God Calls in His Time – Sermon 18 January, 2015

God Calls in His Time
1 Samuel 3: 1-10, John 1:43-51

People have the tendency to listen only to what they want to hear. The Bible even tells us that. God’s word informs us that “The heart is deceitful above all things”. (Jer. 17:9)
Why God want us to listen?
What God’s saying is: I want to bless you. I want to give you what your heart desires in my time. … But I can’t if you won’t listen.
God wants us to hear His voice, and He wants us hear His voice because that’s the only way we’ll receive all the blessings He wants to give us. But we struggle with this because our hearts are deceitful, that is, we hear only what we want to hear, and we tend to put our priorities above His.
Today we look at two examples when God calls people.
In today’s first passage we see several clues about the time and the state of the people.
The time is 11th century B.C. According our sources we know that Samuel was born sometime between 1100 and 1090 B.C., just before the establishment the Kingdom of Israel and Saul is appointed and anointed to be the king of Jews 1050-1020 B.C.
In this short passage we can detect:
Two sets of four points put in Inverted Parallelism (3:1-3 and 3:7-10a) and in between the “Call” and in 3:10b the “Response”.
a In those days the word of the Lord was rare.
b There were not many visions.
c Eli’s eyes were weak and he was lying down.
d The lamp of God had not yet gone out.
The CALL
d The Lord came and stood there.
c Eli realised that God was calling.
b Samuel did not yet know the Lord.
a The word of the Lord was not yet been revealed.
The Response: “Speak, for your servant is listening.”
Then the Lord spoke to him and told him what He was going to do.
That was God’s timing. In His time He called His servant.
History repeats itself. Many years later the situation was still the same in the world. But we know and are assured that God loved and loves the world. Because He created it and all was good. Even the ‘man’ was created ‘good’, because he was created in the image of God. He was perfect, clean and pure.
But we know the story. Sin entered in the perfect creation and alienated man from God. And since man was in rebellion though God had revealed Himself in so many ways, yet man decide to ignore and go on in his/her way.
In the second passage that we read today we see a similar trend of thoughts as Jesus called His first disciples. John puts it as follows”:
a Call to follow the Lord
b Call to come and see
b He saw Him
a You are the Son of God

How about now. I believe nothing has been changed, we see that the Word of God is rare. Not many people read, study, reflect and apply in their daily life. Even though they consider themselves Christians, yet they don’t have the necessary biblical knowledge and as a result of that they have weak faith. And because the Word of God is rare there is no vision, which results in no mission. That’s where we see the church today; on the way of weakening and becoming passive in many areas.
The church is struggling and has shifted to survival mode instead of being active on many levels doing its mission. This is sad and needs to be done something.
But the good news is that God is control and in His time He will call and take action. He will prepare people to serve Him faithfully regardless of their shortfalls and weaknesses.
The call of Samuel to be a prophet and the early disciples to follow and obey His commands are good examples. In the two examples it is clear that when He calls people they respond to him even after a brief questioning period. In the case of young Samuel, God had to call three times until it is realised that the One who is calling is God Himself. And in the case of Nathanael we see an interesting expression that says: “Can anything good come from there?” referring to Jesus coming from Nazareth. Then declaring: “Rabbi, you are the Son of God; you are the King of Israel”. What an expression of faith and commitment. We know that those first disciples left everything to follow Him.
Yes, God calls the “man”, us, in His time and the only thing we should do is to follow Him.

Krikor Youmshajekian