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Knowing God's Will, sermon #5 "How to Listen to God," part 2
by The Rev. Clancy Nixon
Church of the Holy Spirit (Episcopal / Anglican)
Ashburn, Virginia
May 8, 2005
James 1:5 "If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives generously
to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him." James 1:5 Let's say that together.
James 1:5 "If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives generously to all
without finding fault, and it will be given to him." James 1:5
I pray regularly for God's wisdom to be a better father for my teenage boys. In the
bit of parental wisdom called "choose your battles," you determine what is in Basket A
things you'll go to the mat on; Basket B toss-ups and Basket C not worth fighting
over. One of my struggles as a father is that I have corrected my sons too often about
things that are not really that important. I put too much in Basket A, when all that should
be there, says Dr. Dobson, is disrespect and disobedience. Partly that is because my own
parents were very permissive and rarely corrected me, and I learned many lessons in life
much later than I thought I should have. This week God used a memory to speak to me. I
remembered a scene from six months ago when I was visiting old friends from my
childhood, Scott and Liz. They have a very active 11 year old son named Vanya. As we
sat at their kitchen table, Vanya had a scissors and a perfectly good pair of his own khaki
dress pants in his hands. He proceeded to cut a hole in the middle of those trousers in an
interesting jagged design. Then he sewed them up together with a different colored
thread, creating an odd puckered look. The entire time he did this, I sat dumbfounded,
my eyes widening. Most astonishing of all to me was the look on his mother's face. My
old friend Liz was beaming with pleasure at her son's adventure in creative destruction.
She said not one word about it. I didn't think much about it at the time, but it became a
very vivid memory in my mind this week. I kept seeing that picture of my friend smiling
at her son. How differently I might have responded had my own son done that. After a
time, I came to see the persistence of that memory of my friend's smiling face as God
speaking to me, answering my prayer for wisdom as a father. He's calling me to correct
my sons less often now that they are older, to remember to choose my battles.
We understand from the Bible that God is always speaking to us, but that we are
not always listening. Jesus said, "My sheep hear my voice" (John 10:27). Our goal as
disciples of Christ is to have such sweet fellowship with God that we are aware of his
presence all day long, and whenever we incline our ears, we hear him whisper to us.
Before we get there, before we can abide in Christ all day long, we must have times that
we set aside to come into his presence. Your quiet time is the most important time of the
day for that. In the Benedictine tradition, monks and nuns pray the daily office seven
times a day, marking off the whole day as holy, punctuating it with explicit
remembrances of God. That is usually how we learn to abide: first, we use external
disciplines of prayer times, which we impose from the outside as it were, in order to train
our internal souls - until prayer sinks into our hearts to flow from the inside out. Isn't that
what you want for your children that the disciplines you impose from the outside,
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eventually become internally motivated? We adults are not much different. We go from
desire to discipline before we get to delight.
I said last week that most of us need to slow down and say our prayers before we
can hear God. If you are already abiding in Christ, then you don't have to slow down
before you hear God. If that describes you, you may already incorporate listening to God
all throughout your quiet time. So when you say your prayers for your husband, you also
get quiet and listen for him after you pray. Now I have a prayer list, and I do pray
quickly through my lists, naming people and concerns. But I also find that praying my
lists is not enough. God will sometimes quicken my concern for one precious soul, and so
I pray for that person for several minutes. When I pray for one person for a while, my
prayers are far more powerful and effective. Pray until your spirit senses a "release"
pray until you are done praying when you sense that God has accomplished what he
wanted to for that time. Then listen, expecting God to speak to you about that person in
God's still small voice. And I find it very helpful to write down what I hear. If I don't
hear anything at that time, I ask God to speak to me during the day, and I expect him to
do so. Dallas Willard finds that he can often hear God better when he is puttering about
with some mindless chore like watering plants.
Let's say our verse together. James 1:5 "If any of you lacks wisdom, he
should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to
him." James 1:5
We need help, don't we?! We just don't have what it takes to be great dads and
great husbands and great engineers and great wives and mothers and lawyers all at the
same time! You know what I mean. We need guidance! You need to know whether to
marry Sally or Sue, which job to take, and how to focus your energies. I don't know about
you, but I've got to know I am on the right track with God. I need to know what God
thinks about where I need to grow in my character. I need to know the next step God has
for me in loving my family. No matter how mature in Christ you are, or how far from
God, God always has a next step for you. Ask God; what is your next step for me? I need
to know where God wants me to guide this congregation. If he chooses not to reveal an
answer to me right away, that is okay with me; I can rest in the knowledge that I have
asked him what he wants. If God doesn't tell me, then I do what I think is best, based on
my human understanding. If I don't do those things and there have been times when I
have neglected listening to God - then I am more anxious and confused.
Renny Scott said that God uses negative emotions as his alarm system in our life.
For example, when you are anxious, or fearful, or angry, or have any negative emotion,
it's a signal that you are out of God's will in some area of your life. Any of these
negative emotions ought to get your attention just like a sore thumb does. C.S. Lewis said
that "Pain is God's megaphone. He whispers to us in our pleasures, but he shouts at us in
our pain." It's one way we can hear God in our life. When you are in emotional pain, first
you reflect on it to find the source of your pain. Quiet time is a great time to do that!
Then when you find your own bit of sin that is helping to cause your pain, you have two
choices. You can repent, forsake your sin, receive God's forgiveness and then obey him;
or, you can rationalize your sin. In other words, you can think of reasons why it's
understandable that you sinned. Renny calls that the rationalization reflex.
Ginger shared with me recently how she looked at her sin of falling behind on
some paperwork. She thought about all that she had going on recently that she could
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have used as an excuse, as a rationalization for getting behind. She has active teenagers
on sports teams; she has the church office in her house; she is planting a church and
visiting people in need, and more. If she had let them be, those excuses would have been
a rationalization reflex. When you rationalize, it does enable you to relax temporarily,
because you let yourself off the hook. But the pain goes away only for a short time,
because the sin is still present. So the fallout of your sin remains which is still causing
the negative emotion alarm to go off. God speaks to us through our pain. So in your quiet
time, you can ask yourself, what am I anxious about? What am I angry about? What sin
pattern in my life is contributing to my negative emotions?
Let's say our verse together. James 1:5 "If any of you lacks wisdom, he should
ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him."
James 1:5 Your quiet time can be the crucible for your greatest growth in maturity, if
you use it to reflect on your life experiences, and listen to what God says about them. I
find that when I write all this down, and then reflect on it, I learn and grow much better.
Bill Hybels said he began to listen to God out of desperation, because he was tired of
living an unexamined life. You just don't grow much if you are always doing stuff and
rarely reflecting on what you do. In his quiet time, before Hybels listens to God, he
writes in his journal, starting with the word, "Yesterday...." He looks at how the day
went, and writes and thinks about what went right, and what went wrong. If he had a
difficult interaction with someone, he asks God, why did that happen? What was my bit
of sin on that occasion, and then confess it to God. If he is mad at his wife, he can say,
what is up with that? How do you want me to grow in my character through this difficult
thing in my life? Friends, listen to me. This is what really matters. This is the stuff of
authentic Christianity. Life change happens here. It does not come as deeply from
prayers on the run, or on perfunctory lists; nor from conferences, or even in ministry.
Growth in character, and growth in spiritual power, comes from wrestling with God in
solitude. Just the four of you you, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Life-
changing decisions come out of times of stillness like this.
Thirteen years ago, I was new at listening to God. I was listening to one of my
favorite radio preachers, Jack Hayford, discuss how Christian parents ought to take
seriously the responsibility of what to name their children. The Bible takes the meanings
of names far more seriously than most modern people do. Names have meanings, and
when we say a name, it has spiritual power.
Well, I took Pastor Jack's advice, and I asked God what He wanted to name our
second child. Sam was in his birth mother's womb at the time, and we knew he would be
our adopted child, but we did not know whether he was going to be a boy or a girl. So I
asked God for a boy name, and a girl name. As I listened in prayer, I got this answer,
which I wrote down in my prayer journal: "It will be a boy, and you are to name him
Elijah." Though I asked again, no girl name was given at all. Elijah means "Yahweh is
God." What a great name! Someone said to us, what if it's a girl? They were worried that
I would make a fool of myself. If that had happened, I'd say, "I guess I heard wrong."
Don't be afraid to trust God; if it turns out you are wrong, just admit it. In this case, I
heard right. I ran to tell Ginger.
Imagine my shock when she did not share my enthusiasm. So she went directly to
God in prayer for confirmation. That day her scripture reading in the One Year Bible was
the story of Elijah. She took that as a confirmation. Then she prayed, and also sense that
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the name Samuel was from God for him. Samuel means "Asked of God." We had not
conceived biological children, and just like Hannah, Samuel's mother in the Bible,
Ginger had cried out to God for a child. Samuel also had the virtue of being a family
name. I liked the name Samuel, too. So we decided on the names Samuel Elijah for the
boy, but wrestled over what to call him. Would we call him Sam or would we call him
Elijah? Ginger thought it might be difficult to go through life with an unusual name like
Elijah. She could not get peace about calling him Elijah. Note that that peace of the Lord
is one biblical way to hear God's voice. Not the peace that comes from avoiding trouble
but the peace that comes in spite of the trouble ahead. As husband and wife, as long as
we disagree about something, we agreed to wait until a decision must be made, but if we
must decide at that moment, then as head of the home, I would make the decision. We
stayed in that hard place through the day Sam was born. We agreed that his birth
certificate should say, Samuel Elijah, but we did not agree what to call him.
The night Sam was born, I woke up in the middle of the night, and Ginger was
asleep. God whispered to me, and said that he had given me the name Elijah as a test of
my obedience. Now that I had proven faithful, he was releasing me from the test. God
said, "You have a choice, my son; you may choose to call the boy Sam or Elijah." So I
relented, and went back to sleep. What I did not know was that Ginger awakened in the
middle of the night before I had, when I was sound asleep. She went to God weeping,
and confessed her fear as faithless; and told God that she was ready to name our son
Elijah. When we awoke in the morning, she told me, "It's okay, I agree with you; we will
call him Elijah;" and I said, "Yes, it's okay, but he was testing me as well as you; I've
been released to call him Sam." We had switched our positions! I explained to her that
God was giving us a choice. We both knew that we liked the name Sam better, because
we preferred one-syllable names for our sons. Will and Sam. That is how we learned to
trust the voice of God in a variety of ways: in the peace of the Lord; in Pentecostal
discernment of the still small voice; in listening to each other and waiting for agreement;
even when it did not make sense. And it is how Sam got his name. Let's pray.
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