As I stand here before you this morning I’m wearing my cell phone. Will I get a call from someone while I’m speaking to you? No, because the phone’s turned off. The nearby cell phone tower can be sending all kinds of calls my way, but I’m not going to receive them. When I finally turn on the phone after we’re through this morning, I’ll see the message “Missed Call.”
Here’s the basic thesis of this morning: God wants to communicate with us! He really does! If that’s true, you and I are likely to ask why we don’t hear from Him. First of all, He’s not likely to use a big booming voice, because then He’d be imposing Himself on us. He speaks to us, but we have to really decide that we want to hear from Him. If we’re not hearing from God, guess whose fault it is. The breakdown in communication isn’t God’s fault. Jesus quoted the Old Testament when He said, “For this people’s heart has become calloused; they hardly hear with their ears, and they have closed their eyes. Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts and turn, and I would heal them.” (Matthew 13:15) Just as we can turn a cell phone off so that we can’t get a call, we can be turned off to God so that we don’t hear from Him.
Sometimes we have our cell phones on and get a call, but we can’t hear the person who’s calling because of all the noise around us. We have to quickly walk to another location so that we can hear. There are also times when get so caught up with the busyness of life, the attraction or distraction of things, that with all the background noise we don’t hear God’s whisper.
In this continuing series on “Common Objects That Build Faith,” we’re going to hand out an object, just as we have in previous weeks. They’re objects that you can keep near at hand to remind you of something about God. Today we’ll hand out a post-it note. Fold it and put it with your change, or post it on the refrigerator, the dashboard of your car, your desk, or your workbench at work. Let it remind you that God communicates — and that He’s anxious to connect with you. Be open to hearing from Him! This important point is reinforced in a story about a boy named Sammy.

Sammy Hears from God
Sammy was sound asleep in the temple — that’s right, in the temple. His was an unusual situation. He not only lived in the Lord’s house, he was being raised by an old priest by the name of Eli. Such a strange set of circumstances had come about because his mother, Hannah, had been unable to conceive children. One day when she had made the annual pilgrimage to the temple she wept before the Lord, pouring out her heart about her childlessness. Eli, the priest, misinterpreted her deep anguish as drunkenness. She explained the situation to him, and he responded by telling her, “Go in peace, and may the God of Israel grant you what you have asked him.” (1 Samuel 1:17) God did grant her what she had asked for, and Hannah gave birth to Sammy. As soon as he was weaned she brought him to Eli at the temple and gave him to the Lord. Like it or not, Eli had a child to raise.
Back to our story: Sammy was asleep when he was awakened by a voice calling his name. He thought that it was Eli, so he went to him. Eli replied, “I did not call; go back and lie down.” (1 Samuel 3:5) Sammy lay down again, and again he heard the voice: “Samuel.” (1 Samuel 3:6) He went to Eli again, and Eli told him to go back to bed again (this was as bad as a child asking for a drink of water time and time again at bedtime!). Sammy heard the voice a third time, and he went to Eli again. Finally Eli realized that it was God calling, and he told Sammy that when he heard the voice again he should say to God, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.” (1 Samuel 3:9) Sammy did hear the voice again, and he said what Eli had told him to say. Finally God could have His middle-of-the-night conversation with Samuel. Sammy was hearing from God! Sammy grew up and became Samuel the judge.
In those days a judge wasn’t just a man in a robe who was carrying out justice. He was often a military leader, a spiritual leader, and/or a political leader. This was before Israel had a king, so judges were often called by God to do much of what a king would normally do. In fact, Samuel anointed Saul and David, the first two kings of Israel. Sammy heard from God, and it made all the difference in his life.
What Eli suggested that Sammy should say to God is something good for us to say to God, too. May the post-it note remind us to pray, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.”
How should we expect God to speak to us? There are five major ways.

His Word
God wants to communicate to us through His Word, the Bible. We dare not say we never hear from God if we aren’t taking the time and effort to read what He’s written to us. The apostle Paul told us, “All Scripture is God-breathed . . .” (2 Timothy 3:16) That means that the written word we call our Bible is God’s spoken word to us!
Let me encourage you to establish the habit of reading the Bible regularly. First get a modern, easy-to-understand translation such as the New International Version that we use here (there are many other good translations; just get one!). Schedule a time in your day when you can take even as few as five minutes to read it: maybe while eating a bowl of cereal in the morning or as you sip a cup of coffee. (You may now read the paper or watch the morning news shows; you’ll have to make a choice.) Start by reading the gospel of Mark. Don’t read a whole chapter — just one section (each section starts with a title in bold). Ask yourself, “Why does God have me reading this today?” Ask Him to speak to you.

His People
God wants to give us direction, advice, encouragement, correction, and all kinds of other communication through other people. In the book of Acts we have an account of the apostle Paul’s telling a group of Christians at Caesarea that God was calling him to go to Jerusalem. Dr. Luke, the writer of Acts, described what happened next: “After we had been there a number of days, a prophet named Agabus came down from Judea. Coming over to us, he took Paul’s belt, tied his own hands and feet with it and said, ‘The Holy Spirit says, “In this way the Jews of Jerusalem will bind the owner of this belt and will hand him over to the Gentiles.”’” (Acts 21:10-11) In hindsight it seems that the Holy Spirit, through Agabus, wasn’t telling Paul not to go to Jerusalem; the Holy Spirit was just warning him about what he’d face there.
God will give us affirmation, correction, encouragement, direction, or other input we need through what others say — even what they say “off the cuff,” without a lot of forethought. Our daughter Julie just told me the other day about a piece of advice I gave her that she still remembers. I don’t remember giving it; apparently it was an “off the cuff” remark I made. Thank God I said something right that time — and that’s the point, thank God! God speaks through people; we just have to be humble enough to hear Him through them. However, here’s a note of warning: just because someone says to you, “The Lord told me to tell you . . .” it doesn’t mean that they necessarily have it right. You have to weigh what someone says and balance it with the other ways that God speaks to us.

His Creation
God wants to communicate to us though His creation. King David wrote a psalm in which he affirmed, “The heavens declare the glory of God, the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge.” (Psalm 19:1-2)
God is the artist, and creation is His artistic expression. It can tell us much about Him. This is called natural, or general, revelation. It’s not nearly as specific as is His revealed revelation in the Bible, but we can learn much about God’s power, glory, beauty, timing, and organization from creation. Just as enjoying someone’s artwork can help you get to know the person and feel closer to him, so it is with God’s artwork of creation.
I for one greatly connect with God through creation. I encourage you, even on a busy day, to glance up at a cloud, pause to hear a bird sing its song, or stop to smell a rose!

His Holy Spirit
God also can connect with us directly, from His Spirit to ours. When you and I invite the Lord to take up residence in our lives, He’s as close to us as we are to ourselves! His Holy Spirit and our spirits cohabitate in our hearts, souls, and minds. Paul wrote, “In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express.” (Romans 8:26)
God will speak to us through inner promptings, strong urges, and feelings. Again, there’s danger in depending too much on this without cross-checking it with the other means of God’s speaking to us, especially His Word and His people. God will never prompt us through His Holy Spirit in such a way that it contradicts His Word or the sound advice of trusted friends. However, God does lead through the prompting of His Holy Spirit, and we must seek to always be open to His leading.

His “Coincidences”
Finally, we can hear from God by seeing Him act in the “coincidences” of life. William Temple said, “When I pray, coincidences happen, and when I don’t, they don’t.” I’m enough of a cynic to agree that every coincidence may not be a message from God. After all, you can read anything into anything, if you want to. Still, there are times when you have to believe that God is speaking to us through the way things happen.
Do we think that it was coincidence that there was a boy who brought his lunch the day he joined a crowd of five thousand to listen to Jesus? Every miracle Jesus did was unplanned by Him. Almost every miracle He performed was an interruption of where He was going and what He was doing. He didn’t see these people crossing His path as mere random events, but as the Father speaking to Him about how He could go about His Father’s business.
Let me close with a recent example of God’s speaking through a “coincidence.” Ben Williams in our church lost a brother to cancer a number of years ago. He always felt helpless because he couldn’t have done more for him. Ben responded by signing up to be a stem cell donor so that he could be involved in saving someone else’s life.
Ben went through the procedure to donate his stem cells. Of course the privacy of both the donor and the recipient are respected; after a length of time, however, both can agree to communicate with the other, and both did so in this case. Ben found out that the recipient was a 41-year-old single mom who had been given only six months to live. She had prayed for a miracle, and she got her miracle in the form of Ben’s donation of stem cells. She’s doing fine today.
They made contact after the donor center contacted Ben with information about how to get in touch with the woman. The donor center called Ben on a Friday to tell him that the recipient was a 41-year-old woman. That Friday would have been his brother’s 41st birthday! God can certainly use “coincidence” to communicate with us!

God communicates; we just need to be open Him! When you look at your post-it note, remember this wonderful fact!