Fr. Carlos Raines
As we have been looking for a building for our congregation
and seeking God for whether He wants to give us a new name to match a new
identity, I have noticed that most of us struggle with how to hear from
God. When we pray and look for an
answer, what does that look like? How
does He speak? How do we hear the voice
of God in our lives?
Well, as Anglicans, I suppose the obvious answer would be
that we “read, mark, learn and inwardly digest” the Holy Scriptures! And indeed, every believer should be digging
into God’s word daily if at all possible.
For without that, we may sadly discover other voices can speak to us as
well and often sound like God to us.
There are three other voices we are likely to meet: our own voice, the
voice of Satan and the voice of God. In
John 10 Jesus says His sheep “do not listen to the voice of strangers, but will
flee from them.” The strangers would be
Satan and his demons, and even our own fleshly thoughts and desires. Hearing
and learning to recognize our own
thoughts and desires is beneficial as long as we can discern them from
the voice of God. This is a major work
for every Christian: learning who we are through Christ and discerning our
voice from His.
So we begin with this very important passage from Scripture:
1 “Truly, truly, I
say to you, he who does not enter the sheepfold by the door but climbs in by
another way, that man is a thief and a robber. 2 But he who enters by the door is the shepherd
of the sheep. 3 To him the
gatekeeper opens. The sheep hear his voice, and he calls his own sheep by name
and leads them out. 4 When he has
brought out all his own, he goes before them, and the sheep follow him, for
they know his voice. 5 A stranger they
will not follow, but they will flee from him, for they do not know the voice of
strangers.”
First of all, did you hear the
intimacy the Lord desires? He calls His
own by name! He knows the number of the
hairs on our head! He hears our every
thought as well as our words. And at the
end of time He promises a white stone with a name on it known only to the one
who overcomes and Himself. So Jesus invites
us to a relationship that is intimate.
What a blessing!
Hear the verbs in this
passage: hear, call, lead, follow. We are to hear His call to us. We let Him lead. We follow Him and no other. Last Sunday we looked at being the bride of
Christ and compared that to a dance where the Bridegroom is the leader and the
Bride is the follower. As they dance
together eye to eye, there is great joy as she learns the subtle ways He glides
her over the floor. A slight pressure of
the hand on her back. A turn of His
shoulder. A gentle parting for the next
move. She learns to follow and trust as
He shows her off. As the Bride of Christ
we have a great calling: to do the works He did and even greater works while He
goes to the Father (and sends to us the same Holy Spirit who descended upon
Jesus at His baptism). This is the life
of every disciple: to hear His voice, to know you are known and called, to let
Him lead your life and to follow Him and Him only.
This all comes with a promise!
If you abide in me, and my words
abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. 8 By this my Father is glorified, that you bear
much fruit and so prove to be my disciples. 9 As the Father has loved me, so have I loved
you. Abide in my love. 10 If you keep my
commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s
commandments and abide in his love. 11 These things I have spoken to you, that my joy
may be in you, and that your joy may be full.
So here is the guarantee. If you are hearing God and obeying, and if
you are also listening for His timing, then whatever you ask in Jesus’ name
will be done for you by the Father. The
result is infinite Joy in you because it is the joy of Jesus poured into
us. The joy of working with the
Father.
Beloved, I apologize to you as a
priest on behalf of most pastors, priests and churches in the West. We have committed a grave error by not
teaching these things. So when people
come upon those words “ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you” we
generally go two ways.
- Ignore
this Scripture. Nobody really knows
what it means and it is too fantastic to be intended to be taken
literally.
- Name
it and claim it. “Jesus, I stand on
John 15:7 and ask you for this Porsche!
Scripture says ‘God cannot lie’ and ‘Ask whatever you will and it
shall be done for you.’ So I have faith that this car is mine!” (I call this divine blackmail: using an
out of context Scripture to try to extort God. Good luck with that!)
But there is another way. Obey the Scripture but keep the context. We must be abiding in Christ for this to be
true for us. We must draw so near to Him
that we learn to hear His voice and say “Father, what are You doing and what
can I do to be doing that WITH You? That
WITH is very important. God is
relational. He is astoundingly more interested
in the “with” than the task.
Furthermore, the longer we abide in Him, the more deeply we abide in
Him, the more we discern His will and His desires. When our prayers begin to reflect that, we
find that they are answered indeed!
How often were Jesus’ prayers not
answered? Did He every fail in His
prayers and commands for healing? Only
once, perhaps. That would be in
Gethsemane. And even there, intimately
abiding in His Father’s love, desiring His Father’s will, He finished His
prayer with “Nevertheless, not My will, but Yours be done.”
Make abiding in Christ your
deepest desire. Ask for God to draw near
to you as your soul pursues Him. You
will find that all these things are true
and the joy is real.
Now today is the First Sunday in
Epiphany and we celebrate the Baptism of Jesus.
And I want to look at that baptism and subsequent life in terms of how
He intended it to be an example for us of how to be sons of God.
Evidence tells us that Jesus did
almost nothing unusual until His baptism.
In fact the Gospels tell us that when He came to His own town of
Nazareth the people there had such an attitude of low expectations from Him
that they could not accept for a moment that He might be the Messiah. Someone said to a friend “Look who thinks
he’s the Messiah now!” Thirty three
years old and still unmarried (despite the best efforts of the matrons of the
town!). Still living with His
mother! A lowly carpenter! So when Jesus preached His first sermon and
told them that He was the One, and then went on to call them to repentance for
their hateful cultural, religious, and racial superiority, they responded by
flying into a collective rage! They
dragged Him out to throw Him off the cliff outside the town.
So we know that this baptism is a
very important and essential part of Jesus’ ministry. Yet, why did Jesus have to be baptized?
Ignatius of Antioch, a bishop who
was martyred right around the end of the first century and who was discipled by
John the Apostle, simply wrote: “He was baptized to hallow the water.” What does this mean? It means that God in the flesh was baptized
in order that His divine touch in the material world would affect all waters
and all baptisms to this very day and beyond.
Water was changed when He was immersed.
He did it for us.
Jesus also began His ministry as
we begin ours: by baptism. For Him it
was not only for hallowing the waters, but so that there could be a declaration
of approval and identity and authority from the Father and an anointing by the Holy Spirit. Just like your baptism and mine except that
we also needed to be cleansed by the washing of water! But we were adopted as children of God into
the Sonship of Christ. We were anointed
with the Holy Spirit and “sealed by Him and marked as Christ’s own
forever.” With the Holy Spirit came the
gifts of the Spirit and a Counselor/Helper/Advocate who could forge in us the
Fruit of the Spirit as well, giving us both spiritual power and authority.
The first thing after His baptism
was that the Spirit led Him into the wilderness to be tempted by the
devil. You know, God is the greatest
poet. In what place did Adam and Eve
fall prey to the evil one and disobey God?
You’re right. In a garden. To what place were they exiled? Yes, to a wilderness. Full of thorns and thistles and hard
soil. So that’s where Jesus met the
adversary. He did that in order to
finish the fight we lost. He defeated
Satan in the wilderness and ultimately on the cross and in hell itself.
How did Satan tempt Him? By questioning His identity and trust in His
Father. In effect Satan was implying
“You’ve fasted 40 days! You are on the
verge of starvation! How are You going
to walk all the way back to Jerusalem in that condition! You better turn those stones into bread or
your ministry will be over pretty soon!”
Jesus’ answer to that is very telling for those who seek to learn to
hear God’s voice and joyfully obey. “Man
does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth
of God.” Jesus got life from the words
of the Father. So can we. “Speak a word, Father, that I might live.”
Luke tells us Jesus went into the
wilderness “full of the Holy Spirit” and came out “in the power of the Holy
Spirit.” We are all “full of the Holy
Spirit” if we believe and were baptized.
But to those who “hear the word and do it” is given “the power of the
Holy Spirit.”
Except for His identity as the
eternal Son of God, we as Christians get the same thing (or the same One) that
Jesus got at His baptism! We get the
Holy Spirit and an identity as sons of God so that Jesus could say to us “The
things that I have done you shall do and greater things than these because I go
to the Father” And Hebrews 2:11 says “For he who
sanctifies and those who are sanctified all have one source. That is why he is not ashamed
to call them brothers….”
We too are called to heal the
sick, to cast out demons, to preach the good news, cure the lame and the blind,
work miracles, give prophecies, declare revelations, restore sinners and bind
up the wounds of their hearts. The Holy
Spirit who is in you from your baptism is no different from the Spirit who
descended upon Jesus.
This is the True Church! You know, when secularism and atheism arose
we just argued with them, trying to be more clever than they and hoping to
destroy their arguments and bring them back into the fold. But that never worked. Instead, if we had trusted Jesus and depended
upon the Father and simply continued to “do the works He did” we might well
have won the day. Do you know that no
one in the early church ever tried to prove that the Bible was the word of
God? No. Their proof was always to
demonstrate the Bible’s authenticity by demonstrating it’s authority in their
lives. By their lives and the power of
the Holy Spirit they proved the Scriptures.
By the grace and love of God, let us do that again today.
So for the rest of His ministry,
after His baptism, how did Jesus know what to do? Remember?
He was baptized in order to show us how to share in His sonship. How we would do the Father’s will and abide
in the Father as He did. Here are His
words to teach us:
19 So Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to
you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees
the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, that the Son does
likewise. 20 For the
Father loves the Son and shows him all that he himself is doing.
And greater works than these will he show him, so that you may
marvel.
30 “I can do nothing on my own. As I hear, I
judge, and my judgment is just, because I seek not my own
will but the will of him who sent me. John 5
“My teaching is not mine,
but his who sent me. 17 If anyone’s
will is to do God’s will, he will know whether the teaching is from
God or whether I am speaking on my own authority. 18 The one who speaks on his own
authority seeks his own glory; but the one who seeks the glory of him who
sent him is true, and in him there is no falsehood. John 7
“When you have lifted up the
Son of Man, then you will know that I am he, and that I do
nothing on my own authority, but speak just as the Father taught
me. 29 And he who
sent me is with me. He has not left me alone, for I always do the
things that are pleasing to him.” John 8
Once more: what is He doing
here? Jesus is demonstrating for us how
a Son follows the Father. He is showing
us His heart so we can see what it looks like to hear His voice and follow
where He leads.
I’d like to end by illustrating
this further by a true story told to me by Fr. Noah Lawson.
A number of years ago, Fr. Noah
was a leader at our youth retreat in Oakhurst.
They were tasked on one of the last days to try to share their faith
with others in the town. They employed a
method called the Treasure Hunt. This
involved everyone praying for the Lord to speak to them and show them who to
talk to and where to go. So they prayed
and then went into listening silence, expecting that the Lord would give them
clues or show them what to do.
After the silence Fr. Noah asked
if anyone heard something or saw something during the prayer. One young woman said she saw a man in a red
vest. Fr. Noah said to the scribe “That’s
good, write that down.” A number of
other details also were shared. But
nobody gave any clues about where to go!
So by faith, Fr. Noah loaded everyone into the car and they began the
search for the man in the red vest.
After a couple of miles a young woman in the back seat spoke up: “You
know, during the silence I saw something.
I saw a Starbucks. But I was
pretty sure it was just because I wanted coffee. So I said nothing.” Fr. Noah turned the car towards the local
Starbucks. It was a busy one. Must have been some kind of special being
offered. As they got out of the car they
noticed a man in the line...with a red vest.
And as God would have it, after they got their drinks there was enough
room for them to gather around the man in the red vest at his table.
Fr. Noah introduced himself and
after brief pleasantries, began to tell the man what series of events had
brought them to this table. The man was
stunned and choked up when he heard how God had directed these people to his
table. “A year ago I went through a
horrible divorce. When it was over, I
felt abandoned by God and so I left Him behind.
But now I know that He never abandoned me. He brought you wonderful people to show me
that.” Fr. Noah asked if they could pray
for him. He consented and right there at
Starbucks they laid hands on him and prayed for him. A soul was restored because God’s people took
the time and made the effort to “hear His voice and follow where He
leads.”
Heavenly Father, you who are more
ready to hear than we are to speak and able to do far beyond what we can ask or
imagine, draw us near to You. Open the
heavens for us as You did when Your Son was baptized. Teach us to be true disciples of Yours who
hear Your voice and follow where You lead.
Empower us by the Holy Spirit to do the works that Jesus did and even
greater ones. And teach us to find our
place in the Body of Christ, contributing what we have and what we hear so that
we can be directed to be where You are and do what You do. In the Name of the Father and of the Son and
of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
This is #1 in a series of hearing the Spirit's Voice.
