Hearing the Call of God

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Transcript:

This morning, I wanted to start a new series through the month of April, looking at what it means to live a life of faith. You know, I spend a lot of time thinking about church issues. I mean, that’s sort of my job, isn’t it?

Thinking about what we as a church can do to grow, to serve God the way we’re supposed to, things that we can do better, things that we should start doing, things about Christianity in general, what could we as Christians in general, not just in this church, do better? And I look through examples of people in the scriptures and things that they did right, and things where they were following God the way they were supposed to. And sometimes it just seems like there’s a disconnect between us and them, and I’m not necessarily saying you.

I mean, for all I know, you may be doing perfectly well in your Christian life, but I know I can I can look just for my own self at the examples of some people in Scripture and say, man, I wish I had a relationship with God like that guy. Have you ever looked at somebody in the Scriptures and thought that? Boy, I wish my relationship with God could be like Paul’s or like Peter’s or Abraham or Moses or Elijah, any of these guys.

Why don’t I see the same thing? And I’ve thought over the years at times that maybe the reason why we don’t serve God to the us the way we’re supposed to. Maybe the reason we don’t have the same powerful, passionate relationship with God that they did was maybe just a lack of teaching.

And there may be something to that. There may be something to we don’t believe the right things. But I’ve thought for a long time, you know, if we just teach people the right things, we teach people the right doctrine, and I’m not putting that down, please understand.

But if we just teach them the right doctrine, then everything will fall into place. I believe we have a responsibility as a Bible-believing church to teach the right kind of doctrine. But at the same time, just teaching somebody how to follow Christ, how to follow God, how to have that relationship, doesn’t really fix it.

There’s got to be a desire of the heart. There’s got to be a love for God that says, you know what, God is more important than anything else. And that’s something that’s hard to teach.

We have to be led into that. God has to pull us into that. We have to lead ourselves into that.

We have to lead our hearts in that direction. I read something this week, and I wish that I could remember who said it. But what I read this week said that if you want to build a great ship, if you want to build a great ship, you don’t give the workmen, you don’t give them an explanation of how to build the ship and everything that they’re supposed to you instill in them a love for the sea, and then they’ll figure out a way to build the ship.

You instill into their hearts a love for the sea and being at sea, and they’ll find a way to build the ship and be out there. I don’t know that that’s necessarily true of ship building. If I’m going to go on a ship somewhere, I want to know that the people who built it knew what they were doing.

But as I read that, I thought there’s something to that about life. As a church, as your pastor, I can give you all sorts of teaching and all sorts of tools on what it means to follow God, but if I don’t help instill a love for God and a desire to serve Him, if we as a church don’t work toward instilling in each other a love for God and a desire to serve Him, then the tools are just going to lay there unused. And so as I thought over this concept of loving God, of desiring to serve God more than anything, of loving God and desiring to serve him so much that we would put everything else aside, that we would be willing to give up literally everything else, it brought me to some examples of people from Scripture, and ultimately I settled on the life of a man named Abraham.

And Abraham was not a perfect man, as we’ll see in one of the messages this month. you will see that it does not take a perfect person to follow God. Now, God’s standard as far as salvation is perfection, which we’ll talk about.

But I want to dispel the notion that you have to be a perfect person. You have to just sit there with your hands folded in your lap and have your halo perfectly shine. Otherwise, you can’t follow God.

Otherwise, God can’t or won’t use you. God can and will use us in spite of our imperfections, in spite of our flaws. King David is another example of that.

King David was a man with serious, serious problems, serious flaws. Adultery. He couldn’t control his children.

I mean, problem after problem after problem that we would look at and say, he can’t possibly be a man of God, and yet he was called a man after God’s own heart. And so we’ll see in this series that it doesn’t take a perfect person, but it takes somebody with a desire to follow God. Why don’t I have the kind of relationship with God that Paul had, or Moses, or Elijah, or Abraham, maybe it’s because I don’t have that same kind of love that I would be willing to give up everything in my life to follow him.

That takes a love for God. That takes a heart that desires God more than anything else, and it ultimately takes faith. To be able to walk away from everything requires faith that God is all you need, and that God can care for you, and that God can supply far more than you’ve given up.

Hebrews chapter 11, verse 1, before it goes into this, what they call the hall of faith, before it goes into this listing of people all throughout the scriptures, and how they demonstrated faith in God, it says, Now faith is the evidence of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. For by it the elders obtained a good report. And the writer of Hebrews goes on to explain from the creation of the world, on how many of the highlights of the Old Testament, how these people had believed God, how they had faith in God, even when it didn’t make sense in human terms. And then he goes down in verse 8 to the example of Abraham and said, by faith, Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place which he should have to receive for an inheritance, obeyed, and he went out not knowing whither he went.

And folks, that’s the story that we’re going to look at today from the life of Abraham, and how it gives us an example of what it means to live by faith and love God so much and believe God so much that we are willing to walk away from everything in order to pursue Him and what He’s called us to. So if you’ll turn with me to Genesis chapter 12, Genesis chapter 12, we’re going to look at about nine verses this morning. And just to sort of set the stage here, Abraham’s journey of faith, that we’re going to look at, we don’t have time to look at every verse of the life of Abraham.

over the next four Sunday mornings, this one included. But we’re going to look at some of the highlights in this journey he walked with God of growing in his faith and realizing more and more as he went along that he could trust God and that God really was all he needed and God could provide more than he was being asked to give up. His journey of faith began at his home in Macedonia, Mesopotamia, two very different parts of the world.

We think of Abraham being associated with the Jewish people and being in Israel, and that’s where he ended up. But Abraham started out in Mesopotamia. He started out in a city called Ur of the Chaldees, which is now in the southern part of Iraq, partway between Baghdad, where Baghdad is now, and the northern end of the Persian Gulf.

We see that after the Tower of Babel, you know, God scattered everybody to the far corners of the world. Well, a few people stayed in the area of Babel. A few people got to stay in that area, and then they had children, and then they had children, and then they had children, and Abraham was one of those descendants of the people who stayed fairly near where the Tower of Babel was, where it was intended to be.

So he starts out in this little town in what’s now Iraq. That’s where his family had been for generations. That’s where his family had been where they lived longer than most, because they didn’t have to travel that far from the Tower of Babel.

It’s not like they ended up in Europe and they’d just been there for a little bit. His family had been there for generations. All his people were there.

So it started there, and while he was living among his family and his friends, his ancestral homeland, he suddenly hears the voice of God. And it says in chapter 12, starting in verse 1, Now the Lord said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

Once before, God had led Abraham’s family to move from that place called Ur there in Iraq. He had been asked to uproot one time before, and he and his father and some of his family had gone up to a city called Haran that’s now in the area of eastern Turkey. And they’d moved there, but still, he was with his family.

They’d lived there for a while. In chapter 12, verse 1, it said, Now the Lord said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country and from thy kindred, and from my father’s house unto a land that I will show thee. Now before we go too far past that, I want you to stop and realize what God is saying to him here.

He’s saying, I want you to get up and I want you to go. He doesn’t say where. Nowhere reported in this passage does God tell him where to go.

He just says, Abraham at this point, I want you to get up and I want you to leave. Well, wait a minute. This is my home.

This is where all my family is. This is where my father is. This is where.

. . Where am I supposed to go?

Just get up and go. Do you know the kind of faith that that takes? I’m not sure I do.

The closest I can come to understanding it, and this doesn’t even give me a full picture of what he was being asked to do, is that years ago, God called me to go pastor a church in Arkansas. Now, most of my family lives within an hour of Oklahoma City. My family has lived in Oklahoma since the Trail of Tears, and we just stayed put.

We don’t go anywhere. God called me to move to Arkansas, and I thought, did I hear you correctly? Sent me to Arkansas.

That was scary enough. But then God led me to resign that church in Arkansas. Well, God, where am I going?

I’ll show you. I mean, he didn’t audibly say those words to me, but I knew he was calling me to resign that church and come back to Oklahoma. But I didn’t know where.

I had no idea I was going to end up in Lindsay for two years. I didn’t know where God was going to send me or if he was going to send me to any church. I just kind of had to come back with a trust that, okay, God’s going to send me where he wants me to be.

But even that, I say that didn’t require as much faith as Abraham because I knew at least I was going back where my family was and where everything I knew and was comfortable. God tells Abraham, as scary as that was for me, it can’t compare with what God told Abraham, get up and go and I’ll tell you where when you’re on the road. Okay, are we going back to Ur of the Chaldees?

Get up and go, I’ll show you. And so he says, get up from your country, get out of the places that you’re familiar with, and from your kindred, all the people that you know, your community, your family. Many of you know once you’ve lived in a place for a long time, even if you’re not related, you develop your community, your friends.

We’re still getting to, I mean, we still don’t know a lot of people here in Seminole, but we’re out in stores and everybody seems to know everybody because they’ve lived here a long time. Imagine being ripped apart from your family and from your community and everything you’ve known and grown up with and everything you’re familiar with, and God says, get up and go, and just start going, and I’ll tell you where. At that point, I will be honest with you, it would be very difficult for me to say, okay, I’ll do that.

Sure, you want me to leave Oklahoma and you want me to go away from all my family and everything I’m familiar with and you want me to go somewhere and you’re not even going to tell me where I’m going? Sure. Okay, that is not me.

I’m not that much of a risk taker. I like, that’s a good word for it, I like security. I like being in the same place.

I like being in familiar surroundings with familiar people. I like things to stay the same. And most of us are like that to an extent.

Even those who wander, even those who like to wander. Suddenly, if everything was turned upside down and the ground was on top and the sky was on the bottom, that’s going to weird them out a little bit. Because some things should just stay the same, shouldn’t they?

God says, Abram, I need you to get up and go, and I’ll show you where when you’re on the road. And we don’t know what the conversation is like. We don’t know exactly what Abram said to God.

It’s not recorded here. But I have a feeling that there wasn’t a lot of conversation. I have the feeling that there wasn’t a lot of resistance from Abram.

And what gives me that feeling is that we see other places in the Bible where God tells Abraham to do something, And Abraham says, now wait a minute, God, and starts trying to bargain and negotiate. And so we know that the Bible’s not shy about recording where Abraham said, wait a minute, I need more information here. But in this case, there is no, I need more information, hey, please tell me where we’re going, can you give me a hint?

Can we play hot or cold and you tell me if I’m getting warmer here? There’s none of that. God says, get up and go.

I’ll show you where when you’re on the way. And verse 2 says, and I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great, and thou shalt be a blessing. And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curse thee, and in thee shall all the families of the earth be blessed.

So God has called him out, and God has made him a promise. And what is Abraham’s response? Now if I was not familiar with the passage, and I was just reading along in here, I would expect to see in verse 4, and Abraham said, and then fill in the blanks.

But in verse 4 it says, so Abram departed. Okay, that’s pretty black and white. There’s no evidence here of any arguing with God, of any hesitation.

Well, God, give me a couple weeks to prepare. God, let me think about it for a while. It says, so Abram departed as the Lord had spoken to him.

The way, the manner in which God had told him to go is what he did. I aspire to someday have that kind of faith in God. That God says walk away from everything and without question being able to say, sure, when do you want me gone?

But I know that right now that’s not me and that’s not most of us. So Abram departed as the Lord had spoken unto him and Lot went with him. That’s his nephew.

And Abram, hear this. If you’re familiar with the story, you may never have noticed this detail before. And Lot went with him, and Abram was 75 years old when he departed out of Haran.

He was 75 years old. Okay, when you’re 20-something, it’s easier to pull up stakes. It’s easier to pull up stakes and run off somewhere.

That’s why kids turn 18, 19, 20, they move across the country to go to college, or to find themselves, or whatever it is they do. I never did that, but the joke when I was in the youth group was that I was 18 going on 80, so you really can’t go by me. When you’re a 20-something, it’s easy to pull up stakes.

When you’re 75, I would imagine it’s a little harder. I would imagine. I’ve not been there.

I’m 30, and I even know that for me at 30, it’s hard to pull up stakes. He was 75 years old. And I’ve heard from a number of people in their 60s and in their 70s.

Nobody here, but I’ve heard this in churches. Well, you know, we’ve done our time serving God. I asked one man one time.

He’d said that several times to me. I got tired of hearing that, and I said, do you still have a heartbeat? You’re sitting upright, so I’m assuming you do.

And he just looked at me and said, well, yeah. I said, well, then God still has something for you to do. I don’t know where you got this idea that we somehow retire from serving God.

We may retire from a particular role, but we don’t retire from serving God. You know what retirement is? heaven.

And when he’s ready for us to retire, he’ll take us. A lot of times we think we’ve got an expiration date. And I’ve done my time serving God.

Now I’m just kind of biding my time until he takes me home. At 75, Abraham was just getting started. And God called him.

And even at 75, he said, yep, I’ll go. If that’s what you want me to do, I’ll go. And you show me where, and I’ll go.

when he was 75 years old, when he departed out of Haran. And Abram took Sarai his wife and Lot his brother’s son and all their substance that they had gathered and the souls that they had gotten in Haran. And they went forth to go into the land of Canaan and came into the land of Canaan they came.

So God tells him, get up and go. And this was no small endeavor. As I’ve already mentioned, he was 75 years old.

He has a wife that he’s responsible for, who was at that point 65 years old. He had a nephew who was attached to his family as well. He had tents.

He had camels. He had livestock. He had servants.

He had a whole ranch, ladies and gentlemen, that he had to pack up and take with him. And yet God said, go. All right, I guess we’re going.

And so God led them, and God led them into the land of Canaan. And Abram passed through the land unto the place of Sikkim, unto the plain of Mora. And the Canaanite was then in the land.

And the Lord appeared unto Abram and said, Unto thy seed will I give this land. And there built he an altar unto the Lord who appeared to him. God said, this is the land that I’ve promised to you and your children.

I said, I’d bring you into a country. I’d make a great name for you. This is it.

And so Abraham, the first thing he does is he built an altar to the Lord. Now, I think if God said, here’s your country, I’d be really excited about that. And I’m sure Abraham was excited about that too.

Sometimes my mother will ask me when it comes around to me that time, what do you want for your birthday? I’ll tell her my own country, just being a smart mouth. If somebody said, hey, here’s your country, I would be ecstatic.

I would be driving all over the place to check it out. It’s very telling for me that Abraham’s first thought is not, I’m rich, look at this beautiful land and it’s all mine, it’s all mine. His first thought is to sit down and build an altar and worship the Lord and dedicate this land that he’s just been given back to the Lord who gave it to him.

He built an altar unto the Lord who appeared unto him. And he removed from thence unto a mountain on the east of Bethel and pitched his tent, having Bethel on the west and high on the east. And there he built an altar unto the Lord and called upon the name of the Lord. And Abraham journeyed going on still toward the south.

So he did go and check out this land of his inheritance, this land that he was being given. But his first thought was to stop and worship the Lord. And you know what that tells me?

That he loved the Lord even more than he loved the land, even more than he loved the possessions, even more than he loved the promise, he loved the one who gave him the promise. Folks, for him to have done this, that’s the end of the story that we’re going to look at this morning. For him to have done this took so much faith in God.

It took an incredible amount of faith to understand I’m walking away from everything I know and everything that’s familiar, but you know what? I can trust God. I don’t understand where I’m going.

I don’t understand what I’m being asked to do. It’s hard. It’s inconvenient.

And yet I trust God is going to take care of me. It also took an incredible amount of love for God that he would be willing to say, I want to please him and I want to follow him more than I want to stay here and stay put with what’s comfortable. I love God more than my routine.

Boy, that’s something we should be able to say, and I’m not sure we always can. I love God more than my routine. He gets to Canaan, I love God more than all of this stuff, all this wonderful stuff he’s given me.

Folks, part of living a life of faith, part of wanting to follow God, part of loving God so much that we want to follow him and we’re willing to throw everything else aside, get everything else out of the way and just follow him and serve him. Well, folks, it starts with hearing his call on our lives. It starts with hearing his call.

Now, he calls us to salvation. If you’re a believer, there was some point where he called your name, and it may not have been an audible him calling your name. But I remember being five years old and hearing in children’s church, probably for the millionth time, but for the first time it really clicked, Being five years old and realizing that I’d sinned against God and I deserved hell, and that that’s what I would get if I died that day.

And realizing that Jesus Christ died to pay for my sins. Jesus Christ took all the punishment. I still didn’t know what to do about it.

He took the punishment. How do I get saved? How do I get God to forgive me?

And then a few days later being in my bedroom and really feeling God impress on me, even at five years old, you need to do this now. You need to do this now. Did he call my name audibly?

No, but I knew he was pulling me in that direction. And I went and found my mother and asked her, how do I get saved? And I prayed that day and asked God’s forgiveness because of what Jesus Christ did.

When we trust Christ, it’s because God called to us with this offer of forgiveness. God called to us and said, forgiveness is available. God called to us and said, Jesus paid for your sins.

All you have to do is believe it. If you’ve never trusted Christ as your Savior before this morning, there’s a call of God that has to come before any of this. There’s a call of God that says, your sins need to be forgiven.

And I offer forgiveness through Jesus Christ. And we’ll talk about that a little bit more in just a few minutes. But if you are a believer, there’s a call where God says, now you’re mine and you need to follow me. Jesus told his disciples, come follow after me.

I’ll make you fishers of men. He told them, deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow after me. God calls us to die to ourselves daily and follow him.

There’s a general call where God calls all believers to serve him and to follow him and to love him. And there’s a more specific call where he calls each of us to do specific things. One of those things for me is that God has called me to be a pastor.

I don’t know why he did that. I don’t know why he picked me. As I told you when I first came here, there are so many people better suited to this job, I think.

I look at other pastors and I think God has called and could call so many people better for this than me. I don’t understand why he called me and yet he called me to do that. Some of you, God has called to be a Sunday school teacher.

Some of you, God has called to be in a ministry of praying for and encouraging others here in the church. And folks, there are things that God calls all of us as believers to do. God calls us to hear his voice and follow him and do what he says.

And I don’t think anymore that the reason we don’t do that is because we don’t hear or we don’t understand or we don’t believe the right things. I don’t think it’s a mind issue. I think it’s a heart issue.

See, the point’s become very clear lately to me from the Bible and from other things I’ve heard as well that our hearts really drive us more than our minds do, I think. For example, I know that it’s probably not a good idea to go eat a piece of pie at 11 o’clock at night, which I will admit I did last night. Probably not the best thing to do and probably not the best time of day to do it, but I did.

I got me a piece of pie and took it to bed and I ate it. I know that in my mind. And yet there was a desire for pie.

And quite honestly, at that moment, I loved the pie more than I loved the idea of doing what was healthy. You see, we all do that from time to time. We all know what the best thing is in our minds to do, and yet our hearts drive us to something else.

Folks, we need to find out where our hearts are with God. Do we hear Him? Do we love him enough that when he calls, we’re willing to give up everything?

Do we love him enough that we want to know what he wants us to do with our lives? And I’m talking about something as big as, God, are you calling me to be a missionary or a pastor or something like that? Or something as simple as, God, are you calling me to keep my mouth shut in this situation?

I mean, folks, God’s word has guidance and leadership for every situation in our lives. Does the Bible address every topic? No, but there are principles in there that apply to every situation.

And so it can be something as big as a major life change that God’s calling you to do, or it can be something as simple as God is telling you what to do as far as a behavior or a response in a given moment. Do we love God enough that we even care that he’s calling us to do something? Do we love God enough that we believe?

Do we love him enough that we’re willing to drop everything and listen to the call? I’ve given you three points in your handout this morning that I want to share with you from the life of Abraham. We’ll go through them just very quickly.

Folks, we need to hear the call of God. If we want to live lives of faith, if we want to live lives like Abraham, and that’s my hope is that we will grow to desire that, not just realize we need it. I think we, as believers, we realize that that’s what we need to do, to live lives of faith.

but we need to get to a point where we desire it. And if we desire that, we must listen for the voice of God. We must listen for the voice of God.

Genesis 12, 1 says, Now the Lord said unto Abraham, There would be nothing left of the story if Abraham hadn’t heard what God said. Abraham was clearly attuned to the voice of God, listening to what God said. There’s no way of knowing how many times God speaks to us, How many times God has told you or me to do something, and we haven’t done it because we haven’t heard him, and we haven’t heard him because we weren’t listening.

I have a real problem sometimes with listening, with cutting out all the other noise and hearing what really is important and what’s going on. We need to listen. If we really love him, we really need to listen and expect him to speak to us.

Ask him to speak to us. If there’s a situation where we’re saying, God, what do you want me to do here? Ask him, speak to me.

Please tell me what you want me to do. We need to expect that he’ll hear from us. It does us no good if we pray, God, would you speak to me?

Would you guide me? Would you lead me? But we don’t really do it believing that he will.

The Bible tells us to ask things in faith. We need to wait to hear from him. And these things are not in your notes, but this is all part of the whole listening for the voice of God.

Wait to hear from him. Sometimes when I ask for anything, I might expect for it to be now. And sometimes I try to apply my timetable to God.

God, I asked you three minutes ago to speak to me, and you still haven’t. What’s going on here? God doesn’t work for me.

God doesn’t work for you either. We need to prepare ourselves. Sometimes that means putting away anything that distracts us from hearing the voice of God.

Sometimes we are so busy with the things of our day. What’s going on in my life, in my world, this is my day, and our agenda, and our schedule, that we can’t even hear God’s voice if we try. Because we’re so busy listening to everything else.

We need to look for his voice and his word. You will hear me, for however long God keeps me in this pulpit, you will hear me say this many, many times. God, always check what you think you’re hearing spiritually against what this book says, because God will never reveal anything to you contrary to what he’s already revealed to the prophets and the apostles.

So if God says to you, yeah, it’s okay for you to cheat on your taxes for X, Y, and Z reason, no, no, no, you did not just hear the voice of God, because he’s not going to say something in here that’s not going to tell you something that’s contrary to what he’s told everybody. But we’ve got to listen to the voice of God. We’ve got to search for the voice of God, and we’ve got to be prepared to hear it.

Abraham heard it. God spoke to him, and he heard it, And that’s where his story began. Can you hear God today?

If God spoke to you today, are you ready to hear him? Second of all, we must realize that the call of God is not always convenient to follow. It’s not always convenient to follow the will of God, the word of God, the call of God.

I don’t think if Abraham made a list of things that he wanted to do in his remaining years at age 75, that it included uprooting from everything and moving halfway across the Middle East. I doubt that was on his to-do list. God will call you at some point to do something that’s really not on your to-do list. And again, it can be something big. God, it wasn’t on my to-do list to go to Arkansas or to go to Seminole, no offense. I’m glad I’m here and I love it.

But it wasn’t really, this wasn’t where I thought God was going to lead. It wasn’t on my to-do list. It could be something big like a life choice. It can be something small like God’s calling me to be nice to that person who just nearly ran into me with their car at Walmart, and that wasn’t on my to-do list either.

Sometimes God’s call, sometimes what God calls you to do in that moment or with your life will conflict with your desires. They will conflict. His call will conflict with your plans.

His call will just flat-out conflict with what you want to do. and that’s not just you that’s me too his call is not always convenient but we need to realize that it’s no less his call just because it’s inconvenient to us I asked myself that about something this week wait a minute am I really going to tell God no about this and it was something little am I really going to tell God no about this because it’s inconvenient because I think that’s what I was about to do I’ve been praying for God to do something and then the way he did it was not the way I had planned, and I was l

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