"Hearing the Voice of God: Part 1"
Sermon by the Rev. Matt Kennedy
Epiphany2 year B
The Church of the Good Shepherd

1st Samuel 3:1-21

Raise your hand if you’ve gone to church regularly all your life? Raise your hand if you’ve gone church regularly for the last few years? Raise your hand if you’re new here but you’ve been coming regularly. Everyone who raised their hands is a regular churchgoer. If you raised your hand, ask yourself: do you as regularly hear God speaking directly, clearly, and personally to you?

All Christians believe that God speaks, but one of the most difficult things to recognize is when God speaks personally to you. How do you hear his voice and know that it is him?

During Epiphany the church celebrates God’s revealing his saving will to the World. So we’re going to use Epiphany to learn to recognize when God reveals his will directly and personally to you. We’ve done a series on this before, but this time we‘re taking it up a notch. Then we discovered that God speaks through his Word. This time we’ll learn how to hear it. Then we discovered God speaks through the church, this time we’ll learn to recognize it. Last time we said God speaks to your heart in prayer, how does he do this and how do you know?

This morning’s OT lesson will be the starting point for the whole series because Samuel also had trouble recognizing God’s voice, but he learned how. Today we’ll spend some time setting the scene of Samuel’s story and understanding how it applies to us. Next Sunday we’ll draw out some principles and then the Sunday after that we’ll work on how to apply those principles so that when God speaks to you, you’ll know how to listen.

Turn to 1 Samuel 3:1. There we read, “The boy Samuel ministered before the Lord under Eli”
There’s a lot to unpack in this first sentence. Who was Samuel? Who was Eli? What did it mean to “minister before the Lord”? Let’s answer these questions and then we’ll be able to see what God is saying in the rest of the passage.

Eli was the high priest of the Tabernacle. Who can tell me what the Tabernacle was? When God gave Moses the Law on Mt. Sinai, he also commanded the people of Israel to construct a Tent of Meeting, a place where God could meet with his people personally. This tent of meeting, the Tabernacle, had three parts.

First, there was a curtain wall surrounding the tent of meeting. It separated the Holy Tabernacle from the not so holy world. When you stepped through that curtain, you were walking on holy ground. All Israelites who were ceremonially clean and who brought the right sort of sacrifices to atone for their sins could come into this first part of the tabernacle and pray and enjoy fellowship with God. The priests of the Tabernacle lived in smaller tents within this curtain wall.

Within the curtain wall there was a covered tent with two rooms, these are the second and third parts of the Tabernacle.

The first Room was called the Holy Place. Only priests were allowed into the Holy Place and then only to keep the oil lamps lit at night and make sacrifices and offerings before the Lord.

The second Room was called the Most Holy Place. It was connected to the Holy Place but separated from it by a long heavy curtain extending from the ceiling to the floor. Only the high priest was allowed into this room and only once a year and only after making the highest sacrifice of the year for the sins of the entire people. Inside The Most Holy Place was the Ark of the Covenant. The word Ark means “carrying vessel,” like a box. Noah’s Ark was essentially a big floating box that carried the animals and people through the Flood. The Ark of the Covenant was a large wooden box that carried the symbols of the covenant that God made with his people on Mt. Sinai; the staff of Aaron, the first High Priest of Israel, that budded with living buds; the Ten Commandments written by God on stone tablets; some of the Manna that God provided the Hebrews on their trek across the desert; all of that was in the Ark. The Ark was made of acacia wood, covered in gold, and topped with two large winged cherubim also cast in gold that spread their wings over the top of the Ark.

The Most Holy Place was indeed the Most Holy Place in the entire world because before the Ark, God himself, in person, met and spoke with his people through the high priest. What was this like, what did it look like? I don’t know, but the bible just tells us that when the high priest stood before the Ark, he was standing in the very throne room of God.

God told the Israelites to make the Tabernacle mobile because when it was made the Hebrews were mobile; they were on the move from slavery in Egypt to freedom in Palestine, the Promised Land. Once they arrived in the Promised Land, the Tabernacle was set up in a small village called Shiloh. There hundreds of years later, Eli, the high priest and his sons, also priests, ministered before the Lord.

But they were not alone. Samuel was with them. Samuel is described as a boy because he was not yet 13. He was probably around 12 yrs, almost a man in Hebrew terms. Samuel had lived and served in the Tabernacle with the priests ever since he was a baby. His mother, Hannah wasn’t able to have babies, so she went to the Tabernacle and prayed desperately that God would heal her and let her get pregnant. God heard her prayers and gave her Samuel and many more babies after him. In thanksgiving, Hannah dedicated Samuel to God; giving him to Eli to be raised in the tabernacle.

So from infancy, Samuel had lived within the very Tabernacle of God, in the presence of the Ark, in the place where God’s Word was spoken, read, and obeyed day after day year after year. By 12, he would’ve known the law of God, known the rituals of the Tabernacle, known the prayers.
And yet, knowing all of this, Samuel didn’t know the voice of God.

One night Samuel was asleep within the walls of the Tabernacle when out of the silence he heard a voice calling his name. The bible says this voice was the voice of the Lord. Samuel didn’t recognize it. Three times he heard it and three times he thought it was Eli. Why?

There are two reasons right there in verse: “1. Samuel did not yet know the Lord; 2. The Word of the Lord had not yet been revealed to him.”

What? But he lived in the Tabernacle! He knew the Law! He had been dedicated to the Lord at birth! Samuel was a faithful churchgoer.

But Samuel 1. had never surrendered his life to the Lord and 2. because of that it was impossible for him to recognize the Lord’s voice.

This applies to us in two ways. First, going to church regularly is essential to growing closer to God and yet, though you may have been surrounded by the things of God all your life, you can’t recognize the voice of the Lord through them until you know the Lord, until you have a relationship with him, until you surrender your life to him. Only believers are able to recognize God’s voice.

Second, notice I said able. All believers are able to hear God’s voice. But though we’re able, most of us, if we’re honest, don’t know how. So we pass up much that God offers. We have greater access to God than Samuel or any of the prophets ever had.

Samuel lived within the Tabernacle, the holiest place on earth. And yet every single believer is closer still. Samuel wasn’t the high priest so he couldn’t go before the Ark. He couldn’t stand before God in the most Holy Place.

But the book of Hebrews says Jesus is our high priest. The earthly Tabernacle was given by God as a symbolic replica of the Heavenly one. In the heavenly Tabernacle, Hebrews teaches, Jesus entered into the Most Holy Place bringing his own body and blood as a sacrifice for us, for believers, for his people, so that now, if you are in Christ, you live every moment in the Holy of Holies, the very presence of the Almighty God. You are spiritually standing with Jesus in the inner most part of the Heavenly Tabernacle. You are closer than Samuel ever was. This is true not only because Christ has gone into the Most Holy Place. It’s also true because his blood makes us holy enough to be Arks, carriers of the Holy Spirit. Jesus sent the divine Spirit of God into every believer’s heart. Before his sacrifice our sins made that impossible. Now it is a reality. Have you ever heard the phrase, your body is a temple? That is literally true. You have the Holy God of creation living in you. You are a walking temple. Imagine the possibilities for hearing God’s voice and being guided by it. And yet for many of us, like Samuel, God’s voice is so very difficult to recognize. There must be a way to recognize God‘s voice.

There is.

God has given believers four lines of personal communication. You know them, we speak about them all the time. But knowing them and using them are two different things.
The first line is the Bible. The bible is the only communication line that is infallible, that means, without mistake. It is 100% true. But still, you can know the bible and still not recognize God’s voice to you personally in it.

The second communication point is prayer. God’s Spirit in your heart speaks to your spirit. This is not usually an audible voice but it is recognizable voice. Again, you can pray every day and never recognize God’s voice.

The third is the church. There are several communication points at church. You are listening to one right now. No matter how long or boring a sermon, if it is faithful to the bible, God speaks to you personally through it. Not only the sermon, but the prayers, the worship, the fellowship of the church are all points of personal communication. But we miss it all the time.

Finally, there are the open and closed doors in your life. God speaks in and through your life circumstances but most of us don’t know how to hear him.

Knowing these lines of communication and knowing how to recognize God’s voice in them are two very different things. We’ll begin next Sunday learning to use these lines for all their worth so that when God speaks you will recognize and hear his voice.

Amen

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