Re:Focus on Hearing from God
Re:Focus on Hearing from God • Sermon • Submitted
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Hearing from God
Hearing from God
When we desire to hear from God, I will begin with what our denomination, the EPC, begins the “Essentials of Our Faith” with:
All Scripture is self-attesting and being Truth, requires our unreserved submission in all areas of life. The infallible Word of God, the sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments, is a complete and unified witness to God’s redemptive acts culminating in the incarnation of the Living Word, the Lord Jesus Christ. The Bible, uniquely and fully inspired by the Holy Spirit, is the supreme and final authority on all matters on which it speaks.
We know God’s voice through the word of God that is ever breathed by the power of the Holy Spirit to point us to Jesus. Some of the Scriptures we opened our service with how the Bible attests to itself to be from God. This might be problematic to the skeptic as they would want secondary sources seeing Scripture to be reliable - which St Irenaeus, one of the church fathers did this in his “The Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching.” He begins by quoting Psalm 33:6;
By the word of the Lord were the heavens established, and by his sprit all their power. Since then the Word establishes that is to say gives body and grants the reality fo being, and the Spirit gives order and form to the diversity of the powers; rightly and fittingly is the Word called the Son, and Spirit the Wisdom of God. Wall also does Paul His apostle say: Eph 4:6 One God the Father, who is over all and through all and in us all. For over all is the Father; and through all is the Son, for through Him all things were made by the Father; and in us all is the Spirit, who cries Abba Father, and fashions humanity into the likeness of God. Now the Spirit shows forth the Word, and therefore the prophets announced the Son of God; and the Word utters the Spirit, and therefore Himself the announcer of the prophets, and leads and draws humanity to the Father.
Or maybe we could summarize these words in a more accessible way in a quote featured in the Casting Crowns song “The Word is Alive” by John Piper:
The Bible was inscribed over a period of 2000 years
In times of war and in days of peace
By kings, physicians, tax collectors, farmers
Fishermen, singers and shepherds
The marvel is that a library so perfectly cohesive
Could have been produced by such a diverse crowd
Over a period of time which staggers the imagination
Jesus is its grand subject, our good is designed
And the glory of God is its end
Then the song sings:
The word is alive
And it cuts like the sword through the darkness
With a message of life to the hopeless and the frail
Breathing life into all who believe
The word is alive
And the world and its glories will fade
But its truth, it will not pass away
It remains yesterday and forever the same
What is probably the most amazing part of the Word is its willingness to be transparent, vulnerable, and even downright dark at times. Which means its relatable because We all have moments when the fall seems to overcome any goodness in our lives—moments that feel like the end of the line, a dead end. The doors of hope have all closed, the winds of change have died down, and the fires of passion have all gone out. And if we are honest, we all have faced these difficulties in the past 10 months alone both together and individually. When we face these wilderness periods in our lives we might wonder where God has gone, and in the midst of how crazy the world has gotten we might wonder:
Where did God go? Where did we go? How did we get here? If God built a home for us to be in together, why is he so hard to find? We feel like we’re wandering, waiting for God to show up, feeling unwanted because he doesn’t seem to want to be with us. Wandering . . . waiting . . . unwanted.[1]
In these times we need to hear the Lord speak to us in the hear and the now. In order to know the Lord’s voice, we must be familiar with the words He breathed that is the word of God, Scripture, our Bibles. The more we get to know our Bibles the more we get to know how the Lord speaks, it helps us recognize what is of the Lord and what is not, and then to know how the Lord is speaking in the here and now. We can turn to a multitude of verses to speak hope into our lives and to try to answer these questions, but this morning I would like to turn to a place many of you may not naturally turn to when we are going through dark times – to the call of Abraham.
As Adam and Eve disobey God and create “the fall,” humanity for the first time ever is faced with these questions that we ask often now: God was walking with us in the garden, but now where did God go? Where did we go – what does life now look like apart from God? Where we once had a home with God why does God now seem distant? And to a certain degree from Genesis three to eleven humanity is largely was wondering, waiting, and even felt unwanted. I mean certainly humanity is not wanted anymore when God regrets creating humanity in Genesis 6 leading into the flood centering in on Noah and his descendants. In fact, not to long after Noah humanity even tries to gain Eden back by building a city and a tower with its top in the heavens. We see Noah’s descendants flowing to Shem, and then Shem’s descendants to Terah, and so we arrive at our verses for today:
[1] Holsclaw, Cyd; Holsclaw, Geoff. Does God Really Like Me? (p. 66). InterVarsity Press. Kindle Edition