Hearing God’s Voice from His Word
James 4:8 says, “Come near to God and he will come near to you.”
Take a moment and turn your attention to God. Tell God that you desire to trust and obey Him. Ask God to speak to you from His word.
Psalm of the Day
Psalm 99
1 The Lord reigns! Let the peoples tremble. He is enthroned between the cherubim.
Let the earth quake. 2 The Lord is great in Zion; he is exalted above all the peoples.
3 Let them praise your great and awe-inspiring name. He is holy.
4 The mighty King loves justice. You have established fairness; you have administered justice and righteousness in Jacob.
5 Exalt the Lord our God; bow in worship at his footstool. He is holy.
6 Moses and Aaron were among his priests; Samuel also was among those calling on his name.
They called to the Lord and he answered them. 7 He spoke to them in a pillar of cloud;
they kept his decrees and the statutes he gave them.
8 Lord our God, you answered them. You were a forgiving God to them,
but an avenger of their sinful actions.
9 Exalt the Lord our God; bow in worship at his holy mountain, for the Lord our God is holy.
God is Holy. Praise Him for being a Holy God. He is free from any moral impurity. Every action He does and every action He withholds is pure in action and in motive. He is completely untainted by evil. He is pure. Holiness is His natural state. His holiness is wonderful. Praise Him because He makes us holy through the work of Jesus.
SCRIPTURE READING:
1 John 4:1-6 – The Message
4 My dear friends, don’t believe everything you hear. Carefully weigh and examine what people tell you. Not everyone who talks about God comes from God. There are a lot of lying preachers loose in the world.
2-3 Here’s how you test for the genuine Spirit of God. Everyone who confesses openly his faith in Jesus Christ—the Son of God, who came as an actual flesh-and-blood person—comes from God and belongs to God. And everyone who refuses to confess faith in Jesus has nothing in common with God. This is the spirit of antichrist that you heard was coming. Well, here it is, sooner than we thought!
4-6 My dear children, you come from God and belong to God. You have already won a big victory over those false teachers, for the Spirit in you is far stronger than anything in the world. These people belong to the Christ-denying world. They talk the world’s language and the world eats it up. But we come from God and belong to God. Anyone who knows God understands us and listens. The person who has nothing to do with God will, of course, not listen to us. This is another test for telling the Spirit of Truth from the spirit of deception.
Having God’s Ear through Prayer
- Express thanksgiving to God.
- Ask the Holy Spirit to reveal sin to you.
- Confess your sin to Him and receive forgiveness.
(1 John 1:9 “If we confess our sin He is faithful and just and will forgive our sins.”) - Bring your personal requests to God.
(Psalm 62:8 “Pour out your heart before God”) - Pray for someone in your small group.
- Join with others from River and pray for Christian Challenge as they meet tonight at River. Ask God to speak through the message and the worship time.
Living as God’s People by applying the Bible
Scripture Reflection from the Sermon
What is an echo chamber? We know what an echo is. It is where we shout out and our voice bounces off the wall and returns back to our own ears. Technically speaking, an echo chamber is an environment where a person only encounters information or opinions that reflect and reinforce his or her own. There is a challenge to find a balance here. On the one hand, we want to reinforce beliefs that are true. We don’t want to subject ourselves to hearing what is not true, and find our confidence in the truth undermined. On the other hand, sometimes what we are believing is not true, and we must not be afraid to subject those beliefs to scrutiny. What are we to do with this? How do we find this balance? There is some good in searching, but the point of the search is to find. No one wants to search forever to find their keys. You look for them because you want to find them, so you can start your car and drive away. When we have searched for the truth and have found it (or he has found us), we do not keep searching; we start living in that truth. We don’t have to keep searching, or listening to what is not true, to see whether it might be. The world apart from Christ is an echo chamber. It is human voices speaking to human ears. The gospel is the Word of God revealed to humans. We must be careful to let the Word of God speak for itself. When we have understood it, we must obey it. When we have misunderstood it, we must correct our thinking and get on with obeying it. In the gospel we do not hear our own voices, we hear the very word of God. We can listen to competing voices once we know the truth of the gospel. We do not listen because we are unconvinced and still seeking, we listen because we are convinced of the gospel. We listen to understand, in order to love others that they might become convinced as we are.