Copyright © S P Townsend
Footdee Mission Sunday 19th September 2004
Theme: Hearing God’s Voice
Reading: Psalm 95
“For He is our God and we are the people of His pasture, the flock under His care. Today, if you hear His voice, do not harden your hearts” (Ps 95: 7,8).
What God wants for you and me today is to hear His voice, with hearts that are soft.
The first question I want to ask is this: “Have you got ears to hear God’s voice?”. More than once Jesus said, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear” (e.g. Mark 4: 9, 23). Seven times in the book of Revelation the same challenge is expressed: “He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches” (Rev 2,3). So, do you have ears to hear?
In one of the most vivid descriptions of the relationship He desires to have with us, Jesus taught us that His sheep hear His voice.
“The man who enters by the gate is the shepherd of the sheep. The watchman opens the gate for him, and the sheep listen to his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. .. His sheep follow him because they know his voice.” John 10:2-4
This is the same picture that the psalmist paints in Psalm 95:7, “We are the people of His pasture, the flock under His care.”
If you are not one of His sheep then you will not have ears to hear. Until He opens your ears you will be oblivious to His voice. But if you are His sheep then you will hear His voice; He will call you by name. Children have a wonderful capacity to understand this truth. For them, somehow, the thought of being His sheep, under His care and protection, is wonderfully appealing. But Jesus actually used this image when speaking to adults. He knew that the lesson would be just as effective, since we are all children at heart. To have ears to hear Him you must be His sheep. You must belong to Him, be under His authority, follow where He leads, be fully committed to His care and protection.
So are you His sheep? Can you say those familiar words of Psalm 23, “The Lord is my Shepherd,” and mean them truthfully? Is He your shepherd? If not then you will not have ears to hear His voice. I can think of nothing more tragic than to miss hearing what the God of Heaven wants to say to me, individually and by name, because I just can’t hear Him. If this describes you then you can, right now, change this for ever. You can become His sheep today. Do you want to do this? It will mean yielding control of your life entirely into His hands, and following Him from this time forward. But it will also mean you will enjoy His presence, His provision, His protection, His power and His peace both in this life and the next. Jesus said, “I am the Good Shepherd. The Good Shepherd lays down His life for the sheep” (John 10: 11). He laid down His life, through His death on the cross, for you and for me, so that we might be delivered from all that would destroy us and brought into the safety of His flock. Why not ask Him today to do this for you?
The next question I want to ask is, “Are you hearing His voice?” It is one thing to have ears, it is quite another to hear. I cannot remember the number of times my wife has interrupted my train of thought with the words, “Have you been listening to a word I’ve been saying?” Somehow, engrossed in some other activity, my ears become deaf to normal conversation.
How easily do you hear His voice? Jesus said, “My sheep listen to my voice; I know them and they follow Me” (John 10: 27). If you belong to Him then He knows you by name and calls you to follow Him. And what is the key to following Him? The answer is: listening to His voice. Of course, I know that we read the Bible, listen to sermons, and read Christian books, but there is a difference between hearing what God is saying to us in general and hearing what He is saying to me personally. If the chairman said tonight to all of us in general, “Would somebody like to do the washing up?” then it would be easy enough for me not to respond, hoping someone else would do it. But if he were to ask the question directly to me then it would be a different matter. I would be faced with a clear choice – to do what I was being asked to do, or to say no. I couldn’t avoid the issue and tell myself that I will think about it later. Jesus says to us that He knows us individually, that He calls us individually and that He wants each one of us to listen to what He has to say to us individually. At the end of John’s gospel is a beautiful account of how Jesus met with His disciples for breakfast on the shore of the sea of Galilee. Jesus spoke intimately with Peter about how He wanted him to care for the other disciples. Then Peter pointed to John and said to Jesus, “Lord, what about him?” Jesus responded, “What is that to you – you must follow me.” (John 21:21,22). God has prepared for each one of us, in advance, the good works that He want us to accomplish for His glory (Eph 2: 10). It is only by listening to His voice that we will be able to follow the way He wants to lead us.
One day I was thinking about this, having been a Christian for many years, and I realised, to my shame, that I didn’t really have much experience of hearing His voice. I prayed, “Lord please give me ears to hear your voice.” Hardly before I had finished the words came into my mind – “You already have ears to hear; what you need to do is listen.”
Listening means we have to take time to be in His presence. Listening isn’t the same as praying. Many times I have come into God’s presence, and have filled the time with all that I wanted to say to Him. But what about what He wanted to say to me? Listening means being still and focussing on Him. The Scripture says, “Be still and know that I am God,” (Ps 46:10) and again, “Come near to God and He will come near to you” (Jas 4:8). We can be sure that if we draw near to Him desiring to hear His voice then He will speak to us in such a way that we will know that it is Him. We have His promise, you see, “My sheep listen to my voice” (John 10:27).
So do you listen, or are you so engrossed with other activities that you miss what He is saying?
The final question I want to ask is, “Is your heart soft to respond to what God says to you?” The psalmist in Psalm 95 exhorts the reader not to be like those of old who heard God’s voice clearly, but decided not to do what He was calling them to do. The writer to the Hebrews challenges the people of God not to fall into the same sin.
So, as the Holy Spirit says: "Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as you did in the rebellion, during the time of testing in the desert, where your fathers tested and tried me and for forty years saw what I did. That is why I was angry with that generation, and I said, 'Their hearts are always going astray, and they have not known my ways.' So I declared on oath in my anger, 'They shall never enter my rest.'” See to it, brothers, that none of you has a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God. (Heb 3:7-12).
What does the Scripture say happens when we hear God’s voice but fail to respond to Him?
You see, we do not please God by keeping the Law, however meticulous we are in observing all that is within it. We please God by exercising faith in Him (Heb 11:6), and faith is essentially hearing God’s word, believing what He says, and responding obediently. As the Scripture says, “Faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word of Christ” Romans 10:17.
Let me give you an example. Last week my aunt wrote to us, giving her news, but also sharing with us her prayers for us and the wider family. Now I have a history of not writing to my aunt. In my early teens she became so exasperated by my failure to even write her a thank-you letter for a birthday present that she told be that from henceforth no more birthday presents would be coming my way. She was true to her word, but even that didn’t cause me to change my ways. Of course, she has kept regularly in touch with us, and we have sent her cards, Christmas letters, and sometimes bouquets of flowers, but even so my record as a letter-writer has been extremely poor. But last week, as I read her letter, God spoke to me. It wasn’t an audible voice from heaven, a verse from Scripture, a dream or a vision. It was an immediate thought, impressed strongly on my mind, that the Lord was telling me to write to her to encourage her. The next evening I sat down and composed a long, newsy, encouraging letter. It was after midnight before I finished it, and the next day I sent it off first-class post. Why did I do that, when previous attempts by my aunt to persuade me to communicate more had left me largely unmoved? Because I heard the Good Shepherd’s voice; because the Lord spoke directly to me and I had a choice – do I love Him enough to do what He says or am I going to turn away from Him and disobey? And of course, as it always is with the Lord, He not only asked me to do this but also stirred up within me a strong desire to do the very thing He wanted, out of love for my aunt.
In His final discourse to His disciples before His death, Jesus said, “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. If you obey my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have obeyed my Father's commands and remain in his love” (John 15: 9,10) Remaining in His love, that is in the place of deep, loving, communion with Him, is dependant on our keeping His commands. What commands are these – the ten commandments, the new commandment to love one another? It will include these, of course, but Jesus actually tells us precisely what He means. He said “just as I have obeyed my Father's commands”. How did He obey the Fathers commands? In John 5:19,20 we have the answer, "I tell you the truth, the Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does. For the Father loves the Son and shows him all he does”. Again, in John 12: 49 Jesus said, “For I did not speak of my own accord, but the Father who sent me commanded me what to say and how to say it”.
Day by day Jesus communed with His Father, listened to His voice, and then did precisely what the Father wanted Him to do. He tells us to live in exactly the same way, as we see from His prayer to His Father: “As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world” John 17: 18.
Conclusion
Let me repeat the questions:
The answer will be yes to all of these if you are a sheep belonging to the Good Shepherd, listening for His voice, and swift to do what He asks. This is a place of deep, loving fellowship with God himself, a place of forgiveness, a place of safety, a place of peace and joy. Are you in that place? If not, then will you not come to Him, or return to Him, this night, to receive His forgiveness, His cleansing, His wonderful welcome, determined never again to stray from the place of listening and obedience close by His side?
Copyright © S P Townsend