How well do you listen? We are going to find out this morning! I need 7 volunteers to help me with this. Let’s see…(I ‘volunteered’ 7 people)
(3 persons were given a phrase on a 3x5 card to look at and then whisper into the ear of the person and so on and then finally to me. Following the exercise I briefly de-briefed the congregation as to the results and if they were successful in repeating the phrase accurately asked the congregation to suggest why they were with a key condition of little or no distractions as one key condition.)
There is in the rich tradition of stories about President Franklin Roosevelt, one that involves this issue of listening. It seems that the President decided one day to see if anybody was paying attention to what he was saying. As each person came up to him with an extended hand, he flashed that big smile and said, “I murdered my grandmother this morning.”
People would automatically respond with comments such as ‘How lovely!” or “Just continue with your great work!”
Nobody listened to what he was saying, except one foreign diplomat. When the president said, “I murdered my grandmother this morning,” the diplomat responded softly, “I’m sure she had it coming.”
Listening is a key element of our main text for this morning. Now I was not sure what would happen in the situation that we have experienced this morning, but I thought that with no distractions that our group would do really well in correctly repeating what the first person had said.
Listening is hard work and these days with all the newscasts on cable, the Internet, and now through satellite radio, we are bombarded with news 24 hours per day! But a study done several years ago by Andrew Stern of the University of California at Berkeley raises the issue of how much we listen to and what we remember.
Following a newscast, he phoned TV viewers of the broadcast. He found that 51% of those interviewed could not recall even one of the show’s 19 items. Furthermore, the average memory rate was one item.
Now the calls were made from immediately after the show’s sign-off to 3 and one half hours later. Surprisingly the lead story was the most remembered.
The ending material was the most frequently forgotten and was attributed by Stern on ‘disrupting factors’ such as dinner. He recommended that the newscasts be switched to 10:30 PM.
Well given the journalism culture of today, the headlines are given every 15 to 30 minutes these days! So do we remember all that news? Do we listen to it?
However, in our main passage, Acts 8:26-40 we see good listening take place because Philip listens to the Spirit and then does what He says to do. And I would suggest this morning that Philip was effective in aiding the Ethiopian official to come to faith because he made listening to the Holy Spirit a habit of the heart. How do we make listening to the Holy Spirit a habit of the heart? Here are four ways we do so. (overhead 1)
First, we choose to make it a habit. Philip, the others named, and not named in Luke’s account up to this point chose to make listening to the Spirit a habit. We see this in the waiting described in chapters 1 and 2.
Jesus tells the disciples in Acts 1:4, to ’not leave Jerusalem, until the Father sends you what He promised.’ What was being sent was the Holy Spirit that comes, as we read in chapter 2, in great power to empower those waiting and worshipping the Lord.
The habit of waiting on the Lord is critical for us as we live for the Lord. And waiting is highly regarded in the Bible.
For example, we read in Isaiah 40:31, ‘But those who WAIT on the Lord will find new strength.’ Waiting is a choice and our attitude about waiting is critical as well. (Somewhere I hear the word ‘patience’ being spoken.)
To wait for the Lord, to wait for the Spirit to move, lead, and act is very important. I like what Henry Blackaby says about the need to ‘make major adjustments’ to our lives when we want to intentionally and rightfully experience God.
Listen to Blackaby for a moment on this point: ‘Sometimes as you begin making adjustments, God will require that you wait on Him. This is not because God cannot keep up with you or that He does not know what to do next. God is interested in a love relationship with you. Your waiting on Him develops your absolute dependence on Him. Your waiting on Him assures that you will act on His timing and not your own.’
Philip did this and it laid the groundwork for an effective life and witness for the Lord as we saw last week in our review of Acts 8:4-25 and now this week in the concluding segment of Acts 8.
We can learn to wait on the Lord! The Lord will help us learn to wait on Him if we are patient enough with ourselves to do so.
However, there also comes a time for action that brings us to a second way to develop the habit of listening to the Spirit. We listen and then we decide if what we hear is the Spirit…or not.
We read in the Bible the warning to ‘test the spirits’ to determine if what is said or done in the name of God, is truly done or said in the name of God! There is no place in the Bible that I know of in which our minds and will go on ‘autopilot’ after we establish our personal relationship with the Lord.
Faith is not a passive state of mind. It is an active partnership with the Lord in which we wait, discern through prayer, scripture reading, and discussion with spiritually mature people, what we ‘hear’ and ‘sense.’ Philip listened for and heard the Holy Spirit speak because he purposely aligned himself with the community of faith and sought to understand the Spirit’s voice through that community of faith.
(Prove that PJ!) He was one of the seven named to work out the food distribution issue in Acts 6. His character, undoubtedly shaped by the coming and baptism of the Holy Spirit, was a key qualification for selection. And no doubt, he participated in the breaking of bread, prayer, and corporate worship that we read of in these chapters.
Philip was not a ‘Lone Ranger’ follower. He was connected to the community of faith and that enabled him to more effectively listen to and discern the voice of the Spirit.
Another way that Philip made listening to and for the Spirit a habit ties into an important spiritual discipline. He was able to listen for and to the Spirit during important moments of quiet and meditation, as it would allow him to hear the Spirit clearly during moments of action and decision.
One very important practice that we have allowed to be taken over by more pagan and humanistic practices is that of meditation. Meditation is a very old Christian practice.
‘Christian meditation,’ writes Joyce Huggett ‘has nothing to do with emptying our minds. Christian meditation engages every part of us-our mind, our emotions, our imagination, our creativity and, supremely, our will.’
‘As Archbishop Anthony Bloom puts it,’ she says, ‘Meditation is a piece of straight thinking under God’s guidance.’
The Lord wants us to hear His spirit just as clearly as Philip did. In fact, He wants every believer to hear His Spirit. But we have to develop the habit of quieting our hearts and minds in order to read and understand Scripture that helps us hear the Spirit.
The result of this intentionality in Philip is that he heard the Spirit during his ministry and witness in Samaria in which those who were under the influence of Simon heard and believed.
What if Philip would not have cultivated the habit of waiting for, of discerning, listening to in the quiet and one other key practice, obeying, the voice of the Spirit? What would have happened to Simon and those Samaritans? What would have happened to that Ethiopian?
Would he have eventually given up on what he was reading on his trip back home and tossed his reading material?
Philip waited for, discerned out, meditated upon and obeyed the voice of the Spirit! And lives were changed!
In a key segment of Romans, Paul makes clear the implications of being spiritually ready to walk alongside someone who is asking important questions about life, faith, and meaning. Listen to what he says and think about the importance of listening for and to the Spirit: (Romans 10:13-15)
‘For ‘Anyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.’ But how can they call on him to save them unless they believe in him? And how can they believe in him if they have never heard about him? And how they can they hear about him unless someone tells them? And how will anyone go and tell them without being sent?’
The call to ‘go and tell’ is not limited to those who go to another country or culture. It is a universal call of God on all who believe in Him and want to follow Him.
All of us are called to obey the voice of the Spirit to say and do what is God honoring and helps others come to him. Philip is a clear and strong example of this obedience.
But, it was not Philip in his own strength doing this. He would have failed. It was the Holy Spirit, working with and through Philip, who accomplished these two important acts of ministry that God had directed Philip to do.
As I reflected on Philip’s action several important questions came to my mind: (overhead 2)
‘Who might God have me come along side and listen to and direct to Jesus?’ ‘Am I ready for that command?’ ‘Am I prepared to listen to the Spirit?’
(overhead 3) ‘Am I listening for the Spirit?’ ‘Do I understand what the Spirit is saying to me?’ “Will I obey the Spirit’s voice?’
Listening to and obeying what one hears from the Spirit, through the Bible, through prayer, and through the community of faith is demonstrated to us through the stories of Philip and others we have already read in the opening chapters of Acts. It is key requirement for us today because when Jesus spoke of the Holy Spirit and God the Father sent the Holy Spirit, they expected us to listen to and obey the Spirit!
I wanted to do a second demonstration on video tape in which I asked the same number of people to repeat the same 3 phrases of the opening exercise but in a distracting environment but it did not work out. The reason for this second demonstration is shared in a statement made by CS Lewis many years ago.
“The real problem of the Christian life comes where people do not usually look for it. It comes the very moment you wake up each morning. All your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists simply in shoving them all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in.”
For us to fulfill effectively the Lord’s command to be witnesses in our own worlds, we need to listen to the Spirit and then obey what he tells us to do. Our ‘wishes and hopes for the day’ do rush into our conscious thought at the first light of our day, don’t they?
A seemingly endless stream of decisions, conversations, and potential choices come from out of nowhere and bombard us. ‘DECIDE NOW!’ they scream at us! ‘WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT….?’ they demand of us. How can we hear the voice of the Spirit calling to us so that we begin to think about how to follow His lead and direction for the day in the course of our lives? It is illustrated in the example of Philip, many others, and ultimately Jesus Himself who trained them selves to listen to and for the Spirit.
As followers of Jesus Christ, let us listen to the voice of the Spirit and then obey it so that we can come alongside others who are hearing the Lord’s voice in their circumstances but need help in understand His voice. Amen.
FDR illustration is from 1001 Humorous Illustrations for Public Speaking by Michael Hodgin. © 1994 by Zondervan Press.
TV broadcast story is from Encyclopedia of 7700 Illustrations by Paul Lee Tan. © 1979. Page 744
Blackaby quote is from Experiencing God, pgs. 241-242 by Henry Blackaby
Huggett quote is from Spiritual Classics, ed, by Foster and Griffin. © 2000 by Harper and Row. Page 10
Lewis quote is from Mere Christianity and is from an illustration submitted by Andrew Hamilton at www.sermoncentral.com.
