Faith Beyond Our Senses: Hearing God Inside the Silence

Well, good morning. All right. Good morning, church.

Well, listen, before we get started, I said I usually get to lead us in worship.

Joe was out of town and I was speaking and,

I just want to express my immense just gratitude for the leadership of our worship

team to step up kind of at a moment's notice to lead worship for us.

And to be honest, really just look like neither Joe or I need to be here.

They did such a great job.

And I'm very, very proud of our group, our team that we have here at this church.

So, well, I'm excited to be up here speaking.

It's June already. It is the middle of June. I feel like the year has just flown,

by. And if I must say, June is one of my favorite months, maybe because it's

summer, maybe because it's also my birthday month.

And now it means a lot because it's Father's Day. And just in case anybody wants

to know, I'm a size new gas grill, just in case.

June also means that we, our family, the Kings, we're very busy with sports throughout the year.

It doesn't seem to stop, not even during the holidays and in the wintertime.

And June is one of those months where we have a lot of downtime and there's

not a lot to do. And that is great.

That also means the kids are super bored.

And today I was kind of excited. my kids are here. I actually thought that all

of my children were going to be in Club 57 because I have a story to tell that

is the subject of one of them.

And that one happens to be in here. So as I tell the story, love, I love you.

And I think you're amazing. And I think that you're smart and talented,

but you also have a superpower.

And that superpower is we can be in point blank range, talking to her,

if you can see where this is going, and it just goes over our head.

Especially if it has to do with cleaning our room, taking out the trash, feeding the dog,

turning the television off, whatever it is, we have the hearing of about a 102-year-old,

man who lived with loud sounds all his life.

But that's not the superpower. The superpower is that at one point when I do

want to talk about something maybe she shouldn't hear, especially with mom, whatever it is.

And maybe we're even in a different room and we're whispering.

It's like Avery's just like, what?

Like somehow this supersonic hearing has just come out of nowhere.

And we're like, nothing. She's like, what'd you say about Gabby's mom? Gabby's mom.

That I need to share with my friends? Oh, no. Well, that leads me to,

I think that a lot of times that we are very much like that when it comes to

hearing the voice of God.

Sometimes we have that 102-year-old man that's like, what?

And other times we're that teenager just demanding answers, demanding to know things.

So that's kind of today's subject of today's sermon, is having faith beyond our senses.

And so before we get started, I want to open us in prayer. So,

God, we're here in your presence,

asking to hear from you, asking that the words that you've put on my heart that

I'm able to share, I've got to ask that you open up the hearts that are here,

to hear and feel your presence, God.

Let your spirit speak through the word today. In Jesus' name, amen.

So I was out at lunch with one of my friends a few months ago, this friend of mine.

I've known him for 20 years now, over 20 years. Been a good friend of mine.

Started whenever I was in youth group. And.

Through the years, we've had many conversations about God, conversations kind

of theology and worship.

At one point, he was one of my youth leaders and is now developed into a longtime

colleague and friend. And we were at lunch one day at a Mexican food restaurant,

and he's telling me about one of the things that's just kind of baffled him for years and years.

And he finds himself, as he goes to different churches, asks pastors the same

question, and no one's really been able to answer it for him.

And he's asked colleagues and friends and leaders.

And he's sitting there and I'm on my 11th bag of chips. And I'm like,

what is this question, man? And he said, okay, I'll ask you this question.

And he says, we're built in the image of God.

We were built with intelligence, some of us. We were built with logic.

We've put men on the moon. We have battled cancer. We have mathematics that are just incredible.

We're built with these five senses, eyes that somehow I have no idea how they

work, but are so powerful to be able to, these little things,

to be able to transmit the very things that we see in life.

Our eardrums, these little bitty bones that vibrate on each other and allow

us to hear intricate sounds and melodies that we just worshiped with.

We have hands that have such delicate touch that we're able to create an entire

language to read with our fingertips when the other senses fail.

Yet God asks me to put all of those aside when it comes to having faith.

And so put Hebrews 11. In fact, he said, I can tell you Hebrews 11,

faith shows that the reality of what we hope for is the evidence of things that we cannot see.

And he says, he goes, I just don't understand why God presents himself in a

way that we can't use the very things that he created us. And I was like,

I don't know the answer to that question.

It's a good question. In fact, that thought process doesn't work with any other transaction.

You know, if you go to Target after church here and go pull a TV off of the

shelf and walk up to the front and you're just like, the money is not seen.

You're just going to have faith that the $400 is there and I'm going to leave.

My boss calls me and is like, Daniel, we haven't seen you at work in about a

month. And I'm like, I need you to have faith.

I have been here. You have not seen me. It doesn't work.

And so naturally we rely on this physical proof and we apply that to our faith and to God.

And so the title of the sermon, Faith Beyond Our Senses, leads me to that question.

And I spent months, just not really quite sure how to answer that.

And it led me back to the beginning. And a lot of the times that I've spoken,

I've gone back to the beginning because I have been in such a search for what we are meant to be.

And if what we are meant to be at one time existed, then we have to look back to the beginning.

If you're putting a puzzle together, listen, if there's someone in this room

that's just doing it on their own without the box, good for you.

But you look at what the picture is supposed to look like.

If you had something that was broken, you would look at a picture of what it

looked like to try to put it back together. And when we look at what our original

intent was from the one that we created us, we go back to the beginning. We go back to the garden.

And in Genesis, we see Adam and Eve in the beginning first walking with God.

They had intimacy. There was no shame. There was no fear. There was no separation.

God's original design was through relationship and not through religion.

I think one of the funny parts of Genesis that everybody always gets a giggle

at and is like, and they were naked and they knew no shame.

And it was always something that was in there and always found it kind of funny

that we put that in there.

But I don't think that it was just merely that we had no clothes on,

but that we had no separation between us and the Spirit of God.

There was no separation. There was no shame.

There was no hiding that was put into the text, not just because it was a random

important detail, but because it was a very important detail on how man and

God interacted with each other.

And obviously, we know as the story moves on that they're put before the tree

of knowledge of good and evil, and a choice is in front of them.

Now again i'm i'm i mean i i believe very literally that we had a young earth

in a six day genesis and i i i don't question whether or not there was a true,

piece of fruit that they ate,

but i believe that that was much bigger than just.

An apple. I believe that it was a choice whether they leaned on their own understanding,

or whether they leaned on God's instructions.

I believe that it wasn't just a choice then, but would be a choice forever.

And I believe it's still the same choice that we have today.

It wasn't something just isolated to the Garden of Eden, but it is something

that we today, whether we lean not on our own understanding or in all our ways acknowledge him.

And so we see the fall and we see the change.

And if we'll put up Genesis 3, 8, we see that when the cool evening breeze were

blowing, the man and his wife heard the Lord God walking about in the garden.

So they hid from the Lord God among the trees. Go ahead and skip to 10.

He replied, God asked, where were you, Adam. And he replied,

I heard you walking in the garden, so I hid.

I was afraid because I was naked. There's that word again.

A huge transformation takes place.

The presence of God is now no longer seen as a welcoming good thing.

The intimacy is gone. Now the presence of God equals fear and hiding.

Now the intimacy of the nakedness between man and God is now a bad thing to the point that we hide.

God knew where Adam was, but he has now revealed Adam's heart is now separate from God.

Sin enters the world and mankind moves away from spiritual intimacy.

And from that point on, how man interacts with God takes a very,

very big change and looks very differently.

But I will say that though it looks different, God never stopped pursuing from day one.

So we see how God interacts through physical science, specifically with Moses.

He reveals himself to Moses through a burning bush.

He later leads the Hebrew people,

with pillars of fire during the nighttime and clouds during the day.

God will reside on Mount Sinai, covering the top of the mountain with a cloud.

I gotta give it to Moses. It takes a lot of strength to get up to a mountain

that was described so very scary.

God later finds Himself housed in the Ark of the Covenant with very specific,

regulations on who could move it, how it could be moved.

God resides in a temple behind the veil in the Holy of Holies.

God's now interacted with via just a specific group of people with very specific

rules at very specific times, because we have to see what changed.

It wasn't that God suddenly became rude or mean or a different person,

but we went from having a God in which we interacted with spiritually,

intimately, to a God that we are separated with and only on the physical.

Therefore, God has to use the physical to interact with His people,

and there are very specific ways in which that is done.

God accommodated humanity's physical-only condition.

But no, we must not interpret God interacting in the physical as being superior to the spiritual.

So at this point, God is still pursuing people, but now he often communicates

through physical signs because mankind had become spiritually disconnected.

But God's desire to connect spiritually and intimately with His people never ended.

We see prophecies begin to emerge. The first is through Jeremiah.

We read Jeremiah 31, 33, and 34. But this is the new covenant I will make with

the people of Israel after those days, says the Lord.

I will put my instructions deep within them and I will write them on their hearts.

I will be their God and they will be my people. Let's go to Ezekiel.

And I will give you a new heart and I will put a new spirit in you.

I will take out your stony, stubborn heart and give you a tender,

responsive heart. Let's actually go back to Jeremiah real quick.

I will write them on their hearts. One of the things that we're all very well

aware of is the 10 commandments and the spiritual law, right?

Imagine the fact that at one point, God lived within his people.

He lived within his creation and what his creation did coincided with the God that lived within him.

And now we're at the point that the only way that man can live somewhat connected

with God is to follow a set of laws written on stone tablets, carried around,

with the ability to break, with the ability to wither.

It's really easy to look at these laws and picture them as some kind of fun

tillers, but they were a way to instruct his creation.

I mean, think about how you raise your children and you want them to go out into the world.

You don't want to necessarily send them with this book of instructions on if

then, then that. You want to have instored or bestowed on them,

right and wrong within them.

But the separation does not allow that. And we see God begin to speak through

his people that one day the word of God will be written on our hearts.

These prophecies, they point toward restoration. Everything continues to point

towards the original intent.

They point towards the garden, and in comes Jesus.

This should mean so much that Jesus shows up.

If we know the history, we know what God is trying to get back to,

the arrival of Jesus means that much more.

You see, he wasn't just coming to merely just forgive sin, although that was

an incredible fruit of what took place.

He wasn't just teaching how to love thy neighbor or give the Sermon on the Mount

to raise the bar a little bit.

He came to pay the sacrifice so that the reconciliation of the Spirit can live within man.

If we look at John 4, verse 23 and 24, Jesus is talking with the Samaritan woman at the well.

John 4:23

She asks a question that's just paraphrased, essentially. She's a Samaritan

woman, which means she doesn't worship in Jerusalem.

And she essentially is saying, who's to say what's right? Those in Jerusalem

say we should worship there. Those in Samaria say we should worship here.

Because remember, God was supposedly physically in certain places.

And there was arguments of where God was at the time and where you could truly go find him.

And Jesus says, the time is coming indeed. It's here now when true worshipers

will worship the Father in spirit and in truth.

The Father is looking for those who will worship him that way.

Go into the next slide. For God

is spirit. So those who worship him must worship in spirit and in truth.

Jesus at one point later says, I will destroy the temple and I will rebuild it in three days.

You got to understand how big of a deal it was that he was like,

I'm going to destroy the temple.

We just had a series about how big of a deal it was that we built that temple back up.

And Jesus was like, I'm going to destroy it. And they're like, I don't think so.

Fact, they were actually a little bit puzzled because they were like,

yeah, it took us a long time. How do you expect to raise it in three days?

Because when he died and the veil was split, the temple shattered and no longer

was God forced to reside in one spot, but the temple would become in our heart.

And that occurred after three days in the ground, our Jesus resurrected and

the temple was rebuilt with inside us.

True worship would no longer be tied to a place, but people would worship in spirit and in truth.

It is very easy for us to fall into that God resides in our churches.

It doesn't reside, he does not reside only in this church.

He does not reside only in the temples or the churches around,

but it is so easy to put God right back in that box, right back behind that

veil and stitch it right back up.

But he resides in you.

The goal is not getting people into a building. The goal is bringing people

into relationship with God.

And we see an incredible transformation happen in Acts with Peter.

Everybody remember Peter, right? So Peter used to be Simon.

He suddenly becomes Peter, which means rock.

The Catholic Church very much puts a lot of emphasis on that term,

as Jesus says, on this rock. I will build my church.

St. Peter becomes the father of the church.

And he views, he sees Lazarus raised. He watches Jesus heal many over and over.

I mean, you wanna talk about somebody that has seen the physical God, it is Peter.

And yet we see Peter deny Jesus.

Many times when it's like, hey, God, if you would just show me yourself,

show me a miracle and I will believe. That's a lot of big talk.

But we see in Acts chapter 2, verse 36, something change.

Acts 2:36

You see, Acts chapter 2 is the day of Pentecost, right? So Jesus has ascended

Acts 2 · chapter mention

to heaven and the Spirit of God has come down on the people.

A lot of churches are split on exactly what happens on that day with speaking

in different languages.

But what is not argued is that the Spirit of the Holy Spirit descends on the

people, and we see Peter transform into somebody,

very different than the one who denied him, very different than the one who

doubted Jesus when he was walking on water.

He looks the very men in the face who crucified Jesus.

Now, mind you, this is a very big deal because with Jesus, I feel like after

you saw a few things, you might be able to stand behind Jesus and be a little

bit, feel a little bit tough.

You've watched him race from the dead. You've watched him walk on water.

You can kind of point the finger at the Pharisees and stand behind Jesus, but now it's just Peter.

And he says, one of my favorite verses, so let everyone in Israel know for certain

that God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, to be both Lord and Messiah.

Look at what the Spirit of God does to Peter.

The Spirit accomplishes what the physical evidence never could.

Still chase the physical. In fact, I think all of history is built on religions

that have chased a physical God.

The Hebrews, after being completely rescued by God, build a golden calf in no time.

If you read through the Old Testament, it's the same thing over and over.

God presents himself to the Hebrews, saves the Israelites again,

and then suddenly they're back to worshiping a false god.

I think it's very easy for us to point the finger, but it's very easy for us

to worship the physical God as we put him in our church, as we act differently in our church.

And I think that it's easy to make God the physical because a physical God is

a God that we can separate from.

A physical God is a God that we can go run and hide in our sin, like Adam did.

Desires something deeper within you. And so we ask the question.

Why can't I touch and see and hear?

Why does logic, why does God stand outside of logic? And why am I being asked

to put those aside and just believe?

And the answer is, is because those five senses were never meant to interact with God.

Who here has 20-20 vision? A few people. So that means that there's quite a

few people in here that have failing eyes.

Who here has perfect hearing and doesn't say what every once in a while?

And if my child raises her hand, she's wrong.

Why would we want to rely on interacting with our Creator upon things that are

ultimately going to fail, but instead interact with our Father and our Creator

in something that will transcend past creation and into eternity.

So how do we hear God today? Number one, Scripture.

If I told you that you could hear God every morning at 5 a.m.,

that you can hear the very Word of God, I would hope that you would wake up

at 4.30 ready for that 5 a.m. Word of God.

And as cliche as it is, it's right here.

Your scriptures were given to us through the Spirit and through the men that

were led by the Spirit to write the very word of God.

It allows us to learn the character of God.

If you've ever known somebody and you've heard something about them,

meaning they weren't in the room and somebody said, so-and-so said this,

and you're like, that doesn't sound like them.

That doesn't sound like something they would do or that doesn't sound like something that they would say.

That's what it means to know god through his word So when satan is telling you

a lie you go that's not the truth That's not something god would say that's not.

Two is prayer in solitude. We spend time listening.

It becomes a lot easier to hear God when we are spending time away from the

very things that distract us.

Create that time, create that space to allow God to speak to you.

And number three is the church. The church is so very important and not the

church building, but the church as a group.

We see the church described as the body and the bride of Christ.

The church is a body because not each and every person that makes up the church

makes up a separate part of the body.

Though not one single person of us can display the characteristics of Jesus

fully, we can all share in separate characteristics as we see with the fruit of the Spirit.

Spending time with the church is a way that we can see God move,

is the way that we can see the evidence of the Spirit of God.

Listen, many people have searched for God through signs and experiences,

locations, traditions, and rituals.

And they do it using their five senses, but those five senses were made for the earth.

They weren't made for a much more spiritually superior being as God.

God gave us senses for creation, but he gave us his spirit so that we could know him.

God's intent was not to be outside of you so that you could see him.

God's intent was to be inside of you so that he could lead you.

As we finish up here, I want to say that many religions create a God that can

be seen, but zero of them resurrected.

Zero of them want to live inside of you.

The goal was never a burning bush. It was never a pillar of fire.

It was never an ark of the covenant. It was never a temple.

The goal was always reconciliation.

Was always restoration. The goal was always for God and man to walk together again.

The veil has been torn, the invitation has been given, the Spirit has been poured

out, and the only thing left is your response.

If in here today you feel that I have only sought God with the very five senses

that I have and are failing, I invite you to ask for the Spirit to dwell within you.

Let's pray. Jesus, we come to you knowing what you've done on the cross to restore us to the Father.

Father, we ask that you pour out your Spirit on us, that we may forego those

five senses that make it so hard for us to interact in the physical and open up our hearts,

to the spiritual.

God, we ask all this in your name. Amen. If you'll stand and join us in worship again.