Bible reading: 1 Samuel 3:1-10.

In those days, when the boy Samuel was serving the Lord under the direction of Eli, there were very few messages from the Lord, and visions from him were quite rare.One night Eli, who was now almost blind, was sleeping in his own room; Samuel was sleeping in the sanctuary, where the Ark of the Covenant was kept. Before dawn, while the lamp was still burning, the Lord called Samuel. He answered, “Yes, sir!” and ran to Eli saying, “You called me, and here I am.”

But Eli answered, “I didn’t call you; go back to bed.” So Samuel went back to bed.The Lord called Samuel again. The boy did not know that it was the Lord, because the Lord had never spoken to him before. So he got up, went to Eli, and said, “You called me, and here I am.”But Eli answered, “My son, I didn’t call you; go back to bed.”

The Lord called Samuel a third time; he got up, went to Eli, and said, “You called me, and here I am.” Then Eli realized that it was the Lord who was calling the boy. So he said to him, “Go back to bed; and if he calls you again, say, ‘Speak, Lord, your servant is listening.’” So Samuel went back to bed.

The Lord came and stood there, and called as he had before, “Samuel! Samuel!” This time Samuel answered, “Speak; your servant is listening.”

Message.

“I wish there was an easy way of knowing when thoughts are just thoughts, and not messages from God. I had a thought just after I’d been praying today – it just came into my head suddenly: “Buy a tree frog and call it Kaiser Bill”. That sounds utterly absurd, but why should a thought like that just pop up from nowhere? I’ve written the words down on a piece of paper, and put it in the inside pocket of my second-best suit. After all, you never know!”

So wrote Adrian Plass, in his hugely popular “Sacred Diary” which poked fun at the sillier aspects of Christianity. The book is now about 30 years old yet it still asks some fairly profound questions about our faith. And of course Adrian’s puzzlement at his strange thought leads us to a very basic question: we say that God speaks to us, and that’s something we really do mean. But how does he speak and how can we distinguish between his “still, small voice” and random thoughts that have been generated by television programmes or indigestion?

Somehow things seemed to be so much simpler in Bible times – and I’m not thinking of the occasions when Jesus stood up to preach. (He was clearly audible when he did that, but was he really God? That’s what the disciples came to believe, but lots of other people weren’t so sure). No; I’m thinking of those many places in the Old Testament when we read, “The Word of the Lord came to X” or “God spoke to Y” or even “I heard God saying …”. Obviously most of those references are linked to prophets such as Samuel, Isaiah or Jeremiah, but we have others right back in Genesis, with God chastising Adam and Eve or telling Noah to build his Ark. God speaking to people may not have been an everyday occurrence, but the ancient Jews did seem to think that it was quite unexceptional, something that gods were expected to do. Indeed, silence from God was regarded as a divine punishment.

And so we come to the story of Samuel, which I guess most of us know from Sunday School days. This is set in the time of Judges, around 1100 BC. The exciting (if bloody) days of the Hebrews’ escape from Egypt and conquest of the Promised Land are now several centuries in the past; the glory days of Israel under kings David and Solomon are still in the future. Apart from repeated border skirmishes with the surrounding tribes, Israel at peace. One gets the impression that life has settled into a dreary routine, with little of note taking place.

That’s certainly the case at the holy shrine of Shiloh, where the Holy Tent or Tabernacle sits as the spiritual focus of the nation. But the glory of God has long departed; you feel that the canvas has become tatty and needs darning, that the ceremonial vessels are tarnished and could do with a good polish, that it’s been a long time since the floor was swept, and that the worship itself has become repetitive and formulaic. Certainly Eli, the High Priest, a spiritual man, hasn’t aged well; he is frail, nearly blind and barely able to carry out his duties. He is well aware that his sons, Hophni and Phinehas, may wear the priestly robes and know how to talk the priestly talk, but are immoral scoundrels; he is pinning his hopes for the future of religion on young Samuel, brought to Eli as an apprentice by his mother Hannah. But he isn’t, I think, very optimistic: the Ark of the Covenant, symbolising God’s presence, was in the Tabernacle (indeed Samuel slept beside it) but communication from God had all but died out and he seemed to have become very distant.

Then God did speak – but it took a long time for his voice to be recognised. For he bypassed the usual channels and, as we know, spoke to Samuel rather than Eli. This was completely outside the boy’s experience; he heard a voice but thought that it was his master calling him for some kind of assistance. Even Eli, who perhaps should have known better, was so taken about by God’s unexpected intervention that he didn’t at first understand what was going on. Eli finally told Samuel to wait for God to call once more – and how anxious their wait must have been, for perhaps God had become tired of speaking. Fortunately he hadn’t so, when he spoke for the fourth time, Samuel responded, “Speak, Lord – now I’m listening”. And, although we won’t be looking at what Hod said this morning, his message was actually a difficult one for Samuel to deliver.

I wonder what we make of this story? I suspect that, if one of our young people rang me up in the middle of the night and said, “Did you call me?”, they’d get a dusty answer, especially if they did it three times in a row! I also suspect that, if any of them came to me on a Sunday morning and said, “I clearly heard God speaking to me last night”, I’d dismiss it as a dream or even start to wonder if they were experiencing mental health issues. Now I know that there are pastors who would take comments about God speaking to members of their congregation at face value, even praising him for having done so. My tendency, rightly or wrongly, would be to be much more cautious and start digging into what had actually taken place. But – and it’s a big but – would I be then in danger of missing God’s voice? Yes, I would.

You see, if we truly believe in a living God, then we should expect him to speak to us. That will mostly happen in a general sort of way as we read the Bible or listen to a preacher (and please be wary of preachers who claim a special authority from God – we’re all fallible and can easily say things which would better be ignored … did I really say that?). But there are times, rare times perhaps, when God may communicate with us in a vivid, personal or direct way – and we must ensure that we’re ready for that. Yes; a word or thought may come into our mind and we must carefully assess or evaluate it before declaring “Yes, God has spoken”. But let’s not be too quick to dismiss it.

I truly believe that God has spoken to me on several occasions, most specifically in calling me to missionary and then ministry service. But have I ever, like Samuel, heard God’s actual voice “calling me in the night”? Or have I ever, like Paul, had a vision of Christ flashing before my eyes? I have not – although I have, just sometimes, come to the pulpit on a Sunday morning with Jeremiah’s sense of God’s word “burning in my bones” and straining to be set free. However there have been occasions – not that they’ve been frequent – when I’ve been sitting in church or reading my Bible and something that I’ve heard or read has struck me with such force that I’ve had no doubt that it’s been a direct message from God. Also, just once or twice, I’ve been praying about a knotty issue and felt such a huge wave of assurance sweeping over me that it’s as if God has said, “Don’t worry, I’ve heard you, I’ll sort it out” – even though I hadn’t actually heard a thing.

I must say one more thing that these comments apply to churches as well as to individual Christians. There’s a passage in Acts which tells us that, while the leaders of the church at Antioch were praying and fasting (there’s something for us to think about!), God’s Spirit spoke and said, “Set apart Barnabas and Saul, to do the work to which I have called them”. We’re not told how the Spirit spoke, nor how those leaders decided that it was indeed God they were hearing. But what he said was unexpected and even shocking: this church was to send into missionary service its two most able and useful leaders, men who were basically indispensable. Yet the Antioch leaders were so convinced that they’d heard God’s voice that they commissioned and sent off Barnabas and Saul without a moment’s delay. Do most British Deacons’ meetings function like that? Do most British Church meetings function like that? You know very well that they don’t, and tend to be taken up by routine and practical matters. Yet what they ought to be, above anything else, are times when we are seeking to hear God’s voice as we pray, think and discuss – his voice which may urge us to make surprising and radical strategic decisions.

We’ve gone a long way in both space and time from Shiloh, 1100 years before Jesus, to Britain in 2024, calling in at 1^st century Syria on the way. Both religious practice and popular culture have changed hugely over those distances, yet we can still identify with both Samuel waking up and saying, “Eli, did you call me?” and the Antioch leaders saying, “What, God? – Saul and Barnabas? Well, we’d better obey”. God’s voice isn’t always, or even often, easy to hear; there are times when he speaks but we’ve not been listening, as well as times when we think he’s spoken but he hasn’t: I don’t believe for a moment that Adrian Plass’s thought of buying a tree frog had anything whatsoever to do with God. Yet let’s at least try to hear his voice, both individually and collectively. For that to happen, we need to spend time with him, get to know him, “tune in”, if you like, to his frequency. It’s important that we listen out for God, for we can then relay his words to our world.