of my own voice as I silently read them and I totally miss anything important she has to say. Sometimes that’s the way we treat God, we come to church on a Sunday hoping to get a blessing, but our minds are so full of our own agendas that we totally miss the blessing God is offering. We need to be not only in the same room as God but also to recognise his presence, and that means recognising his voice when he speaks.
Recognising God’s voice
How many of you know someone who puts on a telephone voice? How many of you put on a telephone voice? Lorraine’s mum puts on a very posh voice whenever she answers the phone and yet speaks completely different when she is the one doing the calling, but whichever voice she uses the members of the family always know it’s her on the phone. That’s because we have a relationship with her and recognise the slight intonations of her voice. God speaks to his children in different ways, but if they have a close loving relationship with him through Jesus they are tuned into his frequency; they recognise when he is speaking to them. To recognise God’s voice we need to draw close to him in a relationship with his Son Christ Jesus, we can do this by spending time with him in regular Bible study and prayer, as I’m sure many of you do already. However, God still speaks to people who have not yet entered into a relationship with him, but because they do not have that relationship with him they need help in recognising his voice. This was Samuel’s first experience of hearing God’s voice, but he didn’t recognise it, in verse 7 we read “Now Samuel did not yet know the LORD: The word of the LORD had not yet been revealed to him.”
He believed it to be the voice of his master Eli the priest. Three times God called to Samuel and each time he presented himself to Eli saying “Here I am; you called me.” Why does it take so long for Eli to recognise that the LORD was calling to Samuel? He had after all spent a lifetime in service to God, the answer can be found in verse 1 of the passage we read “In those days the word of the LORD was rare; there were not many visions.” This was because Eli’s sons, who should have inherited the position of priest from Eli, had abused their positions. Deliberately disobeying God by cheating, seducing and robbing the people; Eli had tried to correct them, but they were deaf to his rebuke and continued in their disobedience. On the third occasion Samuel presented himself to Eli, the old priest recognised that it was the LORD who was calling to Samuel and he said to him “Go and lie down, and if he calls you, say, ‘Speak, LORD, for your servant is listening.’” Eli was giving Samuel some good advice, it’s just a pity he never took his own advice. The advice he gave was telling Samuel to give God permission for him to speak, it’s the same advice that we should take on board today.
We have to give God permission to speak to us, in order to hear him!
I mentioned earlier that in order to hear God when he speaks, we need to draw close to him in a relationship through Christ. We can do this through daily study of the Bible and prayer, but when we pray we need to know when to be quiet and say “Speak LORD, your servant is listening.” And allow him to speak. We should treat prayer for what it is, a two way conversation with God, and learn to be quiet long enough for him to get a word in edge ways. Nicky Gumbel, in his book Questions of Life compares it to a visit to the doctor, he writes “Suppose I go to the doctor and say, ‘Doctor, I have a number of problems: I have a problem of fungus growing under my toenails, I have piles, my eyes itch, I need a flu jab; I have very bad backaches and I have tennis elbow.’ Then, having got through my list of complaints, I look at my watch and say, ‘Goodness me, time is getting on. Well, I must be off. Thanks very much for listening.’ The doctor might want to say, ‘Hang on a second. Why don’t you listen to me?’ If whenever we pray we only speak to God and never take time to listen, we make the same mistake.” (Gumbel, 2003, 104)
God speaks to us in many different ways; he can speak to us through the words of the Bible, he can speak to us through friends who come along at just the right moment in time, he may speak to us in the form of a thought he places in our minds, through a dream he might give us or he could even speak to us audibly, but we have to allow ourselves to listen and more importantly we have to allow God to speak into our lives. God wants us to listen, so that he can bless us, he wants to draw close to us in a relationship so that we can recognise his voice, however he speaks to us. But he will never force himself upon us, we have to give him permission to speak to us, we need to surrender to his will, to receive the blessing on offer.
In a moment we are going to remain seated to sing song number 525 in the song book, as you sing through each verse, reflect on what you are singing, if you feel that at this moment in time you are struggling with singing those verses then please don’t sing them, please be honest with yourself, I would sooner listen only to the piano than you sing words that have no meaning to you at this moment. If that is you, take the time to reflect on how God is speaking to your hearts today, is he challenging some area of your life that is not quite right? Are you allowing him to speak, are you accepting whatever he is saying to you, or are you still allowing your own agendas to get in the way, if the latter statement is where you are at the moment, and if you feel able to, just take a few moments to surrender that part of your life that is holding you back from receiving the blessing God is offering, do it wherever you feel most comfortable to either at the mercy seat or in the seat you are sitting, but please do it.
