Hear Him!

Carter Conlon from the historic Times Square Church in New York City. Hear him. Hear him. Your voices don't matter. Your plans will come to nothing.

Your strategies will not build this kingdom that you can't even see with your natural eye. Hear him. That's Carter Conlon from Times Square Church in New York City with a snippet from today's message on a call to the nation. What is it that causes you and me to be unable to fully hear the voice of God? And what does the Bible say we must do to be able to hear him?

That's also the title of today's message on a call to the nation. Let's join Carter now to unravel these questions from the Word of God. Matthew chapter 17 beginning at verse 1, Now after six days Jesus took Peter, James, and John, his brother, and led them up to a high mountain by themselves. And he was transfigured before them. His face shone like the sun, and his clothes became as white as the light. And behold, Moses and Elijah appeared to them, talking with him. Now we're looking at a spiritual experience probably unparalleled in a sense to anybody of their generation. Then Peter answered and said to Jesus, Lord, it is good for us to be here.

If you wish, let us make here three tabernacles, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah. While he was still speaking, behold, a bright cloud overshadowed them. And suddenly a voice came out of the cloud saying, this is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased.

Hear him. And when the disciples heard it, they fell on their faces and were greatly afraid. Here you see humanness and divinity meeting together on a mountain where God's about to do something that is absolutely powerful, it's phenomenal, and Peter in his humanness, it's true, it's true in our humanness we'll always gravitate to present or past experience for our sense of comfort and wellbeing. Peter was the kind of a man that said, hey, it just doesn't get any better than this.

I mean, this is awesome. We have the son of God here. We have Moses, we have Elijah representing of course the law and the prophets being fulfilled in one sense in Christ. We have the presence of God, the transfiguration. We're alone with God. We're on a mountain top. We don't have to deal with the people that are all around us. This is a great place to just camp and let's stay here forever. That is the human condition.

That's what we, you and I always want to do. First of all, we want to declare something to be good as equal or better than the best. In other words, you remember in Genesis chapter three, verse five, the temptation of Satan was that you can be as God is or as judges, it says in the original King James, and you can be the arbiters in the sense of what is good and what is evil. And so we have this propensity when God's trying to show us something to jump in and make a declaration of something that we think is good.

And in our humanness, we always want to camp in a certain place. That's why churches that have known revival generally died. You know that.

I mean, are you even aware of that? You look at through history, great, great revivals have happened. I'm talking about real revival. Not a lot of the stuff that's gone on maybe in some places over the years, but real revival where people are coming in, they're turning to God, they're repenting. The glory of the Lord is in the actual physical building. And you go back there a few years later and you have the same people trying to relive the same experiences of three years ago, five years ago, 10 years ago.

I had the privilege of preaching in Wales in one of the buildings that was significant in the Welsh revival in 1904. And I remember that people are still sitting there waiting for the Welsh revival to happen again over a hundred years later. And they've not moved in the church.

There's a dullness there because they've not really moved on with God where God is moving. It's a danger that we all face. Our tendency is to jump in and declare something to be good and say, we're going to camp here. We're going to stay here. We're going to revel in this.

This is going to become our identity from this day forward. And while Peter is speaking, it says in verse five, while he was still speaking. So here is Peter representing humanity, making declarations about what is good and this is God is here and everything he's seeing actually is good, but it's not complete. It's not where God is leading. It's not what God is speaking. While he was still speaking, a bright cloud overshadowed them and a voice came out of the cloud saying, this is my beloved son in whom I'm well pleased.

Hear him. Now this is not being said for the benefit of Moses or Elijah or Jesus. This is being said for the benefit of Peter, James and John. May I put it bluntly? God is telling these men, stop speaking and start listening to the son of God.

He is going to lead you somewhere. Your opinions in the kingdom of God don't matter. Your opinions don't produce life. Your opinions don't lead into the supernatural. Your opinions don't bring about deliverance to people who are hurting at the base of this mountain. For example, your opinions are worth nothing and all you can build is something that will ultimately become irrelevant if you're not willing to walk with the son of God. That's why many churches that have known great moving's of God in the past are now irrelevant today.

Go to New York City. You'll find great stone buildings all over the place that are now just museums. They're empty and when you walk into them you say, surely something must have been here at some time because people put a lot of time, energy, money into the building of these buildings yet there's nobody left here anymore. What happened to these people? It's time for us to stop listening to our own voices and listen to the one who's been sent to lead us. Now Christ came to seek and save that which was lost and he calls you and I to follow him and not to spend our full time seeking personal revelation, comfort and spiritual experience. There's a whole segment of the church today folks.

That's all they do. They just run from place to place to place to place just seeking revelation, seek ultimately seeking personal comfort and seeking some new experience and just run around talking about, you know, the tinglies that they had in the last meeting they attended in the last country they went to. And the whole pursuit is a mount of transfiguration. They want to camp there, they want to stay there, they want that to be their whole spiritual experience. But you see the revelation of who Jesus Christ is begins to lead us to what he does.

You see there's two parts to this. The transfiguration was there. They spoke of his decease. It tells us in other places that he was about to accomplish in Jerusalem that through Christ everything that was prefigured through the law and the prophets was about to be fulfilled at the cross. A church was going to be born. This church was going to go into all of the world and this wonderful message of salvation through Jesus Christ was going to be preached to everyone who had the ears to hear. Now he was leading them somewhere but they were so engrossed in their own ideas of what spiritual experience leads to that they couldn't hear him yet.

And it's like God had to override the whole thing, quiet Peter down and say to Peter basically and James and John, this is my son. Hear him. Hear him.

Your voices don't matter. Your plans will come to nothing. Your strategies will not build this kingdom that you can't even see with your natural eye. Hear him. He is the captain of the Lord's army.

He is the one who appeared to Joshua and told him take off your shoes. In other words, I don't want your plans. I don't want your strength.

I don't need your ideas. I need your obedience. And even if my plan to you seems to be ridiculous, follow it and you watch what will happen. I mean you talk about a ridiculous military strategy. March around a walled city seven days and just say nothing.

I mean I love it. In the reality of it, it's a prefiguring of what happened here on the Mount of Transfiguration where God is saying don't talk because the moment you do, you will destroy the plan of God. The plan of God is for you to just walk around in confidence, blow the trumpets and when I tell you shout and when you shout, you're going to see what God can do. He was leading them to a place where they couldn't fully hear it yet. Now the question arises, why couldn't they fully hear him and what is it that causes you or me to not be able to fully hear the voice of God? I don't know about you. I really, I hope you're as I am but I want to hear his voice more every day.

I want him to lead me. It's easy to come up with ideas and the more experience you have, the more ideas you have and but the kingdom of God is not built by men's ideas. It never has been and it never will be. Tabernacles will be erected. Tents will be made and people will talk about what happened somewhere, sometime to somebody and it will always be about the past, never about the future, never. I don't know if you've ever noticed that but if you ever traveled to places where the church literally died and the people may still come into the building but their whole conversation is going to be about yesterday, what God did yesterday and through whom he did something yesterday. They have absolutely no vision for the future because they're no longer listening to the voice of the Son of God. That's why the Father said, this is my son, hear him, hear him. All through the book of Revelation, every church, you'll notice he says, he who has ears to hear, let him hear what the Spirit speaks to the churches.

I want hearing ears. I want God to lead my life and I don't know how long I've got left on this earth but I want to live it for him and God is not interested in my, I have a lot of ideas obviously. After years of experience of walking with God, you have a lot of ideas but the one thing I have learned is that if he's not leading, there's no power in it. What God does not initiate, he does not sustain.

It's quite, it's simple. If he's leading, the supernatural will always follow it. If he's not leading, if it's just a good idea, then we're on our own with our own little tabernacle on the top of the mountain talking about our past spiritual experiences. They couldn't hear him and we can't hear him yet because in Peter's case and the disciples, they were still leaning on their own strength and their own understanding. Jesus was trying to speak to Peter but Peter was not listening yet. You remember in the scriptures, he told Peter where I'm going, you can't follow me. Now what was Peter's response?

Oh yes, I will follow you. Oh yes, and if you go to Jerusalem to die, I'm going to die with you and these others here, they may not have the courage to go but I will not turn back and I will not do this and I will not do that. He's just full of himself. He's full of his own ideas. He's full of his own strength. Jesus is trying to speak to him and say to him, Peter, before the rooster crows, you're going to three times deny that you even know me. Now he can't hear it because he's still relying on his own strength and he doesn't understand that where Christ is leading, we can't follow without his strength. There's a lot we can do without the strength of God but where he's leading, we can't go without his strength.

I've been around long enough to know this truth. There's a wonderful truth that I've espoused a few times over the years and it's just simply said in a simple statement, the end of ourselves is the beginning of God. God had to bring Peter to an end of himself. He had to bring him to a place where he had nothing left to say.

All he could do is weep bitterly because all his ideas came to nothing, all his trust in himself came to nothing, all of his boasting and bragging of all the things he was going to do and accomplished and how loyal he was going to be to the kingdom of God and all the ability he said he had that he doesn't possess. Finally, it came to an end and what came to an end, he could start to hear now the voice of the son of God. This is my word to you, many who are out there and you're struggling and you're suffering and you've come to the end of your, your testimony would be tonight, I've come to the end of myself. Well, the good news for you is the end of you is the beginning of God now. Now your ideas have come to nothing, you've run into the brick wall that all humanity runs into when they try to follow God in their own strength.

Now you're willing and ready to be trained. Now you're willing and ready to hear and to follow where God is leading you. Remember, it's not in our strength the kingdom of God advances, it's in our weakness with his strength manifested through our weakness. Paul the apostle said it this way, when I'm weak, then I am strong.

He understood it. The second reason why we find it hard to hear the voice of the son of God is because we are unwilling in many cases to put away old things and to embrace that which is new. Remember, if anyone was in Christ, he's a new creation. Old things are passed away and behold, all things are become new. So God is not just taking us out of where we used to be, but he's bringing us into where you would have us to go. The spirit of God comes into our life, according to Jesus in the Gospel of John, and he shows us things to come. He starts speaking to us about what he has for us, not what we have for him.

There's a huge difference. You know, in our humanity, we will make promises to God that we can't fulfill. And finally, when we come to an end of that, suddenly God starts making promises to us.

And it's by these promises that we begin to live and we become everything that God has called us to be. But there's got to be a willingness to put old things away. For example, old comforts need to be put away, old experiences. Yes, we can remember them, but we don't camp there.

We don't live there. In other words, we say goodbye to it. It was great. It was a wonderful time. Thank God for that time, but it's over. We've got to move on now to where God is leading us. Old friends have to be put away.

A lot of people want the kingdom of God, but they want their old friends at the same time. Remember the children of Israel. They came out of Egypt and they suddenly in the wilderness started remembering the leeks and the garlic.

Can you imagine? Oh, we remember the leeks, remember the garlic. Did they forget the children were being thrown in the river there?

Did they forget that they cried out in their bitter bondage and God heard their cry and sent Moses to deliver them? And oh, we're so prone to say, oh, it was so good back there, wasn't it? We forget the depression, the addiction. We forget the brokenness and we're unwilling to make the break.

And sometimes we're unwilling to even make the break from our achievements of the past. When God's telling us, we want to sit in our office and look at all our certificates on the wall and say, oh, what a wonderful person I am. And look at all the wonderful things that I've done. And the apostle Paul in Philippians chapter three, all what things were gained to me, those I counted lost for Christ. He had a reputation, Paul. He was schooled among the best. He was a scholar. People would, as he walked down the street, people would say, there goes Paul. I mean, he himself declared that he was blameless concerning the law.

There were not many, if any, that could even make that claim. Paul was saying, and I've actually fulfilled the law. He was extremely zealous for the things of God. And he had garnered no doubt a reputation.

He had a brilliant mind, this man, and no doubt people would notice him everywhere he went. But he said, those things I counted lost for Christ. Yea, indeed, I also count all things lost for the excellence of the knowledge of Christ Jesus, my Lord, for whom I've suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish that I may gain Christ. You see, you can't start to hear the voice of the Son of God until you and I are willing to walk away from everything that we need to leave behind us.

It's really that simple. No, we have to be willing to be led away from even good things. Remember Peter said, it's good to be here. We have to be willing to be led away from even good things because the things that God has for us are better than our good things, or the things we declare to be good.

Now, lastly, just as Jesus did in Matthew chapter 17, we must be willing to be led from spiritual experience to spiritual need. He could have stayed on the Mount of Transfiguration. He was God. He had Moses and Elijah with him. He's got his father speaking from heaven.

He's got a small entourage at least of followers that he could teach. He could have stayed there forever. They could have just, for the rest of their lives, they said, master, master. But he had come for a mission. At the top of the mountain was this wonderful spiritual experience.

At the bottom of the mountain was a father crying out for a demon-possessed child, a child that was being thrown into the fire, a child that was being thrown into the water, a child that was being virtually destroyed by the powers that had a hold of him. And you think about our generation and what's happening to our children, the unbridled passion, the unmitigated confusion in all of their lives, the sense of hopelessness and anger that's getting a hold of this present generation. And you and I can live our Christian life just talking about old experience or we can follow Jesus and go down the mountain to where the human need really is. And that's exactly what happened in the book of Acts chapter 2. They went from all of the places that they had been led by the Spirit of God now into the upper room.

And this is a marvelous experience. I mean, this is something that's been prophesied about by the prophet. They're about to experience something that the most profound prophets in the Old Testament only could dream about. The Spirit of God was about to fill every one of them.

They were going to be given this explosive ability to communicate with people of other cultures and other languages. They could have just stayed in the upper room. They could have kept there. It was another transfiguration.

May I say that? Because they were the ones now being transfigured by the Spirit of God. They could have just stayed there and spoken tongues to one another for the next five years. But you see, spiritual experience drew them because they're being led by the voice of God to spiritual need. Just outside of where they were, there was thousands of people coming from the temple making great journeys to get there to try to worship God in the best way they knew how, even though it was deficient and short of redemption to the Son of God. And they walked out of that spiritual experience and went right into that mountain of spiritual need. And that's how the church was born. That's how the church was led all the way through the book of Acts.

Remember Paul the Apostle said, we wanted to go to Asia, but the Spirit of God said no. See, he had learned now to hear the voice of God. Peter learned to hear the voice of God. And the best thing you could ever happen to you and to me and to this present generation is that once again, we might learn to hear the voice of God. It affects the way we pray. If we hear the voice of God, we suddenly are coming in and it's not a one way communication anymore with him.

It's a two way communication. We are putting our petitions or our concerns before God. Our ears are now open. He begins to speak to us. He tells us which way to go.

Why? Because we've come to the end of ourselves. We are willing to walk away from old things that we need to walk away from. And we're willing to be led by him into the mountain of spiritual need that is part of our generation.

I don't know about you, but I am unwilling to let this generation die on my watch. I am asking God, lead me, lead me to where I need to go. Give me what I need to say. Walk with me, oh God. You never, you don't send your servants out powerless.

Help me to hear what you're saying. Help me to speak with you and for you so that you can move your hand once again, as you always have throughout scriptural history and that you can bring glory to your own name. Give me the grace to abandon my ideas.

My ideas are worthless. Give me the grace to abandon them. Give me the grace to recognize them. Give me the grace, Lord Jesus Christ, to be led by you and by you alone because your voice is the only voice that has the power to bring life out of death and light out of darkness and something out of nothing. Everything else is just a tabernacle on a mountain top, something created by the hand of man.

I want to close with this. When we talk about human need, Isaiah, the prophet, God said through Isaiah chapter 58 verse six and onward, is this not the fast that I've chosen to lose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens and to let the oppressed go free? Is it not to break every yoke, to share your bread with the hungry and you bring the poor who are cast out to your house?

And when you see the naked that you cover him and not hide yourself from your own flesh. In other words, if your whole of religion is about yourself, you won't be able to hear the voice of God and your prayers will amount to nothing. But if you're willing to go with Jesus into this mountain of human need as he did when he went down from the mountain of transfiguration and met with this man and his son and set this boy free, the promise is then your light will break forth like the morning. Your healing will spring forth speedily. Your righteousness will go before you and the glory of the Lord will be your rear guard. Then you will call and the Lord will answer.

You will cry and he will say, here I am. If you take away the yoke from your midst, the pointing of the finger, in other words, looking to blame somebody for the way things are in society today and speaking wickedness, I like the original King James, it just says empty talk. If you extend your soul to the hungry and satisfy the afflicted soul, then your light shall dawn in the darkness and your darkness shall be as the noonday. The Lord will guide you continually and satisfy your soul and drought and strengthen your bones. You shall be like a watered garden and like a spring of water whose waters do not fail. And those from among you shall build the old waste places. You shall raise up the foundations of many generations and you shall be called the repairer of the breach and the restorer of streets to dwell in. If you are willing to go where Jesus is leading you, that is the key. You have a choice now. You can camp on an old experience and die there. Literally you can go to heaven, but you spiritually die in that old experience. Or you can just leave it and go where God is leading you now and you watch what God will begin to do. .