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September 2, 2026 | This podcast episode explores 1 Samuel 3, focusing on God's calling of Samuel during a time when the word from the Lord was rare. Ben Taylor teaches on hearing God's voice, the patience and justice of God, the impact of sin on fellowship with God and others, and the role of mature believers in helping others discern God's voice.
Join the men of Bellevue as we seek to learn how to be men of God in the world today.
Thank you so much, Michael. Blake, I'm pretty sure I know that was you that did that. Thank you for that wonderful introduction, and we have fun with the kids during Camp Outrageous. I would scream tonight, but I'm already losing my voice. Well, good evening, I am so glad to be with you. It is amazing just to know what we are walking through. I love the model that we are kind of navigating each week where we are revolving around these three questions of a text, what do we learn about God, what do we learn about ourselves, and what do we need to obey? And when we really dive into those three questions, what it allows us to do is to take something from God's word and then learn about it and then use it and apply it to our lives. And when we walk through the text in 1 Samuel, we're gonna be in 1 Samuel chapter three if you wanna turn there. This is one of those famous texts that we, if you've been in the church a while, you've heard teaching on this text, and I'm excited just to be able to dive in with you. If I can find it, I found it. But what we are talking about tonight is one of those topics that I think is sometimes hard for us in a world that is loud and bustling, many times we struggle to hear the voice of God. Now the beautiful thing that we have is God's word to us. But men, we have to engage in God's word in such a way that it moves us to hear the heart of God and to respond to the heart of God. And what we see tonight in 1 Samuel chapter three, we begin to see God call Samuel. We have read chapter one and chapter two, we know that Samuel, he is coming into the prophetic ministry in and around towards the end of the book of Judges. If you read, you'll see, he's kind of like a middle man, if you will, between Judges and prophets. In one part of the passage, he's actually referred to as a seer, and then he is then referred to as a prophet. They were wanting and waiting to hear from God. And my prayer for us tonight is that as we dive into this text, that we are gonna learn from Samuel and learn from this aspect of his life, and then it can then in turn help us to know and understand and hear God's voice. So God calls Samuel, look with me at 1 Samuel three, verse one, it says, 1 Samuel three, verse one, it says, now the boy Samuel was ministering to the Lord before Eli, and the word from the Lord was rare in those days, visions were infrequent. Think about that. It says, and the word of the Lord was rare in those days, and visions were infrequent. Now, I wanna stop right there, because right there, right off the bat, I want us to learn something about God, because I feel like we've got the first lesson in the first verse of this chapter. The first lesson is this, God is moving even in silence. God is moving even in silence. So what does it say here? It says, now the boy Samuel was ministering to the Lord before Eli. Remember, Eli was the priest, and if you remember from last week, we have this reality that Eli and his sons were not doing the work of the priest well. But it says, the boy Samuel was ministering to the Lord before Eli, and the word from the Lord was rare in those days, visions were infrequent. And this makes sense when you put it on top of what was already happening in Judges. What was the theme line in Judges? It was, everybody did what was right in their own eyes. Men, would you agree with me, is that when you decide to start doing things, what is right in your own eyes, you are less likely to hear from the Lord? Because we need to be plugged in to what the Lord is saying, and then we need to do what he wants us to do, and not what is right in our own eyes. When you start walking after your own flesh and doing what you want to do, many times the Lord is left out. We have to recognize that God is moving even in the silence. So visions from God were not, they were rare. The word from God was rare, visions were infrequent. People were not hearing from God like they may have done in the past. And so now we see that even in the midst of this, God is moving, why? Because before Samuel was even born, he was moving in the heart of Hannah, his mom, who was yearning to have a child, who was praying to have a child. That's God moving, and then God moves and gives her a child, not knowing that he would grow up to be this great prophet that we're going to learn about. God is moving even in the silence. And then he is born, and then she fulfills the promise that she made to the Lord, and she gave Samuel to the Lord, and now he is ministering, now he is ready, and he is doing the work that she set aside for him to do, and that he was ready to do for the Lord. God is moving in the silence. Men, I don't know what you're walking through right now, but I need you to recognize that God is sovereign. He rules and reigns over all of creation, and he sovereignly works out things that we don't even know. For his kingdom and his glory. Some of you may be walking through a period of silence in your life. We have seasons. Sometimes we feel close to God, and it's almost like we could hear him like a pin drop, and he's there, we hear it. Then there's other times where we are trying to lean in, or we want to hear from God, but yet he is silent. Does that mean God is not moving? Absolutely not. Men, I want you to think about this. God is sovereign over your life, and he knows your struggles. He knows your trials, and he is there with you even though you may not see him, or feel him, or hear him. Now, I want to give this truth with a word of warning. If you are struggling to hear from the word of God, and you're struggling to hear from God, you have to check your own heart first. Because sometimes, as we walk through this life, we allow the trials of this life, the temptations of this life to overtake us, and when we start going after our flesh, and start doing what we think is right in our own eyes, the voice of the Lord gets quieter and quieter, and our hearts get harder and harder, and we don't respond as we should. So when I'm talking to you, and you would say, Ben, I'm going through a season of silence, I want to tell you that God is moving, but I also want to challenge you. Is there unconfessed, unrepentant sin in your life that could be hindering your fellowship with God? Think about that. You will struggle to hear from God if there's unconfessed sin in your life. Think about the relationship that you have with a spouse or a loved one. When you have a disagreement, do y'all ever walk through a season of a silent treatment? Has anyone ever been on the other end of one of those? Right? It happens, doesn't it? There is something that has happened in your life that has caused a break in a fellowship of that relationship. It doesn't end the relationship, but the fellowship is disrupted. So for the believer, I don't believe your sin, if you are truly a believer, I don't believe your sin causes you to lose your salvation, but I do think it disrupts your fellowship with God. So if you have unconfessed sin, you need to wrestle with it.
recognize that you might have trouble hearing from God. But if you are clean and clear before the Lord and you're not hearing for him, know that he is moving even in the silence and he was moving behind the scenes and frequently it says that they heard, they saw visions from God, that the word from the Lord was rare, but yet God was moving. And so we see this lesson and this is where I want us to just understand as you are learning and trying to discern how you can hear from the Lord better, I want you to know that sometimes in the silence, he is still moving. Now, let's look at 2 Samuel 3, verses two through nine. I'm gonna read them, I don't have them on the screen, but I'm gonna read them for you. It says that it happened that at the time as Eli was lying down in his place, now his eyesight had begun to grow dim and he could not see well. And the lamp of God had not yet gone out and Samuel was lying down in the temple of the Lord where the ark of God was. That the Lord called Samuel and he said, here I am. Then he ran to Eli and said, here I am for you called me. And he said, I did not call you, lie down again. So he went and lay down. And the Lord called yet again, Samuel. So Samuel arose and went to Eli and said, here I am, for you called me. But he answered, I did not call you my son, lie down again. Now Samuel did not yet know the Lord nor had the word of the Lord been revealed to him. So the Lord called to Samuel again for a third time and he arose and he went to Eli and said, here I am, for you called me. And then Eli discerned that the Lord was calling the boy. And Eli said to Samuel, go lie down and it shall be as if he calls you, then you shall say, speak Lord for your servant is listening. So Samuel went down and laid down in his place. Now, we've got three questions that we've been asking of the text. In this text, what do we learn about God? In this text, what do we learn about people? And what do we need to obey? What I want you to do at your tables is I want you and your friends at your tables to dive into this text and answer as many of these questions as possible over the next five to seven minutes. And I just want you to interact with this text and answer these questions in such a way that you have some good answers that we're gonna come back and talk about, okay? This is where you go into your tables and start talking to one another. Words have to come out of your mouth in order to have discussion. Y'all can do this. Go. All right. I love the conversation. So when you're engaging in church, scripture, and you're working through what's called biblical interpretation, like there's just some really cool things that I think we can point out here. The desire for anybody that's studying the Bible for themselves is to try your best to discern what the original author, empowered by the Holy Spirit, intended for the original audience to know and understand from reading this, and then based on that original meaning of the text, then we can then apply it to our lives. The way that we say it is we say that each biblical text has one meaning, but a multitude of applications. And so what we want to kind of walk through is that with that in mind, as we are like answering these questions, we want to kind of filter the answers through is this something that the original audience could discern from the text? Is this something that the original author may have intended? And we're not gonna get it right 100%, we're not gonna get it right 100% of the time, because the reality is that was a couple thousand years ago, but our desire is to get as close as we can, and then we know what God intended for the people that received this first, and then we in turn can apply it to our lives. We want to get out of the rhythm of just reading a Bible text and saying, what does it mean to me? Because although that may feel important, the reality is is it's most important is what did it mean to the first people that received it? That's the original meaning of the text, and then we can apply it to our lives. And so I just want to kind of always kind of encourage that, and that's why I love these questions, because it makes me think, what did we learn from this text about these questions that would have been some of the same lessons that the original audience of the writings could have used? All right, so here's the first question. What do we learn about God? And this is where it's kind of popcorn, y'all just talk to me. If my technology rights works, I'm going to write on this. It's going to be in red ink, but we're going to see how it goes, all right? What do we got? Say it one more time. Patient, God is patient. I'm just going to write patient. All right, God is persistent. Clear. He listens. Listens, yep, I got it. What else? He's faithful. I heard something over here. He's always talking, I like that. God talks. He's not ignored. Okay. We just had some aliens land up in here. Yes, sir? He's concerned about the spiritual condition of the nation. Yeah, I love that, because that's exactly, he is, even though he is speaking not as regularly and the visions are infrequent, he still wants his people to know who he is, and so he is working in order to accomplish that. That is great, love that, yes. He calls people. He calls people, yes, I love that, too. I'm going to say something. Looking for a man, he keeps his promise that he'll start a Bible in a spiritual way. Yep, he's looking for a servant. He's looking for a servant, that's good. Y'all are awesome, these are all great answers. This is what I really, the one main idea that I wanted to get through is the reality that we learn from this that God speaks. Yes, sir? Whose fault is it that in those days there were few messages and few rare gifts of wisdom? Whose fault was that? God's always talking. God's always talking, but it doesn't mean we're always listening. And there are times, and we see this in history. Have you ever heard of the time between Malachi and the book of Matthew? It's known as the silent period, the intertestamental period. It's 400 years of silence. Again, God was moving and working throughout that 400 years, but yet he was not speaking. And so when we say whose fault it is, I don't know if we can assign blame, but we can say that God chooses to speak when he chooses to speak and withhold when he wants to withhold. And we have to just kind of navigate it. I would think if there is a cause of this, it would be the sin of the nation because they were not following after God like they should. But it could be that God also in his sovereignty knew that he did not need to speak at this time. And so I think it could be both and. I don't want to speak for God, but I do think that the sin of the nation could have a correlation to the amount of the ability for God to speak. Amen. Amen. Yeah, God speaks. Yes, sir. When a people, Israel being that and then us, parts on themselves and not on the kingdom of God and his glory, why should he speak to you? Right. You're not concerned about the things of God. You're not concerned about the things of God. Right. And that goes back to what we were saying earlier is sometimes if we are walking through a silent period, perhaps it's our heart, our sin that's keeping us from hearing from God. And that could have been very well the case in this. Yeah. You kind of get on it when you first got started and the judges, they had no king, but everybody was doing what they wanted to do. Right.
Right. That's exactly right. Yes, sir. The other thing is, though, that you had the priesthood, which didn't regard the task that they had as holy. Right. And so the leadership had a general disregard for the sanctity of the job that God had given them. And so people had a disrespect for God. Right. The examples that the people were to follow were the priest. And we just learned in Chapter 2, Eli's sons and Eli were not following after the laws of God and doing what they were supposed to be doing. And so it would fall right on the responsibility of the leaders. I think that's exactly right. All right. So let's look at this next question. What do we learn about people? Any thoughts on this? Sometimes we don't recognize God's voice. Say it one more time. Impatient. Yeah, I like that. Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes we're just hard of hearing. Yes, sir. That's right. We don't have all the answers. Amen. Here's a couple of lessons that I learned. Proximity to the things of God does not mean you are close to God. Proximity to the things of God does not mean that you are close to God. If you look at verse 3, it says, And then he ran to Eli, did not recognize God's voice, and he did this three different times. So when you are close to God, you will hear from God. And now Samuel is young in this journey. And it talks about earlier that it had not been revealed to him. The voice of God had not been revealed to him yet. So he had not heard God's voice yet. And he was trying to figure it out. But yet just because he was in the temple serving on a regular basis, not temple, tabernacle at that time, I believe. And then just because he was there does not mean that you are close to God. And do you all recognize how that can be true of us? Just because you come to church Sunday and Wednesday, and you are in proximity of the things of God, that does not mean that you are close to God. Yes, sir. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. The same deal is like you can know about God, but that doesn't mean that you know God. And I think we have to be careful. If you go into the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said that narrow is the way, but broad is the way that leads to destruction, right? So if we believe that, we have to recognize that there are people that walk through the halls of this church, and they are surrounded by the things of God, but yet they are not close to God. We have to be willing to understand that just because we are in church, it is a clear and consistent thing that we have to check ourselves and our hearts on a regular basis so that we can be close to God. Being in church does not mean you are always right in step with God. And I do think that sometimes our culture lends itself to replace one for the other. Well, I'm in church, so that means I'm where I'm supposed to be. But you know, and if you've lived life long enough, you have walked through seasons of being far from God, and you were sitting on a church pew. Y'all remember pews? And so sometimes we have to understand that we need to make sure that just because we are in close proximity of the things of God, it does not mean that you are close to God. Here's the second lesson I see, is mature believers can help immature believers learn how to hear God's voice. And this is kind of interesting because we have Eli, who we know is not following after God, but we also know that Eli has heard the voice of God before. We see that in 1 Samuel 2. So he had this history of hearing the voice of God, and he was able in this time to say, I bet God is speaking to him. And he was able to help Samuel along the way to know, hey, this is God speaking. And I think this is important. I say mature believers can help immature believers because maturity and immaturity does not always have to go hand in hand with age. Because there can be new believers that are up there in years that a younger believer can come alongside and help them to hear and understand the voice of God. If we believe God speaks, that means that he wants us to hear him, and that we need to be ready to hear and receive what he has to tell us. And it is a learned skill. It is something that it takes time. Hopefully, over your years, you have gotten better at allowing and hearing and responding to the Holy Spirit in your life. The closer we get to God, the more sensitive we're going to be to his spirit and the better we're going to hear from him. How can you help an immature believer know and hear, help them hear and respond to the voice of God? I want you to think about that. See, we have got to stop believing this lie that my faith is mine and your faith is yours and we don't need to really talk about our faith with each other. Because that is not the picture that we see in the New Testament and that is not the picture that we see in the Old Testament. The reality is that we are supposed to be taking that which God has shown to us and give it to those around us. In the Old Testament, it all revolved around the family. The father and the mother and the parents, they were to pour into their children. When they walked, when they slept, when they were all over the place, that's what they were supposed to do. It was supposed to be passed down the family. And if you know anything about our culture now, the family has been destroyed. Why do you think the enemy goes after the family? Because the families were the center of the transmission of God's wonderful story and how we can teach our children to hear the voice of God. But now we also have the church and the family. The church, guys, whether you believe it or not, upstairs, two floors, we have a high school and a middle school area full of young men that need to be taught how to hear the word of God. And they're not getting it from their fathers. And if we learn anything from this, maybe there's a role that you can be playing to help immature believers learn how to hear and respond to the voice of God. They're not getting it at home. They're not getting it at school. Are they getting it at church? See, sometimes we sit in a room like this and we like the distance between us and the high schoolers and the middle schoolers because they're loud. Maybe God would want to use you to walk up a couple of five stairs and to engage in a relationship with a high school boy that doesn't have a father or a good example of a father at home and you can help him learn how to hear the voice of God. Somebody that I know that does this well is one of my first bosses here at Bellevue. His name is Tom Ball. Tom teaches and disciples. He teaches a high school boys life group and he disciples every... When he's not recovering from a hip replacement surgery, he is in our office at 5 p.m. And he has two to three boys sitting around in a circle and he is discipling them. Tom is close to 80 years old. And he's saying, I want to help immature believers learn how to hear the voice of God. Men, if we're not willing to do that, can we expect anybody else to? So here's my challenge with this point. Have you ever considered that the Lord may want to use you to help an immature believer hear the voice of God? And I know that we have a bunch of people that would love to have your help doing that. They would put you in a life group with other leaders that have already started the process and they will help you.
You get, and sometimes you learn by baptism by fire, I'm not gonna lie. You just jump in and you just start having conversations. And then they start asking you questions and you start answering questions from your experience and God's word, and then you're teaching them how to hear the voice of God. Sometimes it's scary, but it's worth it. And I think we have to be willing to put ourselves out there and see God move in tremendous ways. All right, did we see anything that we need to obey from these few verses that we read? Have a humble spirit. Have a humble spirit. Be still and know that he is God, that he's a God who speaks, so be still and listen. Yeah, yeah, we gotta be still and listen. Now in this text, I didn't walk away with a whole lot of like obey actions. And I think what y'all are saying are these are principles that we can use, that we can learn from this. I didn't walk away with a ton that we needed to obey, but I think what we're saying is some things that we need to do for sure. And so the reason why I wanted to ask, have this question in here is sometimes you're asking questions of the text and maybe the text does not have the answer to that question and that's okay, right? But we need to see what else can we glean from that and that's everything that y'all said is great. All right, moving on. Yep. Service, how so? We were just talking about being in service, right? And that's what Samuel was doing. Yep. He was in service to the Lord, he was ministering to the Lord. That's when God spoke to him. Yep. And we need to obey and be in service. Yeah, I like that, I like that. And just be willing to be an obedient servant. I do like that idea that Samuel, every time he heard somebody speak, he went real quick. How many times do your kids do that? Yeah. Yeah. Not very often, right? And so maybe we need to be a good example and when God says move, we move. And if the Lord just spoke to you and said, maybe I could do something in our next gen ministry, man, let me know and we will help connect you because they need us, guys, and we can do that. We can do that. All right, let's look at 1 Samuel 3, starting in verse 10. It says, then the Lord came down and stood and called as at other times, Samuel, Samuel, and Samuel said, speak for your servant is listening. The Lord said to Samuel, behold, I am about to do a thing in Israel at which both ears of everyone who will hear it will tingle. And in that day, I will carry out against Eli all that I have spoken concerning his house from the beginning to the end. For I have told him that I am about to judge his house forever and for the iniquity, which he knew because his sons brought a curse on themselves and he did not rebuke them. Therefore, I have sworn to the house of Eli that the iniquity of Eli's house shall not be atoned for by sacrifice or offering forever. Do you hear that? That is terrible. That is the consequence if we go through our life with an unrepentant heart that never turns to God. I'm gonna stop right there. I'm gonna start a different lesson. Lesson number two. In this passage, we learn that God judges our sin. I think this is a critical thing for us to recognize because we live in a culture that highlights the grace of God and really diminishes the judgment or justice of God. And we have to recognize that if God is holy, he is both love and justice. My favorite verse of scripture that encompasses all of this is Exodus chapter 34, verses six and seven. I believe that when you have those two verses together, you see holy God set apart, distinct from all other creation. Go and turn there with me, go to Exodus chapter 34, and we're gonna look at verses six and seven. I have it in my head, but I wanna make sure that I get it exactly right. All right, verse six says, now this, just to kind of paint the picture of what's happening, Moses has gone up on the mountain, and he has asked God, he's asked God, I pray in chapter 33, verse 13, he says, if I found favor in your sight, let me know your ways that I may know you and find favor in your sight. Consider to this nation is your people. And in verse 18 of 33, the Lord said, Moses said, I pray you show me your glory. Teach me your ways, God, show me your glory. And chapter 34 is a response to these prayers. He says in verse six, then the Lord passed in front of him and proclaimed, the Lord, the Lord God, compassionate, gracious, slow to anger and abounding in love and kindness and truth, who keeps love and kindness for thousands, who forgives iniquities, transgressions and sin. He, yet he will by no means allow the guilty to go unpunished visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and on the grandchildren to the third and the fourth generation. And listen to Moses's response. In response to this description of who God is, Moses made haste to bow low toward the earth and worship. Perfect grace and mercy. He is compassionate, gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love and kindness and truth, who forgives iniquity, transgression and sin, yet he will by no means allow the guilty to go unpunished. Perfect love and grace and perfect justice. That is the God that we serve. We have to highlight both aspects of his character. If we lift high his grace and we diminish his justice, we have a disproportionate view of who God really is. They have to be equal. We wanna speak the truth in love. We wanna give grace, but we wanna give a recognition of his justice. God judges our sin. He judges our sin. You have to understand there is a consequence and a judgment coming for the sins of everyone that does not call on the name of God. And there was a judgment for your sin if you're in this room and you are a follower of Jesus Christ. What was the payment for your sin? Jesus on the cross. Isaiah 53, verse six, all we like sheep have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way, but the Lord has caused the iniquity of us all to fall upon him. Your sin fell on him, and that him is the suffering servant. That him is Jesus Christ. So when Jesus Christ was on the cross, he was paying your penalty for your sin and the sins of the whole world. Men, do you recognize that there is judgment for all sin? The difference between you and a lost person is that Christ took your penalty, and for the lost person that dies separated from God, they have to take God's wrath for their sin. Jesus took your wrath. Eli and his sons were about to pay God's judgment, God's price for their sin. A total disregard for who God is. They did not treat him as holy, and it was gonna cost them. Lesson three, and I think this is critical, we need to recognize that our sin affects others. This is another lie that our culture tells us. My sin is my sin, it doesn't hurt anybody else. And there's the reality that many of us think that if I have this secret sin that nobody knows, then it's not going to hurt anybody. That is a lie from the enemy. And there's all kinds of secret sins. You have to recognize that your sin affects others. Listen to what this verse of scripture says. I'm gonna go back. It says, look at verse 14. Therefore, I have sworn to the house of Eli that the iniquity of Eli's house shall not be atoned for or by sacrifice or offering.
forever. It did not just affect Eli and his sons, it affected his entire house. Dads, husbands, grandfathers, when you live in unrepentant sin, there will be a time where your sin impacts others. I was in a meeting yesterday and we were walking through and we were praying for this man who had been married for 40 years, was caught in an adulterous affair. 40 years of marriage like that. Do you think that that doesn't affect his children, his wife, the rest of his life? Men, you have to recognize your sin will have a consequence and it will affect others. And we see that Eli's unwillingness to move and rebuke his sons in such a way that they would repent and turn back to God, it impacted their lives and his life and the lives of generations in his house. Our sin affects others. We see in this text, a tale of two men. Samuel is beginning his ministry. He is learning to hear from God and we are getting ready to see an amazing ministry that God has for him. And then we see Eli, older in his ministry, who for whatever reason stopped counting the holy things of God as holy and allowed his own thing to go about and do it. He stopped reverencing God. Why? We don't know. But it had a tremendous impact on his life and I would say a nation because they were following his example and his sons were ruining the sacrifices that had been commanded. There's so much here. We see somebody who is hearing from God for the first time and we see somebody who is hearing from God and letting him know that he's about to be judged. Both of them are hearing from God. Now as we close, I want you to ask this question at your table. How can you help someone learn how to hear from the Lord? How can you help someone hear from the Lord? Because if we believe that God can speak, then that means that he wants us to hear him. And so I want you at your tables to take three minutes and just try to answer this question. And then we'll come back and we'll answer it and then we'll close. Okay? All right, let's go ahead and answer that question. All right, so when we think about this question, how can we help others learn how to hear from God? What I want to see is, are there some common themes that come from your discussions? Because what I want you to do is to take what you are learning in this room on Wednesday nights and tell somebody else about it. Hopefully you're learning at least one thing. Even the worst of me, you're like, I want to find one thing. I think I may have said one good thing tonight, I hope. What's one thing that you're learning? How can you help others learn how to hear from God? What would y'all say? Yeah, if you want to hear God speak, read his word. Give time to it. It's just like any good relationship, isn't it? Like if anybody you want to be close to, you have to give them your time. I love that. What else? That's exactly one of the things I'm like, let them know how you hear from God. That's beautiful and let's call it a testimony. Hey guys, it's okay to testify of the goodness of God in your life. When he speaks to you during your time with him every morning, tell somebody else about it. That's an amazing way to just take what you've learned that morning and give it to somebody else. Testimony, I love that. What else? Important to know what is not the, learn what is not. A good way to know what is not the word of God, know the word because you have to test the spirits. I'm gonna, I'm gonna say this is a very over-exaggerated example. Okay, so just run with me. So if I have this thought, the Lord wants me to, this is overblown for illustration, wants me to kill Philip Hardy. Alright, I love Philip very close to my life. I would not kill him. I need him in my life. But if I know, if I feel like the Lord is telling me to do that, I automatically have to go to Scripture and say, does that line up with Scripture? Absolutely not. So I don't have to guess, but if I don't know God's Word, I'm not going to be able to discern that. So you're exactly right Kent, you've got to know God's Word so that you can know whether or not he's speaking to you. If you hear what you think is the voice of God and it directly opposes the Word of God, you don't hear the voice of God. I'm just telling you, you don't. And you have to know God's Word. That's a great word. Could be Melissa. Yeah, Melissa's telling me. I love it. What else? What else? Yes, sir. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that goes back, would you say humility? When we talk about the posture of our heart, you got to be humble. Anything else? Yes, sir, Don. Yeah, I think you're exactly right. Practicing those five, prayer, Bible reading, fellowship, testifying, telling others about Jesus, all of those will help you to receive God's Word. Yes, sir. I'm gonna go, I'll come back to you now. Let me go in here first. When you have a feeling of conviction, yep, knowing what conviction is. Yes, sir, Noble. Right. No, that's exactly right. Be close to God yourself, then you'll be able to hear God's voice and then go say, that's great. Yes, sir. Clean house. Tell me more. Yeah, I love that. Clean, clean your house. Some of your wives want y'all to do that, literally. Yeah. Yeah, turn off the competing voices. Yes, sir. Yeah. Yeah. Michael Pritchard is the best journaler I know. So if you need tips, talk to Michael and he does it, I think every day, most every day. And it's been neat to see how God allows those journals in his life to go back and see God's faithfulness. It's a beautiful testimony. So journaling is great. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's good. Yeah. Yeah. Surrender your pride and just give him, give him yourself. Yes, sir. Amen. Yeah, that's exactly right. That's good, man. And I love the conversation. Guys, this has to got to become the normal when we are in our circles of influence and when we are in church and out of church and all of that. And what I mean by that is we have got to be comfortable talking about our faith with each other and with others. So many times we walk through life in the halls of this church and we do not have spiritual conversations. I want to encourage you to keep talking. This is good. Talk with one another. And as you talk with one another, you're going to be teaching and telling others how they can hear from God because you're telling them how God is speaking to you.
and encourages them. You have to understand that we are meant to be in community, all right? I wanna pray for us. Thank y'all so much for walking through this text. We are getting ready to get into the life of Samuel over the next few weeks and it's gonna be exciting. I'm gonna pray for us and then Nathan Stanfield is gonna come up here and talk to us about next week. All right, let's pray. Father, we thank you and we love you. Lord, we're so grateful that we serve a God who speaks. Lord, I pray that you will help us to really understand who we are in ourselves. That, Lord, just proximity to the things of God does not mean that we are close to you. And Lord, I pray that if there's any man in here that is struggling with secret sin that they need to give to you, Lord, I pray, Lord God, that they will repent, turn to you, and tell somebody about it that can help hold them accountable. Lord, you want to forgive them. Lord, I pray that you will move them. Lord, help us to understand that you judge our sin and that our sin affects others. Lord, help us to take these lessons, apply them to our lives, and walk out of this place different because we've encountered you and your word. We thank you and we love you in your son's most precious name we pray, amen.