2023-01-03 Ghosted - Hearing's God's Voice

The sermon series titled "Ghosted" discusses the concept of being ghosted in modern terms, and relates it to our ability to hear from God. Distractions, such as notifications on our phones, can prevent us from paying attention to God's voice. The story of Elijah in 1 Kings 19 is used as an example of how distractions can hinder our ability to hear God clearly. The main idea is that God is already speaking to us, but we need to remove the distractions and be still in order to hear Him. This requires prioritizing our time and being intentional about spending time with God. Saying yes to God means saying no to lesser things. Tonight, I'm actually going to be starting a bit of a sermon series with you that I've titled Ghosted. So to be ghosted in modern terms is when you send a text message to someone, they see it, they do not respond. You have been ghosted, right? That is what it's called. And tonight, we're going to be talking about hearing from God, hearing the Holy Spirit. Lots of times we say that we want to hear from God. And we do that by the Holy Spirit living within us when we become Christians. But sometimes I think that distractions can get in the way and we end up ghosting the Holy Ghost. You guys probably get lots of notifications on your phone throughout the day, whether you've got it on silent or not, you get lots of notifications. And even when they are, our phones are silent, they can feel super noisy, we get so many alerts, right? And some of those alerts are important, right? When I get a text from my wife, that's important. When I get an email from my boss, that's important. We get other notifications as well that are totally pointless, right? The recipe app has a new recipe. Hunter liked your photo on Instagram. Your Starbucks app has just updated to version 4.0.1.3.2.bxy, whatever. And these useless notifications that we get, get in the way of the important ones. And after a while, we start ignoring all of them, right? Because sometimes it's just hard to feel like we can quiet our minds long enough to pay attention to anything in this life. First Kings are real. And we're going to be reading about someone in the Bible who had some big distractions in the way of him hearing God. Because my big idea tonight is that God is already speaking to us, we just need to remove the distractions. In the book of First Kings, in the Bible, we learn a lot about various kings of ancient Israel. And sometimes their narrative focuses a little bit more on prophets of Israel than it does on the kings themselves. And the person that we're going to be following right now is the prophet Elijah. So we're going to pick up the story in First Kings 19.9, which says, There he came to a cave, this is Elijah, where he spent the night. But the Lord said to him, What are you doing here, Elijah? Elijah replied, I have zealously served the Lord God Almighty. Now the people of Israel have broken their covenant with you, torn down your altars and killed every one of your prophets. I am the only one left. And now they're trying to kill me to go out and stand before me on the mountain, the Lord told him. And as Elijah stood there, the Lord passed by and a mighty windstorm hit the mountain. It was such a terrible blast that the rocks were torn loose, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind, there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. And after the earthquake, there was a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire, there was the sound of a gentle whisper. When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his cloak, and he went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. And a voice said, What are you doing here, Elijah? Elijah expected God to show up, right? He knew he was going to God told him, but expected him to show up and to speak to him in a specific way that he was familiar with big displays of power. He was just on the mountain fire from heaven. He expected big displays of power. But we just saw, you know, like the earthquake, all this stuff, but God was not in that and a gentle whisper comes. It was this still small voice that Elijah wasn't really yet familiar with and his own pride thinking he was the only prophet that could save Israel, right? What did he say? Right back in there? He said, God just asked him, What are you doing here? What does he do? Immediately defensive. I've served you so well. Everybody else. They're the ones they've broken it. They've done all wrong. Right? They've torn down your altars, killed every one of your prophets. I'm the only one left. And that pride and that fear was clouding his ability to hear God clearly. In the novel titled House by authors Ted Decker and Frank Peretti, there's several people who are trapped in a house that seems to manifest their darkest fears. And every time all hope seems lost, this little girl shows up and she starts saying things to the main character, but he can't hear her. All he can do is see her mouth motioning words, but he can't hear her. Later on in the story, he finally catches up with this mysterious little girl and he asks her why she didn't warn him of the various dangers in the house. And she tells him that it wasn't that she wasn't speaking. In fact, she said she's always speaking. It's that he wasn't listening. And I think many of us say that we want to hear God speak, you know, if only he would tell us what our next step should be in life. But just like the character in the novel, often we ask God to speak to us or to speak more clearly to us, but in reality, the question is not is God speaking, it's are we listening? Are we ready and are we prepared to listen? Have we removed all of the distractions? Have we acted on what he's already told us? That's another one. You meet so many people looking for some sort of secret code in the Bible of what they're supposed to do, but it's like, have we done the plain black and white text of love your neighbor? Have we done the plain black and white text of all of these basic things? Why are we looking for that secret code when we haven't even done what we already know to do? Right? And I think that the main reason that we often don't hear God is that we're headed in a dozen directions at every moment. We're busy, right? We're distracted. And I'm really confident that this is the biggest issue in the way of us hearing God. So instead of my usual three points, you get one today because this is the one that I really want to hammer home is that I think the number one reason that we're not hearing God is that we're not being still. Psalm 46, 10, he says, be still and know that I am God. I will be exalted among the nations. I will be exalted in the earth. And I always used to look at this verse as a list. You know what I mean? Like a list, a to do list of things that you're supposed to do. Step one, be still. Step two, know that I am God. Like these are two things we're supposed to do. But over time I've come to see this less like bullet points in a list and more like cause and effect. Like I hit domino number one and it knocks the rest down. Cause and effect. And that I think that being still, that cause, will bring the effect of knowing that he is God. We can't do one without the other. We can't focus on everything and God. God is so vast and all-consuming that for us to pick up the topic of God, we have to put something else down. Here's the thing about notifications like we were talking about earlier. Like notifications on your phone. The solution for getting the important ones is not to make them, you know, bolder or jump out some way from your other notifications to make them more obvious. It's getting rid of the useless notifications, right? It's not simply a matter of making God more important in our life. We can't do that without intentionally making other things less important in our lives. You know, maybe we feel unfulfilled in our life and so we think we just need to add this, add that, add this and then maybe then we'll feel fulfilled and maybe the problem isn't adding something to your life but taking something out of it. Our life is finite. We only have so much time, so much money, so much room for so many loyalties to so many things in our hearts and our minds. And the thing is, you know when you're like five years old and you find out that the other kid in your class is the one other kid whose favorite superhero is Batman and he also likes vanilla pudding? So you're like, okay, we're now best friends forever, right? And you know that calling that person your best friend means they get special favor over everybody else in your life, right? You got two cookies, you're going to go share it with your best friend, that kind of thing. You know, you get the new action figure for Christmas, you want to show your best friend there's a special favor that makes them higher than everybody else. So simply put, choosing to favor that person means not everyone else gets that same special favor. You can't have equal loyalties to everyone and everything if this one thing or person in your life is more special. And it's the same with your time. You have a limited amount of time in your day. Saying yes to watching Stranger Things means saying no to putting away that pile of laundry you should probably be putting away. It's the same thing with God. Often we sing songs like we did earlier, saying we want more of God's presence and while that's not bad, it almost feels like we're saying God is not enough, like we don't have enough of Him, that He just isn't doing it for us, we need more. And the truth is, God is infinite. We're trying to have God over here in our life, and everything else over here and here and here and here and here, and hoping it all just balances out somehow in our lives. Have you ever tried getting up in the morning and just reading your Bible first, but maybe your alarm is on your phone too, so you turn off the alarm and then you're like, oh, so and so texted me, well, you know what, I'll answer that real quick, and I'll read my Bible, that's fine. Oh, look at this, there's also this email, and there's also this thing, and before you know it, you've wasted 30 minutes or something like that, and you're like, I gotta go, I don't have time anymore, right? I've done that so many times. Or have you ever been at dinner with someone, and they're there, but they're not there, you know, they're there, but they're like, yup, yup, yup, right? And then they tell you that they're listening, right, they tell you that they can multitask, but you know they have no idea what you're talking about, right? They're not really listening, not in the same way, right? And in the same way, we can't cure God when we have other distractions in the way, and it's not just phones, let's not just scoff at the techie people for a minute and think it doesn't apply to all of us, this applies to all of us. It's over-committed schedules, it's having each of our kids in five different extracurricular activities, it's binge-watching The Office for the 15th time, it's our sports obsession, it's enjoying the great outdoors alone in our thoughts, but not taking God into that in some way by praying and, you know, making him a part of that moment. And I'm not saying that any of these things are specifically bad in themselves, please don't misunderstand me and think like, okay, Chris said I can't do any of those things now. I'm not saying these things are bad in themselves, but how can we say we want to hear God but then spend all of our time in activities that have nothing to do with him and not bring him into those things in some way? And maybe that sounds like too aspirational, but think of it another way, you know, I'm married to my wife, what if I said I want to spend more time with Hannah, but then I just go do stuff by myself all the time, right? And I just never spend any time with her. When you put it in that same context, right, does anybody remember, I mean, you all remember, we all have this burned into our minds, the height of lockdowns, when everything was canceled, I mean, everything, you couldn't go anywhere, do anything, if you could go somewhere, there would be nothing to do. I don't know about you, but when that happened, there was, sure, I mean, there was points maybe near the beginning, like, oh, man, I can't do this or that. But very quickly, I don't know about you, but for me, it was like a big sigh of relief, because I suddenly realized there was all these things in my schedule, filling up my schedule that I didn't miss at all. And coming out of that, I'm like, yeah, I'm not, I'm not doing that thing anymore. Because it was cluttered, I didn't need to be doing all those things. And I felt I could actually think for once, like a little more human without all those distractions in the way. We've got too much going on. And the hard truth is, none of us are too busy to do what we care about. That's a really hard pill to swallow. And I've had to tell myself this over and over many times. But when somebody, you know, it's like, okay, I'm trying to get this out of my vernacular to when somebody says, we should meet up. I'm like, yeah, yeah, I've just been so busy. No, I haven't been too busy. Because if I really wanted to meet them, I would make the time. Right? So just be honest with people. Yeah, I'm just not in the headspace right now. Maybe another time kind of thing, you know. But the truth is, we really want to make time for something, we will make time for something. If we can get up an hour earlier than we naturally would like to, to go to work, we can get up two hours earlier than we naturally would like to, to spend some time in God's Word or prayer. If we'll cancel a fun outing to make time to be there for our kids or our family, what can we cut out to make time for our relationship with God? The truth is that saying a sincere yes to God means saying no to lesser things. And this is the thing, because maybe you're like me and you've in life struggled with being able to say no to people at times, to be able to say no, you know. You just feel like somebody asks you to do something and you're like, okay, I got to just say yes. I got to do the selfless thing. I got to say yes. But the realistic thing is, every time you say yes to something, you're saying no to something else. That's just how it works, because your time is finite. You have to say no to these lesser things, but how? By committing to spend time with God, right? Because we fill up our schedules with the things that we're committing to, and then there's the other things that we just, we're like, well, when there's a gap, I'll do that kind of thing. When there's a gap, I'll spend time with so-and-so. When there's a gap, right, we have to put it down. You have to put it in your schedule. I'm serious, maybe you're not a schedule person, maybe you're just kind of like, you're the Anne of Green Gables type, you kind of like just go with the wind and all that kind of stuff. You're not a schedule kind of person, but whatever works for you, you have to pencil that time in. Don't fill your schedule up with lesser things and then hope you find that time. And maybe it means keeping your phone on do not disturb mode or keeping it off and buying an alarm clock so you don't have that problem. When you get up in the morning, you know, keeping that off until you have your morning devotion and prayer. Maybe it means asking your friends to challenge you and just check in with you and say, like, hey, like, how's that been going? Have you been spending your time? And then they can do the same for you. I mean, choose a trusted person for sure. Whatever it takes, we have to remove something to make room for something else. You can't have everything and God. The Holy Spirit does not want to be an add on to your life. He will wait for us to be still if we really want to get to know him. Let's take a moment to pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you that we have this beautiful gift of the Holy Spirit who can speak to us through reading your word, Lord, who can speak to us in prayer. And we pray, Lord, we want to hear from you. We are desirous, Lord. I believe that everyone who's here tonight, Lord, including myself, Lord, we're not here just for fun, Lord. We're not just here for awesome tacos. We're here because we want to learn about you. We want to grow in you, Lord. We want to get to know you better, to get to know your character and reflect that character, Lord. But, Lord, we have, we're human and it's easy for us to get distracted by things. And each of us has those things. So, Lord, I just pray for each of us, for myself, for everyone in this room, Lord, that you would put your finger, you'd help us to know even now, Lord, that you'd bring that thing to mind, whatever that thing is that distracts us from being able to have time with you, Lord. And maybe that thing doesn't need to be completely removed from our life if it's an okay thing or a good thing like family or work, like all of these things, Lord, are good things, Lord. If there's a way, Lord, that you can show us how to carve out time to be with you, Lord, show us where that is, Lord. Help us not to just leave here going like, this is a nice idea, but I really am too busy, Lord. Show us what we can sacrifice, what we can give away, what we can let go, what we can put aside, even if it's just putting aside for time to be able to connect with you, Lord. And we just thank you and we praise you, Lord, that you are our focus and can be our focus. In Jesus' name, amen. Well, thanks so much, everybody, for joining us tonight. I really appreciate each and every one of you being here. Otherwise, I'll see you guys next week. God bless.