Date: June 5th, 2011
Speaker: Pastor Dave Smith
Title: Hear the Sound
Hear the Sound…YC Edmonton…
Fourteen Thousand young people gathered in one place to connect and cry out to God…
Lights went down and the call went out…
“When has there ever been a time where we have so needed something to change, something to break? The powers of darkness are waging war on our culture, on our people, on our future. Where are the hands of God? They are right here. Right now, in this very place, God is here, calling you! Hear the sound of the lost, the hurting, the dying, the betrayed, the tortured, the afflicted, the widow, the orphan. More importantly…Hear the sound of His voice. We can make a difference when we hear the sound, when we answer His call. Make this your prayer…My God, I am here, I am ready. I may be young but You are able. Hear me, train me, use me, fill me, I am listening. I will hear the sound!”
As the weekend unfolded we were reminded of putting God first in our lives, that He is the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, we were challenged to trust God even when His promises for us seem half-fulfilled. We were challenged to trust God even though we might feel completely alone, broken, and shattered. We were reminded that Jesus came for the messed up, and asked the questions like, “Do you even want to get well? And we were challenged to take God at His word even though we don’t always understand His timing, or our own circumstances.
It was a great weekend. A spiritual high as the Edmonton Journal called it in Monday’s paper. But it’s over. We are back to reality. For some back to awful circumstances, back to pressures of life, back to hurts and pain, and we might find ourselves asking, “what do we do now?”
Throughout the weekend I ran into several youth pastors that I know and asked them about their God moments through the weekend. And it was interesting to me that a lot of them said that their hopes were, that this weekend would take kids individually, and their youth ministries to the next level. Have you ever heard some one say that? What does it mean to go to the next level? I want us to define that and look at what is means for us to go to the next level in our relationship with God.
Turn with me to Mark 9:2-8. The disciples were spending some time with Jesus, and He specifically calls Peter, James and John for a pretty interesting field trip. The disciples are like okay that sounds cool, but really had no idea what they were in store for.
It’s cool because, the Bible talks about the disciples going to another level. Not only are they going to the next level physically, climbing a mountain is not an easy task, but they are climbing this mountain to spend time with Jesus. Jesus wanted to show them some things and plant seeds into their lives. A huge step in going to the next level with Jesus is to spend time with Him! Keep Him first in your life.
They’re saying, “Okay Jesus we’re going mountain climbing, this should be fun. It’ll be a guys weekend. They get out there and Jesus is praying, the Bible doesn’t really describe how it began to happen, but this would be weird. They were out there praying, maybe they had their eyes closed, and they’re like “Whoa the sun’s really coming down here, I must have had my eyes closed really tight cause it looks like Jesus is glowing. Can you imagine their conversation? “Do you notice something about Jesus? There’s something different about Him. He’s kind of…glowing! They know that Jesus is really important; they know that He’s the Messiah, they know He’s the son of God, and they have seen Him do miracles, they have seen His ministry, they have been spending time with Him. As he prays He begins to take on a more Heavenly form, the earthly form seems to just evaporate and the Spirit seems to emerge out front. They see this with their natural eyes. In Luke 9 it says…then Jesus began to glow violently bright like lightning in front of them.
Peter is like this is really cool ‘cause Jesus is glowing in the dark and Moses and Elijah are here.
Anyway, they’re praying, Jesus is glowing, Moses and Elijah show up, so now Jesus is talking with 1000 year old men, things are kind of weird and then Peter says a classic. I love Peter. He says, Master it is good for us to be here, let’s build tents and camp. It was a really weird and kind of dumb thing to say, but he was pretty scared. If that wasn’t enough, God’s voice comes from the heavens and says, “This is my Son. Listen to Him.” Jesus stops glowing and Moses and Elijah disappear. Oh ya, this happens every other Tuesday. This is not your average mountain climbing experience.
Mark 9:9 says something very interesting. It says, “As they were coming down the mountain, Jesus gave them orders not to tell anyone what they had seen until the Son of Man had risen from the dead. They kept the matter to themselves, discussing what rising from the dead meant.”
I want us to see something here about the disciples. Jesus spends 3 and a half years with these guys, He’s pouring His life into them. The whole time He was with them, He reminds them that He is on a timeline, That He’s there to serve God’s purpose, and that in 3 years He is going to be beaten, killed, and crucified on a cross, but don’t worry because after three days, He’s going to rise again. Jesus tells them throughout the entire time they are together, that this is going to happen. This was an incredible mountain top experience…much like YC this past weekend for us.
The bible says in Amos 3:7 that the Lord does nothing without revealing His plan to His servants the prophets. God wants to share His plans with you. God wants to speak into your life things of great significance and sometimes we may not even understand it right away, but the question becomes, “ Do we trust Him? Are we willing to spend time with Him?”
In this text, I find it interesting that Jesus says to His disciples on the way down from the mountain, “Don’t tell anyone about this right now.” I believe that it is because of this. Jesus said He has the words of life. Everything that lives grows. Often when God is speaking to you, he is actually planting a seed of truth into your life. Not everything that God speaks into your life right now will be comprehended right now. Look at prophets like Ezekiel and Daniel. They had bizarre revelations, and they try to describe the things that they are seeing and it’s so hard to even put into words.
Plans of direction that God has for your life, things that God maybe wanted you to pray into may have to grow in you. At times God is dropping things into our heart, which are seeds of truth. Words of life are words that grow. When God speaks a word of life into you, it is intended to grow.
Consider the Parable of the sower. The seed is the good news, the gospel the word of the Lord. There is nothing wrong with the seed, the seed is all good. But it lands on all types of different soil. The soil represents our hearts. Some of it is hard, some of it has thorns on it, sometimes there are rocks in the soil, and then there is good soil. In the good soil the seed can go deep and begins to take root. What happens to the seed? It begins to bud and grow.
The word of the Lord in your life is not intended to stay in the same state in which it arrived. When God speaks His word into your life, it is intended to grow, when God reveals direction for your life, it is intended to grow in you. When God gives you a word it is not intended to stay in the same form in which it arrived because words of life are words that grow. Jesus told these disciples not to tell anybody about their experience. They obviously, through what they said couldn’t comprehend it yet. Jesus said “Do you know what, just let this sit, because a time will come when it’ll make sense to you when the Son of Man rises from the dead.
Then when Jesus rises from the dead it all starts to come together. Have you ever had that experience when things begin to make sense? I think many of us have read the entire Bible. Many have read most of the Bible. Many of us still read it even though we’ve read some of it before. Many still find that there are parts in the Bible that we haven’t seen before. When you think about it, many of us have read it several times, for some of us there are passages of scripture that the spirit of God keeps bringing us back to over and over and over again. It is remarkable that you can go into this book and read it again and yet something will jump out at you that you have never seen before. What is that? Living words. Not just words on a page, not just any words, but living words, words that will grow, words that are intended to be received in order to be unpacked. If we aren’t willing to receive it, we will miss it. It will just land on harder soil. But when the time is right, and you have been cultivated in the right way, the Holy Spirit will reveal things to you that maybe you never saw before. It will make sense to you. Sometimes we receive truth in stages.
1st Corinth 2:1-16. Going to the next level requires us to mature in our walk with Jesus.
When we mature in God, it increases our ability to receive greater revelation. We mature in God through discipline, through wilderness experiences, through enduring hardship, through our persistence in faith, through our integrity at all times, (even when nobody is looking, we’re doing the right thing even when it hurts.) We mature in God when we worship Him through difficult times, when we praise Him through hardship, we mature when we deny ourselves, we mature as we are being made more and more like Jesus as we subject ourselves and discipline our flesh and set our course that we are going to follow after Him, no matter the cost.
Paul says, “We speak a message of wisdom among the mature.” There is a greater ability to receive greater revelation, when you receive the maturing process of God; when you spend time with Him, when you receive the discipline of God. He disciplines those He loves.
I believe that God is calling us to a higher level in Jesus’ name. Going to the next level means that we must be maturing, we must be spending quality time in His presence, and in that process we will receive the ability to have greater revelation in our lives.
Our responsibility in the Kingdom of God is to mature and to endure hardships trusting that God has a plan and purpose for us. He wants us to do well, and that’s why He sets the boundaries out for us that set us up on a course for success. When we embrace the things of God, and walk through in a maturing process, (spending time with Him) we’ll come out the other side with a greater ability to receive revelation from God. If we don’t understand this point, we will jump from conference to conference, church to church looking for someone else to tickle our spiritual ears. God is saying take what I gave you, and invest it and watch because you have an anointing, and that anointing is real, that anointing will teach you to be instructed by the anointing of the Spirit of God! When we allow the Spirit to instruct us we begin to mature.
Paul says there is secret wisdom among the mature. Here again, maturity is the key. What is this secret wisdom? I believe it is the deep things of God. (verse 10) It’s when God’s Spirit unlocks deep truth in your heart and it changes your life. This verse says that the Spirit searches out the deep things of God. If we want to go deep in the truth of God we need to go deep into the Spirit, because the Spirit searches the deep things of God. And you won’t experience revelation just by sticking your head into a commentary, you may get glimmers, you may get this or that, but nothing compares to when the Spirit of God comes, and hovers over those pages and says, “There it is.” And your response is “Wow, I’ve been reading that for years.” And all of a sudden there is something new there. Why? It’s because it is a living word. That which lives, grows. There is a growing word in you. It’s maturity.
Do we want to go to another level? Then this is what it means. We are are going to have to walk through some things, we’re going to have to navigate, we are going to have to walk by faith, not everything is going to be like flipping channels on TV, you’re going to have to tune in the old school rabbit ears, walk through the fuzz and try to understand in the fog what’s God saying. When we come out on the other side and we’ve made it, and we’ve persisted and we have an investment and seen the return, God says, “Here’s more. Well done good and faithful.” We can’t go any deeper in God without becoming deeply immersed in His Spirit. God first! He is looking for those who are mature and ready. If we want more, we have to be prepared to give more, and follow the call of the Spirit.
Can we say, Yes, lord take me to another level of intimacy with You, I’m going to walk with You, I’m going to put my shoulders back and be bold, I’m going to let people know where I stand for You, I’m the one who will lead my friends to You.
As a church, we need to be a place that equips people for service. We need to be a place where we sharpen each other, build each other up in the gifting of the Spirit, we need to be a place where we get out there and do ministry. We need to live evangelistically focused lives, equipped with the deep truths of the Spirit, by the power of God. When we are ready to go to another level, we’ll see more people getting saved than we know what to do with, because there won’t be just one or two people getting the deep things of God, what if we all were getting the deep things of God? Then what does this look like? What if we were all receiving the deeper truths of the spirit?
The word for us this morning is simple. We can go to the next level. We can experience the deep things of God! Are we willing to spend time with Him? Will we be willing to Hear the sound of God’s voice?
As we head into the summer, as things change around us, as we face new chapters together as a church, will we be committed to laying our lives down in order for Him to perfect maturity in us. Do we want the deeper things of God? Are we willing to mature in our faith? Are we ready and are we hungry to go to the next level in our relationship with God.
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