Can You Hear Me Now?

Can You Hear Me Now?

Matthew 7:24-27

July 12, 2020 • Mount Pleasant UMC

True confession: I’ve long been skeptical of those who say they “hear” from God. Not that I don’t believe God speaks; I do. I know of and have in the past shared several times when I believe I heard from God. But I’ve also experienced many times when people claim to hear things from God that either blatantly contradict Scripture or are so out of character with God as to be unbelievable. There are also times when I think to myself, “I think maybe God has more things to do than find you a parking spot at Walmart.” Now, maybe you want to get up and leave at this point, find a church with a pastor who has better faith, I don’t know. It’s just been interesting to me over the years how the things God generally tells us are (a) what we want to hear and (b) what we’ve already decided to do. It makes me begin to wonder if we are really listening to God, or if we are actually just listening to our own inner voice.

This morning, we are continuing our sermon series that will lead us into this year’s Vacation Bible School. The theme is “Focus,” and last week we began by discovering how we can “focus on what you see,” how we can discover the presence of God in creation. I saw many of you posting creation pictures online, learning to see God in the midst of his world. This month, we’re learning to focus more on Jesus, and one way we’re doing that is by memorizing the VBS theme verse together. Did you work on it this week? Let’s put it on the screen again today so we can say it together—and then next week, I’m going to start removing parts of the verse to see how much we know. You’ve been warned! So, let’s put the verse up on the screen and read it together: “Let us keep looking to Jesus. He is the one who started this journey of faith. And he is the one who completes the journey of faith” (Hebrews 12:2a, NIrV). Let’s keep looking to Jesus—the one who started us on this journey of faith. That’s what we want to do in these weeks and during the week of VBS. And part of looking to him, part of following him, is learning to hear from him. There are a lot of voices that try to get our attention today; are we able to discern his voice in the midst of the many voices (including our own)? Because, as Jesus says in the passage we read from Matthew’s gospel this morning, our survival depends on being able to hear from God.

This passage comes at the end of Jesus’ most famous sermon, what we call the Sermon on the Mount. It’s really Jesus’ first chance to explain to his followers what life in the kingdom of God is all about. So Jesus teaches the people about praying and fasting and giving and adultery and how to be blessed, and then he finishes up by saying it’s not about knowing the right things. It’s not about knowing the right doctrines. It’s not about checking off all the religious duties that you have done. No, what makes the difference between those who are true children of God and those who are not is that the true child of God hears and does the word of God. He tells a short little parable that illustrates the stark difference between the two: only one will stand.

Maybe some of you are like me and you remember singing this little song in Sunday School:

The foolish man built his house upon the sand,

The foolish man built his house upon the sand,

The foolish man built his house upon the sand,

And the house on the sand went splat!

This might be a good time to remind you that Jesus, in his early life, was a builder, a tekton (Card, Matthew: The Gospel of Identity, pg. 72). While we usually think of him as working with wood, he most likely was more of a stone mason. There’s a whole lot more stone in Israel than there is useable wood. But actually, the kind of building material each of these two men are using in the parable is irrelevant to the outcome. What matters the most is the foundation they build upon. In fact, let’s suppose these two houses are being built side-by-side. Jesus doesn’t say that, but for the sake of our imagination, let’s speculate that they are. And let’s imagine that they were both started at the same time. If you were out taking a walk in the neighborhood, and you came across this building site, these two houses would probably look pretty much the same to the naked eye. British pastor John Stott points out that Jesus here is not contrasting Christians and non-Christians. Rather, both the foolish and the wise in Jesus’ story hear the same word of Jesus, so the contrast here is between genuine Christians and what John Wesley might have called “almost Christians,” those who go to church but don’t really know Jesus. They listen but they don’t hear his word. Just like with the houses, you can’t tell the difference just by looking on the outside, on the appearance. The difference, Jesus says, between the foolish and the wise is how deep the foundations go (cf. Stott, The Message of the Sermon on the Mount, pg. 209).

Those of you who have been to Israel (and if you haven’t been, there’s still time to sign up for next January) know that there is a lot of sand. A lot of sand and rock. While there are lush green areas in the northern part of the country, the bulk of the country is sand and rock. To be able to put up a stable building requires a person to dig down, sometimes quite a ways, to find solid bedrock for a foundation. That’s in part why a lot of the ancient cities were built on the top of rock outcroppings or mountains because there was a solid foundation readily available. (It was also good to be up high on top of the rock rather than in the valley if you wanted to defend a city.) So Jesus imagines two men—or maybe had he experienced this as a builder, who knows. But in his story, one of the men took his time to dig down, find good bedrock and he set his house on that foundation. His neighbor, a “foolish” man, didn’t have time to dig down deep. Besides, he could build just as good a house on top of the sand that was already there. And he could do it more quickly! What difference would it really make? So he put his house on the sand. Both of them moved in on the same day, and they got everything unpacked, put away, and settled into life in the community. Then, one day, Jesus says, a huge storm came along. Again, you have to understand that storms like this are rare, especially in the desert areas. There’s not a lot of rain in Israel. When I was there in the summer of 2000, passed field after field of burnt-up crops because the rain had not come. In some parts of the country, they get only a little over an inch of rain in a year; Jerusalem gets about 21 inches a year. (That’s less than half of our average rainfall here in Terre Haute.) Storms are rare, so in some ways, the foolish man could assume he wouldn’t need a deep foundation. But he was wrong. Jesus says the foolish man’s luck ran out. A huge storm came, it beat on the houses, and while the wise man was safe and sound, watching Netflix in his living room during the storm, the foolish man soon found his house destroyed, laying in rubble around him.

At least part of Jesus’ point is this: you never know when the storms are going to come. And hasn’t that been the story of 2020 so far? When this year began, we started to hear rumblings of a new virus far, far overseas, and while there were some voices of warning, by and large we ignored those voices. We failed to see the storm that was coming. And even when we began to see the potential health crisis, few anticipated the storm of the economic challenge. People did not anticipate losing jobs, businesses did not anticipate being closed for so long. Many businesses are still struggling to open back up in this “new normal” and most of us are struggling to adjust and figure out what’s next. The storm arrived and we were not ready for it. I can tell you I wasn’t ready for it; I can tell you the church wasn’t ready for it. And for the last four months, the streams have risen, the winds have blown and beaten against us—the question that remains is whether our foundation is built on sand or on the rock. Will we stand or will we fall in the midst of this particular storm?

You see, there’s an essential difference in the Scriptures between the foolish and the wise. It’s especially evident in what is called the “wisdom literature,” books like Psalms, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. In fact, the book of Proverbs is essentially a description of what it means to be wise as opposed to being foolish, and it has little to do with book smarts. Wisdom is not about knowing things. Wisdom is about taking what you know and applying it to real life. Wisdom is about living the good life—not the life of leisure, but life the way God intended it to be lived. King Solomon described wisdom as finding a way to do “what is right and just and fair” (Proverbs 1:3). And that always involves interaction with God. The fool, we’re told, says in his heart, “There is no God” (Psalm 14:1) but the wise trusts in God even when everything seems to fall apart. Ultimately, real wisdom comes from God, and is found in Jesus Christ. Paul even described Jesus as “the power of God and the wisdom of God” (1 Corinthians 1:24). Wisdom is knowing what to do with what you know; foolishness is ignoring what you know and doing what you want anyway. So, tell me, how would you describe the world we live in? Wise or foolish?

The wise man built his house on the rock. The foolish man built his house on the sand. The wise man’s house stood in the midst of the storms. The foolish man’s house fell down in the midst of the storms. And what was the biggest difference between the two? Jesus says the wise person hears his words and puts them into practice (cf. Stott 208). The wise person hears Jesus’ words and does something with them. He doesn’t just study Jesus’ words; he lives Jesus’ words. The difference is not in who has more Bible knowledge. The difference is not in who knows more Jesus sayings. The difference between the wise and the foolish is in what they do with what they hear. And this brings us back to our theme for this week, our bottom line: you can hear from God.

Several years ago, many of you remember, Verizon ran a series of commercials demonstrating how good their network was by having this guy, named Paul, show up in various places with his phone and ask whoever was on the other end of the call, “Can you hear me now?” A few years later, he switched to advertising with Sprint, but he’s still usually remembered for that one question: can you hear me now? I sometimes think God might be saying that to us: can you hear me now? Are you listening? Because you can hear from God; our problem is that we are often not listening. We’re not connected to the network. So I want to spend the rest of our time this morning talking about ways we can learn to hear from God, ways we can connect, if you will, to God’s network.

These aren’t necessarily in any order of importance, and I do believe God will speak to us in different ways at different times, maybe even in different ways that relate to our own personalities. I mean, God made us, so he should know how we can best hear, right? Think about Mary and Joseph, Jesus’ parents. To Mary, God sent an angel. Mary’s faith was such that she could handle seeing a real-live angel in the daylight. But Joseph was wired differently, and so to Joseph God sent an angel in a dream. I sometimes say maybe that was the only time Joseph would get quiet enough that he could hear from God. So God speaks in many different ways, but regardless of the order you might put these ways in, I do believe that the primary way, the number one way God speaks to us that we can hear is through the Scripture. You can hear from God through the Bible. We call this book the Word of God, but we also know there were human authors who wrote these books over centuries. It did not drop down out of heaven on golden tablets. There was a long period of time during which the Bible was written and put together. And yet because of the work of the Holy Spirit, there is a single message and a single story that works its way through the Bible’s many books. We call it the Word of God not because it’s a literal word-for-word account of God’s literal voice. We call it the Word of God because it is an account of the ways in which God has worked through people, in history, to redeem the world, to bring the world back to him. It wasn’t written in or for our culture, however, which is why we study it, why we preach on it, why we seek to learn more and more about it. We want to understand God’s message then so we can hear his message for now. It’s in the words of this book we find the living Word of God, who is, according to John 1, Jesus himself, the Son of God. He is the Word made flesh, God with skin on. Every word in this book points us in some way to him and helps us hear from him. So in Bible study, in devotional reading, in listening to sermons, even mine, we can hear God speaking to us. 

A second way we hear God speak is through prayer. We tend to treat prayer as a time to give God our wish list, or our needs list, but prayer is meant to be communication with God. It’s not supposed to be just about us talking; it’s about talking and listening to God, the way good communication always happens. Can you imagine what it would be like if, when I was with Cathy, I just talked and talked and talked and only told her what I wanted? Then, when I was done, I said, “Amen,” and walked away, never giving her a chance to speak? Yeah, there wouldn’t be much of a relationship there, would there? And yet, that’s the way we often treat God. We talk and talk and talk and we don’t take time to listen. I love the spirit of Mother Teresa, now Saint Teresa, who was once asked what she said to God when she prayed. Teresa said, “Nothing, I just listen.” The interviewer said okay, then, what does God say to you when you pray? And Teresa responded, “Nothing, he just listens.” As we grow closer to God, we begin to commune heart to heart, where words aren’t even necessary; just being in his presence is enough.

But what should we be listening for in prayer, then? If we can hear from God, how do we know when we have? We want to build on a firm foundation; we want to hear and do what is actually from God. We want to stand when the storms come. As I mentioned earlier, it’s amazing to me how often I hear people say that God has “told” them exactly what they want to hear, or God has told them to do what they really had already decided to do. And maybe sometimes that’s what happens, but my experience has been that more often if I’m presented with two choices, the harder one is the one God leads me to. God rarely calls us to simply do what is easy. In fact, if it’s easy, what do we need God for? God will also never tell us to do something that contradicts Scripture; that’s why, for us, Scripture is always primary. I can’t tell the difference between my feelings and a word from the Lord if I don’t know the words from the Lord. Many years ago I knew a man who claimed God had told him to divorce his terminally ill wife and take off with his new girlfriend. God had told him, he was confident of that. And yet that is completely inconsistent with the God we meet in Scripture, the God who cares for the broken, for the sick, and the God who created marriage as a lifelong bond. God will never tell us to do something that contradicts his word. And so the real work is sorting our feelings from a genuine word from the Lord.

I don’t know about you, but I can’t honestly say I’ve ever heard the voice of God. I picture it as a booming, James Earl Jones-type voice, but I don’t know because God hasn’t spoken to me that way. The way God most often speaks to me is through an inward impression, often very strong, something I can’t just dismiss or get rid of. One time in particular I remember was on a Wednesday morning many years ago. I had gotten word that Barb was in the hospital in another city, and so I had decided I would go see her that afternoon. The morning was supposed to be for sermon prep and office work. But the impression kept coming back to me: go see Barb. And I argued: I am going to go see her this afternoon. But the thought would not leave me: go see Barb. Finally, I gave up and got in the car to go see Barb, grumbling all the way because this was not my plan. But it was God’s, because when I walked in the room, a nurse was just leaving and said to me, “Barb just got some hard news and I’m glad you’re here.” Barb had just learned she had inoperable cancer, and none of her family was there to help her through that news. So we talked and we prayed—and that was the last time I saw Barb. She died shortly after that and I celebrated her life at her funeral. What if I had ignored that strong inward impression, as I’ve done at other times? Well, I believe God would have sent someone else, but I would have missed out on the blessing of being obedient. God most often speaks to me through an inward impression, sometimes when I’m praying and sometimes when I’m not. I do believe God speaks to us sometimes in an audible voice, or an inward voice, but I find that sort of hearing most often happens in older people who have walked with Jesus for a long time. The longer you know someone, the better you know their voice, after all. And the more we listen, the more we learn that we can hear from God, the better able we are to act on what we hear, and the stronger our spiritual foundation will be.

You can hear from God and there’s one other way, I believe, we need to incorporate into our listening. John Wesley called it “Christian conferencing,” but he didn’t mean paying a lot of money to go to some conference in some city far away—which is good because we can’t really do that right now anyway! All of the conferences have been cancelled. No, he described Christian conferencing as individuals and small groups “watching over one another in love” (cf. Harper, Prayer & Devotional Life of United Methodists, pg. 74). The genius of the early Methodist movement was the way Wesley and his preachers connected people with each other in small groups, not for the purpose of becoming a social club but so that they could help each other grow into and live the Christian life. Christian conferencing today includes talking through whatever we’re wrestling with in the context of community, having a few close friends you know you can trust who will tell you the truth, who might even tell you you’re crazy. Generally, this is not a large group; it’s a small circle of people in my life that I would trust enough, with whom I could share something God might be saying to me and know they would respond well. That’s what Christian conferencing is about; it’s discernment in the context of the Christian community. It might be your LifeGroup, or a covenant group, or a friend who has walked with you for a long time. There is something freeing about having a long chat with a friend, sharing your heart, and hearing them say, “What I think God might be saying in this is…” I have a hard time remembering an occasion when such an experience hasn’t led to a sense of confirmation or even relief. That doesn’t mean we always hear what we think we want to hear, but we do generally hear what we need to hear, which is what happens in this exchange between a mother and daughter. Take a listen.

VIDEO: “Talking to God”

So, Christian conferencing is not something we turn to for mere affirmation, or just to be told we’re right. If the ones we turn to are really trusted friends, they will be willing to say what we don’t want to hear but know is true. And it’s not something we engage in because we simply can’t decide what to do. It’s a practice we engage in so that we can hear from God, so that we can learn to better build a solid foundation for our house. In fact, it is so important that one author describes it in these terms: “Without Christian conferencing it is very difficult to follow Jesus, must less increasingly bear his love and likeness into the world” (Heath, Five Means of Grace, pg. 55).

You can hear from God, if you will listen. Learning to listen may be the hardest thing of all in a world where we are bombarded by constant distractions. I wonder what might have happened in Jesus’ story if the foolish man hadn’t been in such a hurry to build his house, if he had taken time to run the plans by a trusted friend, if he had sat down and thought it through, if he had read a book on how to build a lasting house. If only he had listened, his house might have stood through the storms. And because I want my house to stand when the storms come—storms of loss, storms of coronavirus, storms of disruption and more—because I want my house to stand, I’m learning to listen. When God asks, “Can you hear me now?” I want to be able to say, “Yes, Lord! Speak, for your servant is listening” (cf. 1 Samuel 3:10). Let’s pray…and listen.