As a church we need to develop the habits that help us recognize Jesus's voice when we hear it and to distinguish it from other voices that we hear.
So roll up your sleeves, put your mind in gear, be totally ready to receive the gift that’s coming when Jesus arrives. Don’t lazily slip back into those old grooves of evil, doing just what you feel like doing. You didn’t know any better then; you do now. As obedient children, let yourselves be pulled into a way of life shaped by God’s life, a life energetic and blazing with holiness. God said, “I am holy; you be holy. [1 Peter 1:13-16]
As a church we need to develop the habits that help us recognize Jesus's voice when we hear it and to distinguish it from other voices that we hear.
So roll up your sleeves, put your mind in gear, be totally ready to receive the gift that’s coming when Jesus arrives. Don’t lazily slip back into those old grooves of evil, doing just what you feel like doing. You didn’t know any better then; you do now. As obedient children, let yourselves be pulled into a way of life shaped by God’s life, a life energetic and blazing with holiness. God said, “I am holy; you be holy. [1 Peter 1:13-16]
Good morning. My name is Dave and welcome to our service for the call to worship this morning. It is we have received the Holy spirit and the glory of the Lord endures forever scripture. This morning is second Corinthians, 13, 11 through 13, and I'm reading from the new living dear brothers and sisters. I closed my letter with these last words. Be joyful, grow to maturity, encourage each other, live in harmony and peace. Then the God of love and peace will be with you greet each other with a sacred kiss. All of God's people here send you their greetings. May the grace of the Lord, Jesus Christ. The love of God and the fellowship of the Holy spirit. Be with you all. May God add a blessing to the reading of his word. Will you pray with me in a world filled with anger. We offer a message of love in a world, filled with tension. We offer a message of peace, dearest Lord banish from our hearts, whatever might endanger BESE. May we be transformed into witnesses for truth? May we be inspired? Overcome the barriers that divide us may all people of the earth become as brothers and sisters this week pray in the name of our father, the son, and the Holy spirit. Amen. I started off the sermon this morning with this question. You have ever been on the phone with somebody and they haven't identified themselves yet. And they're there. You're not really sure who it is. And the longer you wait to find out who it is, I know this is harder with cell phones nowadays. Cause most of the time they, they tell you what it is, but maybe you answered it without color ID on a landline or something like that. And the longer you go into the conversation, the more difficult it's going to be to say, excuse me, um, who am I talking to? Who am I talking to? Because something in their voice, you don't recognize it or something like that. And a story to tell you once, uh, I'm told that my voice is a little distinctive, but in the MCU man, it's not actually that distinctive, uh, one person in town recognize my voice when they heard it and said, are, are you related to Alex McHugh? His voice is similar enough to mine that they recognized it. But when Alex was a little boy, we'd been living in Olympia and we moved and he was really little. And he, Karen was over at my brother and his wife's house. And uh, my brother Kevin came in, started talking and an Alex just ran into the other room because he recognized dad's voice only. And the problem was, is my blonde brother was attached to that voice. And it's almost the same boys. Anyway, it's pretty easy to get confused when you can't see somebody's face and hear their voice or when you hear their voice and you don't know them very well. It's very easy to get confused. Today's text talks about just such a situation for us as believers. And then all I'll share three things that we as believers need to do us as followers of Christ need to do, and then how that can impact our lives. So here's the text from John 10. This is one through 10. And I'm reading from the message. I tell you the truth. Anyone who sneaks over the wall of a sheepfold rather than going through the gate must surely be a thief and a robber. But the one who enters through the gate is the shepherd of the sheep. The gatekeeper opens the gate for him and the sheep recognize his voice and come to him. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. After his gathered his own flock, he walks ahead of them. And I follow because they recognize and know his voice. They won't follow a stranger. They will run from him because they don't know his voice. Those who heard Jesus use this illustration didn't understand what he meant. And so I explained it to them. I tell you the truth. I am the gate for the sheep and all who come before me were thieves and robbers. But the true sheep did not listen to them. Yes, I am. The gate. Those who come in through me will be saved. They will come and go freely and will find good pastures. A thief's purpose is to steal, kill, and destroy. My purpose is to give them a rich and satisfying life. Okay? So three things in this text first off is sheep. The sheep to use today's lingo that identify as his, that he has a relationship with. Now. It's pretty easy to say I have a relationship with somebody, but when we get near each other, if we've never had that talk or we've never been really near each other, we don't, it becomes really obvious that we don't know each other very well. So this sheep, the sheep have been near him and they know him and they've heard his voice several times and they expect him to come one way. This is really important. Number two is the sheep. They're the ones that identify his and he identifies that. So there's a mutual identification between the sheep and Jesus. Number two, the sheep are used to and recognize his voice that implies doing the work of getting to know what Jesus, his voice sounds like and is like. And then the third thing here is his behavior is recognizable as well. He comes and goes in the same way. That's something that's very big deal to us is that he comes through the entry gate and he doesn't sneak in behind. It's not like he's like you're walking down the street and out of the Aligote somebody goes, come over here. I've got something to show you. I'm going to. And, and man, you, you don't know the person. You don't do that. That is not what Jesus is talking about here. His behavior is he's on the street. He's recognizable. There's some brand loyalty they're going on. If we're using today's language, his behavior is recognizable. It matches his voice and the relationship. And then each side recognizes that the other is the one. So how do we go about getting used to seeing his behavior and knowing his voice? This is a really good question and newcomers or new people that are just getting to know Jesus often think Jesus is telling them to do this or that, but it doesn't match what, um, people with a little more experienced might say. And the difference between that, isn't just that they've had more experience listening, but that they've gotten to know his word, which is the Bible. So this is the first thing that we need to do is a, as we need to get used to what his voice sounds like, and the things that his voice says, I've said this a number of times to some people off on the side is when, when you think that your things are not going well in your life and, and everybody's down on you and you start talking to yourself in a negative voice and you start thinking, well, God's judging me and doing this thing. Then once you're really doing is you're, you've, you've heard an imposter. That's not, God tell you that you're not good or something like that, but you haven't recognized the fact the correction is, Oh, Hey, that's not what God would say to me. That's not what God wants me to think about myself. I need to hear what God has to say to me. And, and so the beginning of that is to begin to hear, um, God's love and acceptance in this, where he leaves the 99 to find the one sheep. And you're the one shape you've been lost and you've been found. He thinks you're valuable. He'll give you a new name anyway. But what he's doing is he's telling you how precious you are to him. It's not just that your precious to him, he's becoming precious to you as well. And so that it's not just that you're his inheritance, but he is yours and you are his. And, and in order to do that, you need to stop the MP3 or the tape recorder in your head. That says thing that doesn't match what Jesus would say. And the only way to do that is to start rewriting the text of what you hear and the way we do that as we get into his work. But his word doesn't make any sense to me, pastor, to have, what do I do with his word when it doesn't make any sense? Well, I'm going to say this, and I know this is hard. You don't understand everything in the book. It's just like when you were learning something that you needed to learn in your life and you didn't know how to do it, and you start reading a book, you didn't go, well, I don't understand this. And so I'm just going to quit. Need you to just plug in there. You don't learn calculus without math facts, and you don't learn math facts without some practice. And, and you don't. And then the intermediate steps, if I were to ask Roxanne this morning, or the math teachers or the science teachers, is that concepts build upon each other and you have to get used to some concepts before they can all go together. And then the interplay of those concepts builds this relationship. And so when you're reading his word and going, man, I just don't understand that. I need you to do something for me. I need you to call somebody that you trust in the faith. Somebody who's, whose life has been reliable in Christ. I need you to call them and say, I'm confused by this. How would you see this? And then let somebody help you through it. So that just like, if you needed a math tutor earlier on in your life, that you would ask them how to do it, and they would show you or help you do it. And then later you could go further and you might need their help again. And another spot it's okay. But find somebody that you know and love. So anyway, as we correct the MP three player, we also begin to get used to hearing and reading his word. And we, and, and the people that are called by his name, that he calls a new name. That's the believers in Christ. They don't forsake meeting together because that's what Jesus tells them to do. Not just so that they'll be there and do encourage each other. But that you'll begin to see the character of the people that have been formed in Christ. And you go, Oh, that's how you follow him. And, Oh, there's that trustworthy person. And, Oh, there's that word. I don't really understand that. And, and then maybe you have somebody that is a good explainer of his word with him. And so this is how we become, you stay hearing his voice so that when he talks to us, we go, Oh, that's Jesus talking to me. That's the point in this thing that, that he's talking about, that the people that are in relationship with him and have taken the time to build the relationship and getting to know to use his voice and hear his voice, they have a deeper understanding of what's going on in the same way that people that have had more Mac classes or more writing glasses or better, or writing or better at math than the peoples. That haven't, it's exactly the same thing, but we get used to hearing his voice. Now, there's this other thing that when you start to see his behaviors in the way that Jesus behaves in the Bible and in his people, and you start correcting and recognize though that the rest of God's people also have MP3s in their head that they're overriding and correcting at different stages of their development than you are doing as well. And so everybody is on the way and they need the examples of the other people living this life so that they can be shaped properly and get used to doing it. This is what we call following the Lord. So what are we going to do? Newcomers come. And, and they're not used to this simple as the instructions yet. And so God keeps it fairly simply. Doesn't tell complex things, unless he's very explicit to newcomers that he would later do because the communication and the Euston and the habits of hearing and listening to each other, just as really good friends, have these habits of listening to each other, that sometimes we just know what the other one's thinking. That's relationship built over time in spending time, in his word and with his people and with him so that when he comes and he says Dave, or, or Sandy, or, or Margene, or bill or Bob, or he calls your name, I can't say our names, but when, when he says your name, you have, Oh, that's him. You don't have this confusion about this voice, and you don't have this long conversation. So when you're in relationship with Jesus for a long term and something new comes into the relationship and you're going, Hmm, this, some of this doesn't seem like Jesus. And so the fanciest thing to do, and our study and our understanding right there is to start to say, Hmm, something doesn't seem right here. Um, I'm going to go try to confirm this with somebody that I trust. I'm not just a girl. Oh, well, you know, I had this spiritual voice in my head. It didn't sound like anything that matches Jesus's word or the Bible, or, or it doesn't do anything like anybody in the church ever does, but it's clearly from God. And so I'm going to follow that. This is why I start off with a talk about voice recognition and how often that we're not let us stray when we're in relationship with people. When, when people call me that I talked to on the phone all the time, I've recognized their voice. I'm used to them. Let's walk into the life that we're being invited into in such a way that we build that we get used to and will you watch and see and identified Jesus as our savior, but we don't just do it without getting to know him better and living in relationship with him. Because then when he talks to us, we wouldn't recognize his voice because we just say, well, I'm Jesus, but I don't really read the Bible or I don't do no. We read the Bible, we do all this stuff. And then when he speaks, he's not speaking into a vacuum. So church today, I asked for you to be his sheep to hear his voice, but not just hear his voice, do the work of getting used to hearing his voice so that when he speaks to you, it won't be as a stranger. I guess at that point, it might be the part for me.
Speaker 2:I never knew you were you praying this week,
Speaker 1:Lord, this morning, I asked specifically that, that rather than us just identifying as you and you calling out our name and us not answering that, we would be called into this deep ever deepening relationship where we would know your voice, that we would know the way you are in the world. And then we could live in that. And we could follow you more truly because of it in your precious name, Lord, amen. This morning, as we, uh, as we leave this place of listening and, and hearing from God, I specifically ask that you would be able to be at peace with your neighbors, which is pretty much everybody you come into contact with. And so as you go, I mean, you know his piece and you may, you be an agent of his peace, be at peace church. Amen.