River Road Church Baptist

January 15, 2006
Dr. Michael J. Clingenpeel

“A Speechless God and a Lonely Listener ”

After the Hebrew people had conquered the Promised Land, but before Saul was appointed King of Israel, and David slew Goliath, and Solomon built a temple in Jerusalem, there lived in Shiloh a boy named Samuel. Samuel worked in the sanctuary under the supervision of an old priest named Eli. Every morning he opened the doors of the House of God, and every evening he kept lit the lamp of God. Once in the night he heard a voice calling his name. He ran to Eli, but it wasn’t Eli’s voice. A second time and a third time he heard a voice calling his name and he ran to Eli, but it wasn’t the voice of Eli. Finally, Eli counseled Samuel that it was the Lord calling, and when the Lord called again Samuel answered, “Speak, Lord, for your servant hears”.

I recall this story vividly from my childhood and so do many of you. The point of the Sunday school teacher who taught that lesson was always the same: “Girls and boys, you need to learn to listen for the voice of God, because God may be calling you to something very special. And if God calls you the way that God called Samuel, then be prepared to say ‘yes’ to God”.

At the time, the story of Samuel didn’t really surprise me. When I was growing up all of the favorite Bible characters talked to God and God talked to them. Some voice from somewhere asked them to do daring deeds. A voice told Noah to build an ark. A voice told Abraham to go into an unknown destination. A voice spoke to Moses out of a burning bush. A voice announced to Isaiah, “Who will go for us?” A voice begged Jonah to preach to the Ninevites. A voice asked Paul why it was he was being persecuted. I did not need great training to be able to understand that the pattern in the Bible is that God speaks and people act.

Even so, as a child, while this story did not surprise me, it did cause me to be curious. If God spoke in an audible voice then what would God’s voice sound like? In the 1950s, in Roanoke, Virginia, we Baptists understood that the voice of God sounded like Harry Y. Gamble, the pastor at Calvary Baptist Church. Now God’s voice, I suppose, would be James Earl Jones or perhaps Morgan Freeman.

I also was curious to ask the question how did Eli know it was God but Samuel did not know it was God? In time, I learned that Eli knew it was the voice of God because Eli had experience listening. He had heard the voice of God on many occasions before.

In 1983, Vivian and I moved to Franklin, Virginia, where I became pastor of Franklin Baptist Church. Those of you who have moved a few times know that in the process of moving you realize that some of the possessions you own really are junk, so you decide to get rid of them. After a few months, we had a considerable amount of junk which we decided to take to the city landfill. One morning I borrowed a church member’s truck, loaded it full of all of the stuff, and together Vivian and I drove to the city landfill. It was a rainy day, the ground was soft. I backed the truck up into the landfill and promptly began to feel the back wheels sinking into the mud. I gunned the motor, spun the tires, and the combination of the truck’s load and my ineptitude as a driver caused the back wheels to sink all the way down to the axle of the truck. We became quite stuck.

I looked around and saw another man rummaging through some things in the landfill. He saw our dilemma and began to mosey in our direction. Being a male-type person, I did not want to confess that I had gotten ourselves into that situation unintentionally, so I decided I would say that I wanted to get the wheels real low because it would be easier to unload the truck. In the meantime, I remind you that Vivian was with me, and when the man came up she very eloquently plead my ignorance and ineptitude. So, the three of us began to try to extract the mired vehicle. At one point the man stopped, looked at me hard and finally asked, “Aren’t you the new preacher down at the Baptist church?” “Yes”, I replied, “How did you know?” He said, “Well, every week your church broadcasts its service on the radio, and I listen to you preach, and I recognized the sound of your voice”.

Eventually Samuel would become familiar with the sound of God’s voice because he had heard it week after week after week. But that night when he heard it, it was for the first time, so he did not know it was the voice of God. He needed help detecting the difference between God’s voice on the one hand and Eli’s voice on the other. I suppose God can speak audibly to you or to me. But more often than not I believe that God speaks to us in ways that require us to listen quite carefully to detect the sound of God’s voice.

In the book entitled In Search of Guidance, Dallas Willard writes that whenever we attempt to discern what God wants us to do we need to keep in mind three very important points of reference. The first, Willard says, are circumstances. God’s providence is all around us in the form of open doors and closed doors, opportunities and the close of opportunities. We need to discern the circumstances of our lives if we are to know what God wants us to do.

Second, he says, are impressions, inner promptings of the Spirit. The sense that this is something that we ought to do or this is something that we shouldn’t do - the tug or the nudge, quiet inner feeling that we cannot explain, the confidence or joy or simple reasonableness of a course of action.

Third, he says, we need to keep in mind passages from the Bible, not so much the individual words or phrases, but the principles enunciated in the Bible. In the absence of God’s audible voice these circumstances, inner promptings of the Spirit, principles from Scripture, are the criteria that enable us to understand the Divine accent in our lives.

Over time, I came to realize that there is more to Samuel’s story than I learned as a child. This is very much an adult story. It is the story of a speechless God in a world that is not listening to the voice of God. It is a world that has become deaf to the sound of God speaking. In 1 Samuel Chapter 3 verse one, we read that “the word of God was rare in those days and there was no frequent vision.” Samuel was born into a world in which his own tribe had become deaf to the sound of God’s voice. They no longer listened to what God was saying to them. There was no more manna on the ground when they woke up in the mornings, no more fire to lead them by night or a cloud by day, no more taking a stick and whacking rock and the water would gush forth.

God had become silent in their generation. And we see why when we see what happens with Eli’s sons. We read that they were “worthless men.” They had taken the house of God and turned it into a brothel. They had helped themselves to the offerings of the people. And we read in the book of Judges that “there was no king in Israel and every man did what was right in his own eyes.” These people demanded their own autonomy from God and in the process they demanded it so fiercely that God eventually gave them what they requested. It is possible that we can live so long without listening to God that eventually God grants us what we want, our autonomy. When we ignore God long enough, God eventually shuts up.

Some of you have read the writings of the desert fathers. There is an account from one of those, a story about Abba Felix. Some of the brothers come to Abba Felix and they beg him, an old man, to speak a word to them. He has been silent for so long. They keep coming and begging and pleading, cajoling, “Please, Abba Felix, speak a word to us”. Eventually he speaks, and this is what he says: “There are no more words nowadays. When the brothers used to consult the old men and, when they did what was said to them, God showed them how to speak. But now, since they asked, by not doing that which they hear God has withdrawn from them the grace of the word and they do not find anything to say because there are no longer any who carry their words out.”

God had withdrawn the grace of the word from Samuel’s generation. And God can withdraw the word of grace from you and from me if we quit heeding and listening to God.

But there is in this adult story a message of hope. God’s word is rare, but it is not nonexistent. There is a wonderful symbol of hope in this Scripture. In the dark of the night Eli and Samuel are lying in their respective rooms. But over in the sanctuary of God there is a golden menorah. It was placed there long ago when Moses instructed the people to keep the lamp lit throughout the night and to never let it go out. The Scripture says that, “The lamp of God had not yet gone out.” And it had not yet gone out because Samuel, the boy in church, was keeping it going.

Never underestimate the influence of one person, however small, however insignificant, who listens for the voice of God and heeds the will of God. One single, solitary, lonely listener can make an enormous difference in this world for good and for God.

Douglas Steere was a great Quaker, teacher, and preacher. He wrote a book entitled Gleanings and in it he described something of the events of our nation leading up to the Civil War. He told of a man named Nerius Mendenhall, a Quaker, who brought his family to Greensboro, North Carolina, where he became head of the New Garden Friends Boarding School. Mendenhall and his friends were strongly opposed to the institution of slavery. When it became obvious that North Carolina would secede from the Union and join along with the Confederate States in order to retain the institution of slavery, Mendenhall decided that he could no longer raise his family in North Carolina. So he decided to move them north and west to either Ohio or Indiana. They gathered their belongings and went to the train station in Greensboro to leave. And while they were sitting, waiting on the train, Mendenhall suddenly felt that inner voice telling him to remain at the school. He took it to be the voice of God. He turned to his wife and described to her what he had heard and she concurred, “Yes, it must be the voice of God”.

They took their belongings and put them back on the cart and rolled them back to the school. During the long years of the war, Mendenhall kept that tiny school open, and following the war he took a leading role in the reconstruction of the South. Today, the New Garden Friends Boarding School is Guilford College. One lonely listener - in era when God was virtually speechless because the people had ceased to listen for the voice of God.

The rest of the story will only take a minute to tell and many of you know it. The message God gave Samuel to give to Eli was not a happy message. It was a tragic word. Eli and all his household would fall. Samuel was afraid to tell it to Eli but the Scripture says, “Samuel told Eli everything and hid nothing from him.”

And the word of God, which was so rare, turned from a trickle to a torrent. And the Scripture says, “Samuel grew and the Lord was with him and let none of his words fall on the ground”. Not one of the words God gave the prophet Samuel to tell was wasted in the heart and mind and mouth of Samuel. And Samuel became the one who anointed Saul, the first king of Israel.

One thousand years later, another boy would hear the voice of God calling in the night. This lonely listener would respond to the voice with these words, “Nevertheless, not my will but your will be done”. And God has never let this lonely listener’s voice or his words fall. And we would come to know him as our Savior and our Lord.

What a man. What a story. What a God.

May we pray: We are grateful for those lonely listeners throughout history, O God, who have listened for the unmistakable accent of your voice, and when they heard it, discerned it, and then did what you said. Give us ears in our own generation. Help us to hear, and help us to do. Through Christ we pray. Amen.

MC; lmk, mt