Hearing, Knowing & Following Gods Voice - Luke Kennedy

Ps Luke Kennedy Brings an encouraging messing about Hearing, Knowing & Following Gods Voice. Life can get extremely busy and distracting, there are a lot of voices trying to sound like The Shepard. This timely message reminds us that Jesus is the filter not the fixture. 

Ps Luke shares from John 10:21-24, Matthew 7:21-24, Ephesians 4:14-15, John 14:6 & Hebrews 4:14-16.

We pray you’re blessed by this message—and we’d love to see you in person. Join us every Sunday at 10am. See you there.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:32

Should we jump into the into the scripture together? Jump into the Bible. Let's do it. Robbie tells me he does read the Bible, actually. So just wanted to I just wanted to back up that bus, Kim, and say that he does read the Bible and um what a guy. What a what a guy what how good is that? How good was that? Loose canons, but fantastic. Loved it. Um should we jump into John chapter 10? John chapter 10. Um I'm excited to share today. It's gonna be good. I think this is going to be slightly encouraging, slightly challenging, and hopefully a fair bit practical. Okay, we ready? We're all in this together. John chapter 10, verse 3 to 5. I want to talk to you about hearing the voice of the shepherd. And my son Hugo is going to follow along, just amazingly doing the words on the screen. It's gonna be so good. Bit of a father and son combo day today. Did you notice that on the rhythm section over here? Drums and bass. Did you notice that? The boys, um amazing, Stan and Jared up here making it making us feel it. I like it. Um okay, the gatekeeper opens the gate for him, and the sheep listen to his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has bought them out, all his own, he goes ahead of them, and his sheep follow him because they know his voice. But they will never follow a stranger because stranger danger. In fact, they will run away from him because they do not recognize the stranger's voice. In in verse 27, it goes on to say, My sheep listen to my voice, I know them, and they are following me. Notice three things here. It talks about hearing, knowing, and following. Hearing God's voice, knowing God's voice, and following God's voice. I have a four-year-old daughter who's quite something. She's um got a ball of energy and personality. And the thing is, I could be in a pitch black room with Kaylee and she knows my voice so clearly. She doesn't even need to see me. If she hears my voice, she knows my voice immediately. Even if there's other voices in the room talking at the same time, if she hears my voice as I come in to the door, in the front door, she could be in another part of the house and she will hear it and she will call out, Daddy, and it makes me feel happy, right? That she's happy that I'm home. There's there's something about her emotions when she also hears my voice, the emotions that she feels is she feels safe. She feels safe. There's something about daddy's voice that makes her feel secure and safe, and everything's going to be okay. I wonder today, when you think about hearing your father's voice, I'm talking about our father who art in heaven. His voice, can you hear God's voice? And how do you feel when God speaks to you? Many of us grew up in homes when a father's voice may not have been the most wonderful voice in our lives. Maybe it was a voice of criticism, or maybe it was a maybe a voice of fear because we had a little bit of uh stuff to happen at home that wasn't, didn't really feel quite so safe. And when we talk about God as Father, it's maybe that's even a hard thing to conceptually connect with because you didn't necessarily have an amazing relationship with your father. But I pray that your heavenly father would bring into your life healing and security and freedom into your life as you allow the voice of the Father to come and be that father in your life that maybe you didn't even get from your earthly father. Know his voice. So the goal that Jesus is saying here, the goal is not just to hear God's voice, but it's to learn how to follow God's voice, to follow it. So let me ask you this question. Um you know Jesus? Do you know Jesus? Do you know, maybe some of us know about Jesus. We know about Jesus. He's the guy, you know, Easter and Christmas, and oh Jesus. But my question is to you do you really know Jesus? Do you know him? Um, do you know his voice? Part of the biggest part of discipleship to me is to help you learn how to hear God's voice. That is the biggest part of discipleship. If you can learn how to hear God's voice for yourself, you can get through almost anything in life. Any challenge, if you can hear God's voice, it is the hope of your life to hear God's voice. And God is so encouraging to me. When God speaks to me, He's so encouraging. Even when God's asking me to change or correcting me, I still feel so loved by God. It's so loving, this voice, that even when I'm rebuked, I'm smiling, saying, Thank you, I feel so loved. Isn't that crazy? That's the voice of the Father who cares about you. Jesus said this in Matthew chapter 7. This is going to be one of the more challenging verses of today. Verse 21, speaking to religious leaders, not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and and in your name drive out demons and in your name perform many miracles? Then I will tell them plainly, I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers. Notice who's who Jesus is talking to here. He's not talking to the person who has never heard about Jesus, who doesn't know about Jesus, who is living their life in the world. He's talking about the person who claims to know Jesus. He's talking to us. The religious. He's talking to the people who say that they know God. People who say, Lord, Lord, they know the language, they know church talk, they can do religious activities, they can even do things in the name of Jesus. And the response that Jesus is saying to them is quite devastating. He says, I don't know you. You're doing things for me, but I don't know you. You're churching, but I don't know you. And I think I part of my job as a pastor is to come and tell you the words of Jesus and say to you and look at you and say, Do you know Jesus? Because it's not enough to come to church. That is not what Jesus is asking. He's asking, Do you know me? This word to know God is the same word that you that that that the Bible uses in the scripture to know your husband or know your wife in an intimate way. That's the same word. Do you know Jesus like that? And I am really alarmed in my heart, often I carry this burden that the possibility that someone could be completely comfortable around the community of Jesus inside this church while never really knowing Jesus. You like the music, we enjoy the vibe, the aesthetics are great, and you agree with enough of what gets said around here, but um what I'm asking you today is not to become more religious or more church cultured. I'm asking you to come and to give your life to Jesus. Give your life to Jesus, come close. Um, because I don't want to stand before Jesus one day, and I've spent my whole life resisting Jesus, and now suddenly I'm confronted with the reality of Jesus is reality. But I'm totally unprepared for that moment because I've spent my whole life saying good things, but actually rejecting him in my heart, rejecting his ways. And I may be up for a rude awakening. Let me say it this way: don't be the guy who's killing it in everything in life that fades away while neglecting what is eternal. You could be killing it in the metrics of the world and not know Jesus. I don't want to be that guy. That's my conviction. So maturity in the scripture, one of the one of the definitions of maturity in the scripture is to recognize the voice of God. Okay, Ephesians 4 puts it like this you'll be no longer infants, tossed backwards and forwards by the waves and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of people in their deceitful scheming. Instead, speaking the truth in love, you will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is Christ. Meaning this one of the measures of Christian maturity is stability amongst competing voices. To be stable even while there's lots of people around you telling you many things, trying to compete. So immaturity is not just less info, immaturity is constantly being thrown around by the opinions of people. That's what it's saying. Someone sends you a video of the next um date when Jesus is coming back, that gets you all afraid. Um, you see uh uh you know some teaching on Instagram, people often send me these things. Often, what do you think about this? And I literally say, I think nothing about it. I don't think anything about it. I just think let's get back to Jesus because this in a world of like social media, there's honestly the majority of of what I see on social media is just absolute um dumpster fire. And if you are getting your discipleship from your algorithm, you're in trouble, bro. You're in trouble. Um, there is so and every single video is the most important video you will ever. And I think I'm just gonna read my Bible. Me and Robbie are gonna read our Bibles together. In a Christian community, like Christians have done for the last 2,000 years, and we've made it. Empires have risen and fallen, and the church has remained and it will remain. AI will not kill the church, don't worry about that. We've made it through everything. The Roman Empire, we don't even know who the we barely know anything about the Roman Empire, the Roman Emperors when Jesus was alive. Jesus, we know Jesus. You can have a you can have a sure foundation in that. Don't be thrown around by teaching. Um, we should be open, but being gullible is not a Christian virtue. The mature Christian can listen to many voices without that voice becoming their shepherd. Jesus is our shepherd, not social media. Okay. Um there are a lot of things today trying to sound like the shepherd in your life. Okay? Let me give you a few. Let me give you a few just on top of my head. Okay. Um the latest end times panic. That would try to be the voice of the shepherd in your life. Um, there is so much silly teaching about the end times on social media right now. So much silliness. Another war begins, another political leader gets elected, someone discovers a new number or pattern, that somehow they have special secret information that is now available only through their subscription. Grifting, grifting off Jesus. Um, and suddenly Christians getting terrified by that. Guys, we should not be terrified by that. Let it through to the keeper. At some point, you have to read something serious. And let me give you a good recommendation. Hugo, stay with me, brother. Um Surprise by Hope is probably the best work that I could tell you today on how to see if it's how to think about the end of things or the or the new beginning of things. Okay? If you actually want, if you actually seriously want answers, then read a serious book like Surprise by Hope from a real scholar who's put their entire life's work into understanding these issues that we trust and become confident and then put it to bed. And so then you can just keep scrolling and not worry about every silly thing that comes up on your social media feed. Is this okay? Read a book, don't be lazy, is what I often say to my adults. Don't be lazy, read the book. Stop getting the info off one-minute reels and actually do a bit of the work. Okay. Um the second thing that I comes to mind when I think about trying to disciple you is syncretism. It's basically the Play Doh God. It's in other ways, it's like, why choose just have a little bit of everything? Just I'll get Jesus and then I'll get some more Play-Doh and I'll put in manifestation and like you know, my Ouija board, or my like tarot cards, or my like Buddhism, and a little bit of like you know, my favorite self-help book. And I'll just construct my own spirituality into something that looks exactly like me. What have I done? I haven't I haven't surrendered my life to Jesus. I've actually just recreated a God who is me. And me always agrees with me. Therefore, I am always right about everything, which is quite amazing, isn't it? I would love I love the universe because the universe always agrees with me, always has my side, always politically chooses the same people as me. Everything about the universe agrees with me. That is not Jesus, that's not the God that we're worshiping. If your God doesn't challenge you to live differently, maybe your God is just yourself. Are you enjoying my motivational talk? Come back to Jesus. Jesus is so good. Come back to Jesus, He's amazing. John chapter 14, verse 6. Jesus answered, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. Jesus is not giving you the option of creating a mixture, Jesus. He is the filter, he is not the mixture. I filter my political views through Jesus. I filter my sexuality through the life and teaching of Jesus. I filter what I watch and what I don't watch through the life and lens of Jesus. Everything is through Jesus is the filter for my life. It's so quiet, it's so quiet here. Thank you, sir. Um everything goes through Jesus. Okay. And then the third thing that I often see is this political tug-a-war of Jesus? Meaning like everyone wants Jesus to be behind their podium. Um quite clearly, Jesus is not a conservative. You know that, right? Jesus is not a liberal. We should have a bigger amen for all of that. Jesus doesn't fit inside your political party. Now don't don't make that to minimize being involved in society. There are great serious Christians involved in political leadership across all kinds of spectrum of solutions for society, namely political parties. Um wonderful, wonderful, but be very careful thinking that your side owns Jesus. They don't. Jesus doesn't belong to anyone. Jesus is God. We belong to him. He doesn't belong to my political stance. And be very careful when people try to make that happen. This is getting good, isn't it? Okay. Prayer, let me say this then. Prayer is where this relationship with Jesus becomes really real. It becomes really real in prayer. Um, prayer, you could say prayer is the primary spiritual discipline. Many of the other spiritual disciplines lead us to a place of prayer, which is communication with God. Bible reading is what creates the framework for us to understand Jesus so that we can go to Him with clarity and boldness. But prayer is it is the actual communication, it's the substance of our communication with God. We should aspire to really love prayer because prayer is the actual me and Jesus face to face. Um, it's the substance. Prayer is the sitting across the table from God. Um prayer is so often for me where I stop presenting the edited version of myself, and I'm just it's just me and God. It's it's kind of a scary place for some people, I think. I think I talk to a lot of young adults who are scared of prayer. And I think part of it is because they're just not sure what they're gonna get on the other side. Like I'm gonna pray, and then what's gonna come back? Maybe it's nothing, maybe it's a void. What if I pray and then God's just not even there? And my question is what if you pray and God is there and you've been missing out on knowing the God of the universe for years and you could know him. Not about him, you could know God. That's what's on offer for us here today. To know God. Um so prayer isn't um giving God information, it prayer is really giving God permission or consent to come into your life and really know you. It's the place. And I would just like to say to all of us who are like, we are like in Brisbane, we're about that life. Like up early, we're like the I think we're the are we the earliest rising city in the world. I think I heard that somewhere. Could be true, could be not, we made up. But like we are like so about that life when it comes to like everyone's in a run club, everyone's like so, you know. If you if you are like so all about that life, okay, and you don't have five minutes to sit with God and to pray, I'm I'm wondering where's God in your life? Like, everything that is not eternal, we're like so about it, but the thing that is eternal, and we're like, take a leave it. Guys, we we gotta we're gonna like do a little reversing here on that, and gets back to prayer being the source of our life, it's where our Meet God face to face. So the Bible instructs us to come boldly to God. Here's an encouraging verse, okay? Hebrews chapter 4. Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has ascended into heaven, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold firmly to the faith that we present profess. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weakness. Jesus knows, guys. But we have one who has been tempted in every way just as we are, yet he did not sin. And this is the key part. Let us then approach God's throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need. Come boldly to God in prayer, not because you are impressive, but because you are a child of God. Think about a CEO in a boardroom, very important meetings, everyone's trying to get into the room, there's a row outside, and you know, there's a there's a gatekeeper and administrator giving you your number of when you can come into the CEO, and then a child just walks straight past all of that and comes in and sits on the CEO's lap. That's the picture of this scripture here. We don't come to God because we've got all our ducks in a row. We come to God because we are children of God, and that gives you access to God in a way that is amazing. You have access to the God. There is nothing standing between you and God. Come to Him boldly. And I think this is one of the reasons why God's voice is so healing to us. When you hear God's voice, it's like healing warmth over your whole body, is because his acceptance of you is so visceral. So, why is it hard to hear God's voice? Let me just give you a few reasons that may be pinpointing why it's hard to hear God's voice right now. Okay. And um I'll try to make them encouraging. Okay, number one, a hardened conscience could be the reason you're not hearing God's voice. Think about a smoke alarm. When you first hear it, it's like so loud and so annoying. But if you left it on for an hour, you could probably tune it out or get used to it. Um maybe a hardened conscience is like that smoke alarm system. It's God's warning system in my own heart about change. And the more I ignore that conscience, the more dull it becomes. So think about sin in terms of like um sin is not just dangerous because of what I do, okay? Sin is dangerous because it's repeatedly forming who I am. Okay? Sin forms me. Okay, if I continue to tell lies over and over and over, those lies start to form who I am over time. It it malforms me. That's why it's so dangerous. That's why God doesn't want you to be a liar, because it will change who you are and not something to be um aspired to. So repentance is like a normal part of the Christian life. It's so normal. I think every day we could be coming to God and say, is there anything in my life I need to just I need to turn away from sin, I need to turn to Jesus like every day of my life. It's normal. Um, it doesn't have to be a big ceremony, but it should be a regular part of my life. Not because God needs it for me to be, I'm I'm a Christian, not Christian, Christian, no, it's not that. It's that if I let sin malform my heart, it's going to affect everything in my life. And I want to get it out quickly. I want to deal with today's issues today. I don't want to drag today's issues into tomorrow and then the next day and the next day, and all of a sudden, a year down the track, I've got this massive weight on my shoulders of unconfessed, unrepented sin that is now affecting my whole life. Don't need it. Don't need a big ceremony, just repent today and every day, and God's grace will meet you there. The second thing I think may be affecting your ability to hear from God is just willful disobedience, um, willful rejection of God. Um, some people say, I wish God would speak to me, but let me ask you this question. When God spoke to you last time, did you obey? Did you actually do what God asked you to do? Or let me say it this way: what's the last thing God told you to do? Have you done it? Because maybe there's nothing more until you just do that. Maybe it's you need to forgive that person. And really, you are kind of stuck in a tomb uh in in in a in a in a time warp until you actually obey God, and then there's more. It's like you know, when you go on Google Maps and you've got a destination, and it says turn left, and then you turn right, and then it says re-routing, take the next left, and then instead of that you turn right, and then it says rerouting, turn left here, and then you just keep going through it. That's like some of us when we're hearing God's voice, and then eventually you get so annoyed with it, you just put it on mute. I want to go where I want to go, God, and maybe that's what, if we're honest, maybe that's what's happening, and the fastest way to hear God's voice is to come back to what has God asked you to do, and just do it, and they will find blessing. You will find so much blessing in obeying God, you really will. I think we know that. Okay, the third thing, this is the last thing for today, is I think unforgiveness will rob you of hearing God's voice in such a big way. Unforgiveness. Um, Jesus said this in Matthew 5. He said, Therefore, if you are offering your gift at the altar and remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there in front of the altar. Go first, go and be reconciled to them, and then come and offer your gift. Um Baba's saying, Don't even bother with the worship singing if you're like offended and like angry at your brother across the room. Go better in the middle of the worship to go stand up and say, Um I love you, I'm sorry. Would you forgive me? God sees that as more of worship than just singing the songs. That's real, that's that's what God wants. Um and in a community like this, don't be um don't be naive. You will get offended here. This is a great community, but you will get offended here because people are here, and you are here. And if you want to, you know, the old preacher saying, if you find a perfect church, don't go there because you will ruin it, man. Um the thing is, you cannot go deep with with people without eventually passing through a layer of discomfort discomfort with them. You have to go through the discomfort to get to a deep place with people. And some of us are not willing to go through that deep place. We get into a place of community, it gets uncomfortable, and then we bail. But that's your whole life story, is just bailing. Over and over and over and over, and then you wake up and realize I don't have any friends, I don't have any deep people in my life. Forgiveness is the soil in which you can go deeper with people. Forgiveness creates the safety of I I've I can look under the surface with people and see that they're not perfect, but my commitment to forgiveness means that we can work through it. So I I can really know you. I can have courage to know you because I know that I'm committed to forgiveness, even if there's stuff there that is difficult. That's the kind of relationships we're trying to build here. So um I would encourage us to think about that in our church. A social club survives because we keep everything surface level. Um, but a real spiritual family is when we see under the hood and we're still in. I see a bit of your mess and I still love you. I'm still in. Um and that's the grace of God because he has seen everything and he is certainly in. I'm gonna finish and we're gonna pray in a moment. So my invitation is come close to Jesus, know Jesus, hear God's voice. My sheep will hear my voice, I know them, and they follow me. Um maybe for some of us it means switching off some other voices in our lives. Um what I found is the more I obey Jesus' voice, the louder and clearer it gets. And the more I disobey God's voice or disregard God's voice, other voices in my life get louder. So maybe what we're gonna do now is just spend a little moment in prayer. Maybe team will come and help me and just pray a second. Um, spend a moment in prayer and just like dialing down all the other voices out of my life and inviting the Holy Spirit to come and speak into my life, and just saying, God, I want to hear your voice. I want it. Because that's the source of my life. And if that's uncomfortable for you, I gotta tell you, the only way it's gonna get comfortable is by doing it. Jesus' voice is so good. Yeah, it's encouraging, it will be encouraging to you. He might come and tell you how much he loves you. Often God tells me how much he loves me. I'm like, God is telling me again how much he loves me. That's just all the time. God tells me how much he loves me. It's pretty crazy. But that love is the foundation of which I'm standing on. When things get hard, I'm coming back to that foundation. That's what we tell our children every day. I love you, I love you, I'm proud of you, I love you, I'm proud of you, and they go, they go, I know, dad, I know. But when things get hard, they know that they're loved. So I wonder if we can just take a moment to um be quiet. I'll stop talking. And we could take a moment to listen to God. Sound good?