Today if you Hear His Voice
Passage Psalm 95
Speaker Matt Porter
Service Morning
Series Come to your Senses
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1 Come, let us sing for joy to the Lord;
let us shout aloud to the Rock of our salvation.
2 Let us come before him with thanksgiving
and extol him with music and song.
3 For the Lord is the great God,
the great King above all gods.
4 In his hand are the depths of the earth,
and the mountain peaks belong to him.
5 The sea is his, for he made it,
and his hands formed the dry land.
6 Come, let us bow down in worship,
let us kneel before the Lord our Maker;
7 for he is our God
and we are the people of his pasture,
the flock under his care.
Today, if only you would hear his voice,
8 ‘Do not harden your hearts as you did at Meribah,
as you did that day at Massah in the wilderness,
9 where your ancestors tested me;
they tried me, though they had seen what I did.
10 For forty years I was angry with that generation;
I said, “They are a people whose hearts go astray,
and they have not known my ways.”
11 So I declared on oath in my anger,
“They shall never enter my rest.”’
Holy Bible, New International Version® Anglicized, NIV® Copyright © 1979, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
This transcript has been automatically generated, and therefore may not be 100% accurate.
Thank you, Pam, for reading and. Morning, everyone. I seem to come and preach on very hot days. It's very warm in here. If you're feeling warm, do feel free to fan yourself or to raise a hand.
We can get you some water. It's warm. Let me pray as we come to God's word and then we'll dive in. Almighty God, we have asked many times in this service already that we would hear your voice and that you would soften our hearts to respond. Well, thank you.
That your word is life to us. May it be that today, in Christ's name, we ask. Amen.
I wonder if you can recognise, either from your own childhood or from more recent experience, the challenge of getting either yourself as a child or a child or grandchild to the meal table on time. It can be tricky, can't it? I don't know if you've had this experience, you kind of said, five minutes and the food's going to be on the table. What do you expect? You expect them to appear, don't you?
Five minutes later. But of course, from my own experience, when I was a child, I was playing, I was having great fun. Five minutes felt like a very flexible amount of time, really. So as my mum or dad stood at the bottom of the stairs and I was playing upstairs and called up and said, dinner's on the table now. Come get it.
I thought, wow, is it really on the table? I'm enjoying this. I could have a couple more minutes of play. The rhetoric ramps up, then, doesn't it? What do they say?
They say something like, it's starting to get cold. You need to come down now.
What happens? As I'm hearing that? I'm thinking, no, I'm having too much fun playing. I don't want to go yet. So I'm hearing what they're saying, but my heart inside is hardening to their words.
What I'm doing is much more important. Eventually, maybe, it reaches a scale of escalation that says, look, we need to go out in a few minutes time. If you don't come now, you won't get any food. And what do I do as a child? Maybe you do this as an adult.
I don't know. Stomp down the stairs. It was meant to be funny, but maybe you're registering it not as that. The child stomped down the stairs and the food that should have been delicious is like chocolate. Just don't want it anymore.
That's a common experience where we harden ourselves to a parental word. How much more important when it's the living word of God. To think carefully about our response. We're actually going to work through psalm 95. We had the New Testament reading just to pick that up.
So if you've got a Bible, I'd really love it if you could turn back to page 602, page 602, where you'll find psalm 95. And that's going to be our primary source of encouragement this morning.
While you're turning to page 602, let me tell you, if I may, 1 more story from my childhood. I grew up in a pretty small town, and if you imagine the church being like the high street, my house was at this end, and my primary school was kind of where you walked in at the doors. So in this kind of direction was my primary school. One long road, primary school on the left, small town. When I reached secondary school, my secondary school was where the sound desk was on the right.
My church was halfway up the high street, and every shop I normally needed to visit was somewhere along this fine middle section. I don't know how many times I walked up and down, up and down that one particular street. And sometimes I'd be walking and I would get home, I'd get towards my front door, and I'd kind of catch myself and I'd think, how did I get here? It was just so instinctive on autopilot that I'd done it almost without thinking. I'd kind of reach for the keys and think, did I just walk back or did someone give me, how did I get here?
And this psalm, psalm 95 is like a warning to the Christian or the people of Israel who are on autopilot like me, who are just drifting through thinking, yes, I can assent to it. Have a look. It starts really well. We said it aloud. I'm so grateful that Steve got us to do that, and I wonder if you found yourself just kind of nodding along.
Verse one come, let us sing for joy to the Lord. Let us shout aloud to the rock of our salvation. Let us come with thanksgiving and extoll in with music and song, and we kind of find ourselves nodding along, saying, yeah, this is the typical christian life. Yeah, I've heard these kind of things many a time. How does it continue?
The Lord is the great God. Verse three. The king above all gods. Yeah, I kind of know it. I know it fine, fine.
Verse four. In his hands are the depths of the earth, and the mountain peaks belong to him. The sea is his for he made it and his hands form the dry lands.
The invitation. Verse six. Come, let us bow down in worship let us kneel before the Lord our maker, for he is our God and we are the people of his pasture that flock under his care. And you could read it, I could read it and just kind of nod, say, yeah, that's fine, good truth. Heard it a thousand times.
Great. But there's a stark warning that comes at the end of verse seven. It's our key verse for today. The people who find themselves nodding along, knowing that life is, yeah, God's there. He's in the background.
Yeah, fine. The warning comes today. If only you would hear his voice. Do not harden your heart.
We've sung some great truth, we've heard some great words, but how's our heart doing when we hear it? Do we just nod along and say, yeah, that's the same old thing. In these verses, there's a warning not just to start well, but today, right here, right now, to continue to allow God's word to do that deep, penetrative work, get into our hearts, change us from the inside out.
As I was thinking about this, I was reminded of a story of a swimmer, I think her name is Florence Chadwick. She swam many, many years ago. She was an elite swimmer and she'd done many of the kind of firsts she'd swam the, I don't know, english channel, the first woman to do that, so on and so forth. And she was in one particular mammoth swim. I can't remember the places involved, swimming from point a to point b, vast, many miles that she was swimming.
And she'd been swimming for many, many an hour. And her body, understandably even as an elite swimmer, was getting tired and fatigued. It was beginning to kick in and the fog rolled in and she became utterly disorientated, didn't know which way to go. She kind of ploughed on in the direction she thought she had to do, swam on and on and on through this dense fog, could barely see where she was going. And eventually, just completely exhausted and bamboozled and disorientated, had to raise her hand, signal for help, and the support boat came alongside and pulled her aboard, utterly exhausted.
As she collapsed in the boat, breathing in hard, the fog at that moment began to lift. She could see that she was just a few hundred metres from the shore. She gave up just at the end. And of course her name didnt get in the record book for that. No prize for nearly getting there.
And this psalm is a warning to the Christian whos nodding along, saying, yeah, life, I know the goodness of God. Its kind of there in the background it's a challenge for us to say, are we actually allowing God's word deep, deep into our hearts? Psalmist doesn't want us to give up, to have lived a great christian life and give up right at the end.
We'll see in a few moments that the kind of references given in the next few verses talk about the experience of the people of Israel. Do not harden your hearts. Verse eight, as they did, and it refers to some of the events after coming through the exodus. We, of course, only can imagine it or have images of what that would be like. But some of those people, they actually experienced that, you know, Pharaoh's army was charging at them.
They had the sea to their back, no hope of rescue. And what did Moses do? Stretched out the staff and they actually really experienced it. The water's parting. Women, children, young and old crossing through this incredible rescue.
And they've had that and they'd seen that. Even in the midst of that, God then brought the waves crashing down to save them from their enemies. And a few days, weeks, months later, what are they doing saying, God, why have you done this? God, why have you brought us to this rubbish desert? You brought us here to die.
Couldn't we have died back there? And they start to harden their hearts towards God and his word and their trust in him fails. So easily done. And they become like Pharaoh, saying, we know best, God, what have you done? And God said they didn't get to go into the promised land.
And as that verse in Hebrews says, for us, the warning is that we wouldn't get to the new creation. Don't be like the swimmer. Keep going. Keep letting God's word do its work. In a few moments, I'd love to take us through just one example of what that might look like for us.
But first, I have a prop. I'd like to have a prop. And I'm thankful to Jonathan for loaning me some of his honey. Let me bring it into view. I have before you three jars of magnificent honey.
I was hoping for a bit of a woo or a reaction. Three jars of honey. Now, what would you say, how would you feel if I said that over the next few minutes I'm going to consume all three of these jars?
You don't believe me? Don't think it's a good idea. It's definitely not a good idea. I'm not going to do it. Don't worry.
Because if I tried to consume these three jars, well, firstly, I wouldn't get very far. And secondly, I make myself pretty ill, wouldn't I? It's impossible. Well, maybe not impossible, but not a great idea. Much better.
And probably what Jonathan has in mind. If I drop a bit of honey into my tea or put a bit on my toast or make a cake with a. You know, I can use it bit by bit. I could have it day by day. And so I just wanted to pause before we do our worked example and say, the best way that the Bible tells us again and again is today.
Well, it's today. Let's hear God's voice. If we're just doing that once on a Sunday and we're trying to get as much inside of us as possible, well, many of you know it's not going to be the best for us. But bit by bit, day by day, it's going to sweeten and enrich our lives. We're going to know the goodness of God through those normal moments, through those extremely hard moments, through the joyful moments.
I'm currently reading with our five year old, Amelia. We're just working our way through the book of acts. We're just reading it from the Niv. We're not using anything particularly special. We read a little bit each night.
I don't know how much she's understanding. She's enjoying some of the drama, she's enjoying some of the stories, but even if it's doing her a tiny bit of good, 25% of it might be going in. It's just bit by bit, day by day, those habits formed. So let's not try and consume three jars worth in one go. Binge it and feel that that will keep us topped up.
Instead. Do what you're doing today. Come sit. It's been a joy to visit some of your homes and to know and hear from you that when you can't come to church, you put the livestream on. Throughout the week, you've got the daily Bible reading notes or your favourite podcast.
You're just allowing God's word to drip in. And the lesson from this is, let it happen today. Don't hear God's voice and become hard, but let it come in and soak into our lives. But I thought it would be helpful just to spend a few minutes on a worked example because it's all very well and good. As I was thinking about it this week, to say, well, don't harden your heart.
Don't be like me as a child, stomping down the stairs. But what might that actually look like? I've got a PowerPoint just to help us think through this. It's going to flick up on the screen today. If you hear his voice, not his, don't harden your heart.
Let me see if I can click on. I don't know if I can. I don't know if it's on. I can't. But we'll have the next slide.
There we go. And we could think about marriage. We've done that many times in this church recently. The way in which this is a massive issue for our culture, really struggling with God's word on the subject of marriage. But I thought, because we've done that a lot and it's a kind of massive issue that maybe affects some more than others, I thought I'd pick a kind of better worked example.
We'll have the next slide. I thought about doing money, and the Bible talks all the time about the challenge, especially for us living in the west, let alone living around Linfield and Haywards Heath and wherever we live, of the dangers of money. And yet I thought, well, again, it's a big topic that's maybe useful to ponder, but maybe not the one I wanted to do. Instead, I thought I'd pick one that I reckon almost everyone here would kind of have some experience of wrestling through. One more slide.
Forgiveness. The issue of forgiveness. Here's some words from Ephesians. Be kind and compassionate to one another. Forgiving each other.
Just as in Christ, God forgave you. It's a pretty clear word from God. You want the forgiveness of God. You like that in your life, you benefit from it. Yes, of course we do.
We need it. It's the only way to get into the kingdom to be forgiveness. Well, forgive one another. And you say, okay, okay, I can do this. I've got this.
Not a problem. When that person jumps in front of me at the queue at the supermarket, I will forgive them. I will. I'll forgive them. Or if they cut in front of me in traffic and it's really dangerous and really annoying, I'll forgive them.
I'm not sure. I mean, that's good. Don't stop doing that. But I think there's a level deeper than that, that God's word on this one specific issue is pushing us towards. As I was thinking in my own life, maybe you can relate as well.
There are many times where I sense that someone really got under my skin, or there was a situation where I expected even the church to act in a certain way and it didn't. Maybe I thought someone would come and help me in a time of real crisis and no one came. Maybe someone said something to me, I can't believe they said it and it's years ago, but it stuck with me. Or maybe families are great at doing this, aren't they? Your family?
Someone's done something. They maybe don't even remember it or know about it, but you and I, we can hold onto that so tight and we can say, I'm not letting go of that. If they knew the extent to which they hurt me. If we look at the next slides, it is like the relationship between us in that aspect is utterly smashed, utterly broken. And we hear God's word to forgive, and we say, God, if you knew my situation, you wouldn't ask that of me.
And we harden our hearts to it. Well, God keeps on talking to us in the language of forgiveness. We said it today. Our next slide will help us. We said, forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.
And it rolls off the tongue week by week, but it's really hard to do. I was thinking about someone who really hurt me and my family. And on one level I feel like, have I dealt with it? Yes. Has it moved on?
Yes. But have I really forgiven them? Have I reached out and said, I'm so sorry for the way I reacted? I just want you to now forgive you for the hurt that you caused. Could we restore that broken relationship?
See, we need God's word and God's spirit to help our hearts, even on the most basic level of something like forgiveness. Thanks. We can lose the PowerPoint now. And the disciples and the crowds following Jesus knew the challenge of his words. If you're reading the gospels and you see where the disciples and the crowds are, they love the miracles.
They love to see him do stuff. But there are times where he says things and it's like the crowd have all disappeared. In fact, there's one moment, I think, in John's gospel where we're told he looks around, the crowds have vanished, and it's just a few of the disciples left. And he says, what about you? Are you going to go too?
And they profoundly say, where else can we go, Lord? Where else can we go? You have the words of eternal life.
See what's at stake for the people of God as we hear this challenge today. If you hear his voice, don't harden your heart. It's that eternal life is on the line for you and for me. God wants our best. He's that loving heavenly Father with great things on the table in store for us.
And we're often like the child in the room saying, God, I will not forgive. I will not let go of that. God says, it would be so much better for you and for the relationship that brokenness could be restored today. If we hear his voice, don't harden his hearts. We sang earlier in our service.
I brought the sheet up because it was so beautiful that we sang it in that first song. He speaks and listening to his voice. New life the dead receive. And I know for many of you, you know this. We know it to be true that Jesus voice is the one we want to hear and know.
Day by day. As I head to a close, let me just tell you how that's been profoundly shown to me in the last couple of weeks. Thank you to many of you who reached out. You knew that my mum had life saving emergency surgery and she continues to recover in the critical care units at the hospital in the northwest. But we had this, I mean, just astonishing phone call.
I was driving up to help my parents to go and support and my dad rang to say that my mum was heading into the operation, heading into the theatre. They didn't know I was driving up towards them. I didn't want them to worry. I said, I'm driving. Let me find somewhere to pull in.
There was a service station on the motorway half a mile away. I pulled in and my dad put my mum on the phone and said, it's really serious. She may not come through this surgery. And they're saying, it's really, really, really serious and she may not live since then, wonderfully. We've had many conversations.
We've chatted about all kinds of things. We've chatted about what the grandchildren have been doing and the pottery that Amelia made. We've been talking about the start of school and even some chat about the crickets. But in that conversation, in that moment where I thought, this might be the last time I have a chance to speak to my mom in this life before glory. And she is a committed christian and has been joining a church that we used to be part of online, while she's not been well, to watch their service, and they've been working through psalm 23, week by week, verse by verse.
And she said to me, and I said to her, the Lord Jesus has you and he will walk with you no matter what happens. Through the valley of the shadow of death, his rod and his staff will comfort you. He won't leave you, mum. He won't leave you. And with tears in our eyes and just such a hard conversation to have, the thing that we clung to was the word of God so precious, more beautiful.
More certain, more rich than any other word I could give her. We just prayed and said God's word to one another.
This psalm says, today, if only we'd hear his voice. Don't harden our hearts. And the psalm finishes in a slightly weird way. We highlighted it as we read it, because you say, well, I don't want to harden my heart. I want to live for God.
Oh, it just finished verse eleven. So I declared on my oath in my anger, they shall never enter my rest. That wasn't very encouraging. It's a conclusion. But I think this psalm is a bit like one of those songs that sometimes gets in our heads and we get to the end and then we find ourselves back at the beginning on a loop.
Because if we don't want to harden our hearts, well, what could we recognise from the start of that psalm? We could recognise that he is the Lord. That we can worship him and praise him as we should. We can recognise the vastness of his power compared to ours. That he made the sea and made the mountains.
They belong to him. And verse seven, what can we recognise? That we are the people of his pasture, the flock under his care. You see, he's our good heavenly Father and he has good things for us. And so when he says to us things about marriage or money or our forgiveness or whatever it may be, it is for our good and for his glory.
He doesn't want bad things for us. We can trust him utterly.
So this word has been a really helpful word to me and I hope will be a helpful word to you. That as you swim on towards that distant shore when the Lord Jesus calls you home or returns well, each and every day today, if we hear his voice, don't harden our hearts. Let me lead us in a word of prayer.
Almighty and everlasting gods, we recognise today that your word is the thing that we long to cling to. We long to hear it in the busyness and the noise of all the other voices that crowd in. Please, would you protect our time? Protect our time coming to be with you, to hear your voice. And, Lord, when we hear it, might we not just be on autopilot and nothing, but instead, would you powerfully work it within us?
Would you give us soft hearts that we know you are for us, that you love us and that you want what is best? And we pray this in the mighty name of Jesus. Amen. I.