Fr. Carlos Epiphany 1 How Does God Reach Out To Us?

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.