Northside Church - Sydney
Anyone Listening?
You're listening to another great message from Northside Community Church. Thank you and good morning. It is great to be with you this morning. It's always a wonderful opportunity for me and I'm always excited to be able to come and share with the people at Northside. I think this is my, I don't know, maybe my second or my third time with you. So I wanted to, again, just say thank you for opening your heart to me. My name is Matt. I live in Paddington. We've been there for about the last four years. We moved, I was worshiped pastoring at Kingsway Community Church in Carring Bar and the Lord called us out of there kind of dramatically, called us out of Carring Bar to move into Paddington and from there we took a small team that was my wife and I and we had my children at that stage where I think 2 and 0 and then we had one other couple with us and they came and we moved into Paddington and begun to, I guess, pray and seek the Lord for what it is that He wanted to do there. And so four years on we're still there, the Vox community is kind of our, is the little church that God has built around us at that point. And so, yeah, we're in Paddington and we're seeking to reach the people there and the community there with the voice of God and help to unearth each individual's unique potential and contribution that they can make to the society and the world around them. I'm also part of a folk duo and we play in the Sydney pubs and clubs and all of that and I see that as a great opportunity for me to be able to extend the kingdom of God into places and to go into places that my ministry role doesn't usually take me. So I see that as an excellent opportunity and I'm thankful for God, I'm thankful to God for that as well. I'm married to Jodi, we've been married for 12 years and we have two children, Lucy who is five and Finn who is three. So one of each and Lucy just started her first year of kindergarten, her first week was just completed last week. So we're in that stage of kids going to school and all of that kind of thing. So a new experience for everyone, a couple of people asked, well how did she find school and she, you know, Lucy was, she was fine. She was so, so ready, you know, and we were so happy to allow them to have her for the most part. Of course, I think more than anything, you know, they said, oh, did you cry or was there tears or anything like that? It was mostly, I think when your children grow up and they hit those milestones, that just makes you realize how much older you're getting. So it's not really about them at all, it's kind of a selfish thing. You think, oh man, am I that old to have kids at school now? Gee, what does that mean for me? I'm nearly in the next bracket, you know, all of that kind of stuff. But it was wonderful, we're really blessed to have them there and really looking forward to the year ahead. But I wonder whether you ever say this around your house. This is the phrase that's been occurring, oh, it occurs from time to time in my household as well, usually around the kitchen table or around the dining table or something like that. You're not listening to me. Has anybody ever heard that phrase before? Maybe it's rare in this side of kind of Sydney. Maybe everybody's quite attentive and we've got our communication lines very clear. So I'm not sure, but you're not listening to me. I don't know whether anybody's ever said that to you before or whether you've said that to anybody else. Maybe you've been in a meeting, maybe it's been at work or you've been part of a PNC meeting or you've been in a group scenario, maybe even it was a church meeting. And then you ask the question or at least you think it, is anybody listening to me? Is anybody listening at all? I don't seem to be able to get my point of view across. I don't seem to be being heard. You know, there's nothing more frustrating than talking to somebody about something that interests you and having them kind of glaze over and kind of, I don't know, look the other way or start doing something in the middle of your impassioned speech to them about something that's so important and something that the world needs to hear. All of a sudden, the person who's sitting there just kind of wanders off in their own thoughts. I wonder whether that's ever happened to you. Happens to me occasionally, but I must say that I'm more guilty of the wandering off than the other way around. Generally, that's me. But of course, we do this and we're not a world starved of words, are we? I mean, the latest research that's come out says that males generally will speak about 6,000 words in a day on average and then females will speak on average around 10,000 words a day. Now, that shouldn't surprise us. I mean, it's a, of course, we chuckle, but it's kind of a knowing chuckle, isn't it? We go, of course, that's the way it is. But that's again on average. But so can you imagine now, I mean, 6 to 10,000 words a day per individual, you even multiply that by the number of people that are sitting here today. Just on today, imagine how many words this group, this room, this church will speak today. That's a lot of information flowing between us, isn't it? Even our printed words, I mean, there is more information in one newspaper, in one newspaper today than a person in the 1800s would have received in their lifetime. More information about different things, about different subjects, about varying points of view, where we're not starved of words, but we are starved of listening, aren't we? We're not starved of words, but we are starved of true transforming information. It's getting harder and harder to get silence in our lives with our increased busyness. I mean, for me, listening is a learned art. It's something that we learn, it's not something that we do innately. You know what we do innately? We talk, we speak, we express, we communicate, that's something that we do, but learning to listen is definitely something that is learned. It's not something that just grows on us, particularly when you, I was officiating a wedding yesterday, and so you get to experience the joy and the wonder of two people coming together and beginning their married life together, and after being married for a little over 10 years myself, you kind of can forecast or you get a bit of an idea of all the things that you're in for, you too. Of course you don't tell them that. Well, yes you do. Of course you tell them. It's my pastoral responsibility to tell them what they're getting themselves in for, but at the same time, we don't naturally, listen, I don't naturally listen, especially being a speaker and a musician, I like to put information going from here, here. I don't like information coming back this way, listening is a learned art. When we moved into Paddington to plant the church, the first thing that we, what we set our heart on doing was firstly listening to God, but secondly listening to our community. What are their needs? What are their fears? What are their hopes? What are their dreams? What is it that they think that they need? Because in listening, we place ourselves in the position of the learner, don't we? Not of the expert. And as churches, I mean, we have books full of words. I mean we have so, we have so much theology out there, so much information that we can tell people. We just want to give you more, more stuff. But how often do we stop and listen? As a confession, I believe even for my own life, I've not listened to people or to the Lord as attentively as I should have. Not in terms of time, but in terms of depth of attentiveness. No, they're two very different things. One of my favorite writers, Blaise Pascal, said famously, "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit in a quietly in a room alone." All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone. I don't know what you think about that, but to think that maybe some of the root cause of the issues that you've got in your life and I've got in mind stem from our lack of craving space around us to sit, to reflect, to hear from others, and to hear from God. We were just read a story before from 1 Samuel chapter 3, a famous story really of Samuel the boy who is lying down and then in the middle of the night he is the voice of God calling to him and his response to that in that scenario. We know this story because it goes on. We know about Samuel. He goes on. He's the one to anoint King David who will then lead Israel's great revival in worship and a revival in military power and he reinstates Israel as kind of the superpower of the Middle East in the day. But Samuel begins from very humble beginnings, doesn't he, when the book opens, it opens with the prayer of a barren woman who's the second wife of a man named Elcanah and the first wife, she's got lots and lots of children, she's feeling very, she's flourishing, you know, she's got boys, girls left and right and then there's Hannah, the second wife who is barren and not only does she feel ashamed, does she feel insecure but her arrival were told, provokes her? You can imagine what she's would say, oh, that Lord's forgotten about you. You can't even have children. You know, what worth, I don't even know why he's got you as a wife. These kinds of things, I think the things that this first wife would have said. And yet we hear from the cry of Hannah's heart as she goes up to the house of the Lord to worship and she cries and falls down on her knees before the Lord begging God for mercy. And she's praying those kinds of prayers that you pray on your heart and only were told that only her mouth was moving, her lips were moving. And she was praying in such a way that Eli, the priest of the time, thought she was drunk, thought she'd had so much to drink that she kind of downed a couple of bottles of wine and wandered up to the temple and all of a sudden then she's sitting there kind of drunkenly praying before God. Eli says, put your wine away, put your drink away from me. This is no place to be drunk. And she says, I'm not drunk, I'm pouring my heart out before God. And it's as though Israel's entire spiritual condition, the state of the heart, the state of the nation is being adequately expressed and symbolized in the prayer of one barren woman. And of course we know the story because the Lord hears her cry. He says, God, if you give me a son, I'll devote him, I'll dedicate him to you by form of a Nazarite vow, which means he won't drink, he'll grow his hair long, no razor will ever touch his beard. He's going to be a hairy man who worships you and lives in the house of God. And of course God answers her prayer and gives her Samuel and once he's weaned she takes him up to the temple and he lives there kind of as a border, kind of as an in-house intern living in the tabernacle with God under Eli. And Samuel's one of those, one of those Old Testament characters that's like a hinge. He's like the very last judge and kind of like the very first prophet that we know. Israel's come out of the season of judges, we have an entire book of those with Gideon and Deborah and Samson and these people that God raises up for a time. They'll lead Israel through and they defeat all of Israel's enemies, then Israel goes into spiritual decline, they kind of plummet down, they start worshipping idols again, then God raises up enemies that overtake them, then he raises up a, you know, then another judge comes through and delivers them and it gets like this roller coaster. You know, it's kind of a, it's a gripping drama really when you stand back and watch it all unfold. It's actually quite an exciting story but also a provoking one, isn't it? As we see in there, we see our own lives. We see the way how things often work for us as well. But nevertheless, Samuel here is this hinge. He's the last judge in the first prophet. He's also the one who would go on to not only anoint King Saul but then anoint King David who would lead Israel into prominence, who would become a figure of Christ, would he not? Remember when Jesus was born, the angel said to Mary, he'll sit on the throne of his father David. He'll reign as David reigned, but even more so. Samuel is kind of like the John the Baptist of the Old Testament. They were both born in similar ways, if you'll remember. John the Baptist mother Elizabeth was barren. She was old and she prayed earnestly for her son and God gave her John. And he then came and prepared the way for Jesus. John the Baptist was kind of like the last prophet and the first real evangelist that we have in the New Testament, so they're very similar characters. So I want you to kind of draw a line connecting those in your mind. But so here we have young Samuel devoted to God, living in the temple, ministering before the Lord under Eli. Eli was one of those characters that had both good and bad qualities. I love that scripture doesn't hide from us. People's darkness does it? It's quite a candid record really. Most of the writers aren't too ashamed of telling you exactly the way that it is. And I think there's a reason for that. We don't have to, they don't kind of have selective historical approach. They tell you how it is. And so here we have Samuel living in the temple, but we're told that in those days, the word of the Lord was rare and that there were not many visions. Now I think that could be said about our time, could it not? The word of the Lord is rare and there are not many visions. If you would go out and take a random sample on the street and say, well, how many of you have heard from God today? How many people do you think would say, oh yes, I heard from him and he told me this. Oh yes, I was reading the scriptures this morning and this really jumped out at me, or I was in my prayer time and I had an impression of this. There would be not many people. I reckon we could take a random sample of the church and even the response rate would be low. Now we're talking about real poverty here. I believe in social justice and I believe we need to work to serve the poor. But I think real poverty is not a lack of money or lack of resources, but a lack of hope. You know when you just can't see tomorrow through the bleakness of today? In those days, the word of the Lord was rare. There were not many visions, i.e. the people of Israel didn't really know where they were going. They didn't really know what was in front of them. So we're asking all those questions that we to ask, where is God? What is happening with our lives? He saved us out of Egypt and now we're here, but we can't really seem to see him. We can't seem to get a hold of where he's taking us. Samuel's living in the midst of people starving to hear the word of God, to hear a word of hope, to hear a word of freedom. And if you're like me, then you're somebody who is hungry, passionate to hear the word of God again, to him, him speak to you afresh, to hear him declare his promises to you again through his word by his spirit. We also notice here that it's one night that Eli, whose eyes were told to be coming so dim, he's in his 90s, so he's starting to go blind, he can't really see very well anymore. Most likely, Samuel's helping him around, most places now. Come on Eli, come and sit down and now you need to go over here, kind of looking after him a little bit, but Eli's lying down at night. The lamp of God has not gone out yet, i.e. they've still been, they're not closed up, they're not shut up shop for the night yet. But Samuel's lying down, Eli's lying down, they're lying down in two different places. Eli, we're told, is in his usual place and then we're told that Samuel is lying down to go to sleep right in the house of God, where the presence of God was. Two very different locations. Now of course, Samuel was kind of running security, I mean he was the guy who would open up the temple in the morning to greet the worshippers and allow that order to happen. He would sleep in there overnight to make sure that no bandits or robbers came in, but also I think it tells us something about the state of their hearts. Eli's in his usual place, Samuel is right in the presence of God. Now the question this morning is this, where do you lie down to rest? When you need spiritual rest, when you need some restoration and transformation, where do you lie down? Where do you set your heart at rest? Is it in your usual place or is it in the presence of God? Because they're two very different things. Your usual place might be a place of anxiety, might be a place of stress, might be a place of worrying about what's going to happen, maybe it's a place of busyness. That might be your usual place, or you might learn, we might learn together to lie down and to rest in the presence of God. Samuel was sleeping in the temple and our usual place reveals the depth of our hearts. Who do you run to? Where do you rest your heart and your soul? And of course we know the story from here as Samuel's lying down in the presence of God, the lamp of the Lord flickering over in the corner. He hears these words, Samuel, Samuel speaking to him. And you can see him kind of sitting up looking around thinking, man where did that come from? He gets a little torch and lights it and runs down the corridors and finds Eli where Eli's lying down, rouses Eli from his sleep. What is it that you want? And you know maybe thinking, oh you lay needs some water or maybe he needs to get up to go to the loo or something like that. And he lies like, oh well no, it wasn't me, just go and lie back down. This happens time and time again. How attentive are we to the voice of God calling us? Because when God calls you, he's got a job for you, he's got something for you. But it's getting harder and harder isn't it? You know in our world today 2.3 billion texts are sent each day, 2.3 billion text messages going up to satellites bouncing around coming back down into somebody else's phone. The average person will make 204 phone calls and send 337 texts per month. That's just an average person, 200 phone calls a month, over 300 texts. Average person ages 12 and up will listen to 19 hours of music for either radio or CD or iPod or something per week, 19 hours. So once you add sleep, eating, daily tasks, et cetera, seeing family, if you add up all the time that we spend in noise, including the times when we're doing two things at once, like either driving and listening to the radio or listening to the radio and playing on your phone and playing on your phone and listening to your husband or wife talk to you, we are in deficit 15 hours a day of silence, like we're backwards in the red every day. That's how difficult it is to get just a little bit of space. So how important is it for us to make some room to create a little bit of margin that we might be able to sense, that we might be able to hear what it is that God's saying to us? The Lord Jesus now, it's true, will speak to you in many ways, in many different places. The amount of times that I've been reading my Bible and I felt like, wow, that was for me or I'm driving in the car and in the words of a song or I'm talking to somebody, particularly at church, I find church so helpful into it was when I'm talking to somebody and somebody says something that for them is just an off-handed comment but the Holy Spirit uses that and that peace is my heart and I think, wow, I needed to hear that today. It's about being attentive and about listening. Now Eli, for all of, I guess, all of his darkness and his light, he gives Samuel very, very good advice the third time around, doesn't he? He finally cottons on and thinks, well, Samuel keeps coming to me, I mean, maybe he's just tired and doesn't want to get disturbed again, just Samuel go back and lie down, it might be God. Do you know what I mean? I don't know but I think he ends up giving him some really good advice. He says, Samuel, if you hear that voice again, say speak, Lord, because your servant is listening. I wonder whether you and I would be bold enough to pray that prayer again. It's a bold, courageous, maybe even risky prayer to pray. Because we like coming to God with our prayers, with the things that we want, the things that we need but it's a vulnerable place to hear the God, to hear the Lord speak to us. The first two words of this, speak, Lord. You know, God has chosen to reveal himself, hasn't he? We have the Bible that's been handed down to us over generations and generations, over centuries, over millennia even, as a record, as a revelation of who God is. We only know anything about him because he's chosen to reveal himself. And why has he revealed himself, he's revealed himself to draw you and I into relationship with him, into fellowship with him, into a depth of knowledge about him? Think about the friends in your own world. Maybe you've got a dear friend, maybe you've got a close circle of friends, a group that maybe you went to school with and you've traveled through life with over many, many seasons. How did you get there? Well, of course, relationship is only built on honest, vulnerable communication. I share something with you, you listen to it, you understand it, you share something, give something of yourself to me and it's in this kind of contact, in this process that a relationship is built. And in the same way God has spoken to us, in the same way God continues to speak to us, in order to draw us in, to capture our hearts and engage us in relationship, in fellowship with God, in friendship, even with God. He speaks and shares himself, shares his word out of love and mercy, wanting to meet us there. So God is a tremendously giving, generous and communicative God. I mean, you only have to go back, you go right back to the beginning of Genesis and you find the same thing. There's nothing, nothing ever, just a formless void until God speaks. And upon his communication, upon his words, something happens, boom, all of a sudden this sky, all of a sudden there's trees, all of a sudden there's all of this creative energy in life, upon the Word of God. Imagine the creative power of his Word, speaking to hearts today, to lives today. The second two words after speak Lord is your servant. It's really important for us to know our place and the relationship, isn't it? Jesus did say, "I no longer call you servants, I no longer beg, but I call you friends because the servant doesn't know what his master is doing. But at the very same time, we still serve the creator of the universe. We come before God as ones who offer worship, offer love, offer adoration to the king, of whom all of heaven, the elders and the angels, all bow down crying, holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty." We do not choose the words we hear. We cannot be selective about the things that we'll listen to from God and the things that we don't. That was exactly Eli's sin, wasn't it? Eli had two sons, Hopney and Finnehass, and these two were told evil, wicked sons who were working as priests in the house of God were sleeping with the temple attendants. They were taking all the choice cuts of meat from the offerings that Israel would offer to God, and they were keeping all of them for themselves, getting fat on the offerings of people that were meant to be for worship, taking the worship of God and using it for their own means. And of course, Eli knew this. He knew what was going on. He'd been told. He knew what his sons were doing, but he chose not to do anything about it. And that brought him into a place of contention before the law, didn't it? God said, you knew what was going on and you failed to restrain them. The sin of Eli was he took some things that he liked about God and forgot about others. But ironically, he could tell Samuel how to listen to God. Speak, Lord, your servant is listening. I mean, Samuel's working in the house of God. He's working in the tabernacle of keys there to serve the Lord. So he says, speak, Lord, your servant, finally, two more words is listening. And it's true, isn't it? Because we often come to the Lord to speak. To bring our shopping list or our Christmas list before God, treat it kind of like a corporate meeting where we come in and say, all right, Lord, now, it'll be great if we could just get this, this, this, this, this done. And we've got that meeting next week. Okay, cool. We'll reconvene in a couple of weeks time. If you could organize that, I'll get your people to speak to my people. And thanks very much. That's been productive and we'll move on with our day. And there's been no relationship. You know, sometimes we treated a bit like a, like a, like a, like a tool just to be used to get what we need to get done. But I know if I treated my friends that way, wow, wouldn't, they wouldn't probably want to be my friend very much longer. But the Lord is slow to anger and abounding instead fast love. His kindness and his goodness leads us to repentance. He longs to be close to you, longs to be in fellowship with you, not a mere head knowledge of facts about God, but a relationship with Him by the Holy Spirit, which has given us as a seal until the day of redemption. Often we come to God to speak and not to listen, but listening is a posture of vulnerability, isn't it? It's a, it's the posture of vulnerability where we come and we say, I want to hear what you have to say. I'm not going to talk and just feel the air with my words, but I'm going to listen to you. It places us in a, in a position of powerlessness before God, which is not what we like, because we like to not feel powerless. We don't like being dependent. We like being in control and feel like we've got on top of things. But even Ecclesiastes says to us, well, when you, when you go up to the house of God, when you go into His presence, be slow to speak, be quick to listen and don't offer the sacrifice of fools, which is just many, many words heaped up on one on top of the other. Guard your steps when you go to the house of God. Guard your steps. Should we read you one more quote from H. G. Wells of all people as we close or as we come towards closing, looking at his own world, he saw this, he said, the activity to escape mental solitude is remarkable. Most of the rushing about in motor cars is plainly due to that. The rich and in particular seem constantly in flight across the Atlantic from something that is always nevertheless waiting for the, waiting for them on the other side, whatever side it happens to be. There would not be all this vomit going to and fro if they were not afraid of something that sought them in the quiet places. Isn't that beautiful? There is not just something but someone who seeks you in the quiet places. Are we too afraid to hear it? I know sometimes I am. But maybe just maybe we can draw near to hear the Lord speak to us again today, to be encouraged and built up by his word, to be transformed by it, to be encouraged and built up by the power of his spirit working in amongst our lives, in amongst the church like he was doing in the book of Acts, as they would pray and the Lord Jesus would encourage them. Hebrews 1 tells us that all in times gone by, God has spoken to us through various people, through the prophets and so on, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his son. If you want to know what God is like, you go and have a look at Jesus, see him. Jesus himself said, I am the father of one. If you've seen me, you've seen the father, he's the exact representation, the perfect likeness, the second Adam, the image of God. The Gospel writer said, yeah, we've seen his glory, the glory of the one and only full of grace and truth. Now, I think there are many people in here today in need of grace and truth. I need grace, truth in my life, more grace, more truth. On the amount of transfiguration the voice from heaven said, looking at Jesus, dazzling and white, this is my son, whom I love, listen to him. And we would do well to heed that voice this morning. So in a moment, the worship team are going to come, they're going to lead us in another song and we're going to create a little bit of space, even today, to stop and to listen. Not just verbal space is in just no words, but it's almost like we want to create some room in our hearts. The back of the auditorium is going to be open, it's going to be a place where you can go and receive prayer, where you can go and wait on the Lord, where you can go and sit, or you can stay in your chairs where you are, stand before God. But what we want to do is say with Samuel this morning, speak Lord, your servant is listening. May we be open to hearing something again from the Lord Jesus. May God and I pray that God's been speaking to you today, even now. So why don't you pray with me today. Our gracious and heavenly Father, we want to thank you that you continue to reveal yourself to your people, that you speak to us by your word, you encourage us and comfort us by your spirit, that we might then go on to encourage others with the comfort we've received. O heavenly Father, I pray that you would steal our hearts. We would humble ourselves before you, knowing that it's not just more words that we need, but it's your words that we need. That we are starved of silence, but we're not starved of information. God would you speak into the void again today. If there are those who have that kind of formless void in their hearts, I pray you would speak and create life. Speak and bring joy. Speak and bring peace, O God, that we would know you, that we would come to you, that we would receive forgiveness, restoration, truth in our lives, and be better able to serve you and enjoy you, and show others to do the same in your mighty, mighty name, Jesus. We pray. Amen. Amen. (gentle music)