Good morning, church. Hello again.
Hey, I need somebody to cart this table out for me when I'm teaching. Can
I get any volunteer for that? Me.
There you go. Thank you. So service
opportunities. Okay. Anybody use our
children's ministry here? Don't they do an amazing job?
Listen, they need help, okay? I know my
kids, I send them down there, they have to go through it down there. So
if you have a heart to serve the children, we— they would love to have
you. Also, guys, we need like 8 people
to help us join our tech team and handle video
and livestream and stuff like that. If we get 8 people, you would only have
to serve one time per month in the second service. So if
that interests you, please come see me after service. And I do want to make
an announcement. Um, next Sunday is our baby dedication Sunday.
Uh, tomorrow is the last day to sign up for that. And on the
27th is our single service baptismal service.
And next week is the last time, or the end of this week is the
last time to sign up for that. So if any of those things
If that would pique your interest, please come up and see us or sign up
on the app. Let's pray.
Thank you for the key change, Michael. That was cool. God, I thank you
for your
word that you have spoken. Lord, your word is
beneficial to us for teaching and
reproving and correcting and training In righteousness.
It is here to complete us and equip us for good
works, Father, in our lives of faith and love
and righteousness and good works, God, are all to bring you glory,
Lord. So Holy Spirit, we just pray
that you would give us a love and a
trust for every word
That you have spoken. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.
So when Pastor Barbie told the teaching team that we're going to be
going into a series called Discerning His Voice, one of the
teachers raised their hand and said, is there any particular topic or
nuance about his voice that you want each of us to cover? And she simply
said, I want you to discern his voice
when coming up with that. So it's like some real Mr. Miyagi
stuff she did there, you know. And as I prayed and considered what I
might teach regarding his voice, a memory came to me from over a
decade ago when I was serving as a youth leader here at
Springhouse. And we had a night where we asked all the youth to get up
and share one testimony, something that the Lord was doing in their lives, as
well as one prayer, something they were really believing in faith
for. And I remember several kids getting up one after another, and
all of them basically Many of them, not all of them, but many of them
basically had the same exact prayer to
audibly and clearly hear the voice of God.
One of them, this one broke my heart, was asking
why God wasn't speaking to them anymore.
These were not careless prayers. These were not throwaway prayers. They weren't prayers
meant to sound good. There was sincerity in them. There
was desperation in them. I knew these kids. I knew the challenges they
were facing at home, the challenges they were facing at school every
day. I knew that the, the thoughts and the feelings they were trying to
process through a kingdom worldview, the temptations that were coming
at them from the culture every day. And when they were asking God to
speak to them, I sensed that they were asking in a
way that their faith depended on it. They were saying,
God, if you would, if I could just hear your voice,
I would be, I would know, and I would be settled in my spirit in
this wilderness that I'm going through, that I can get through. And that
night I went home, I began to think, how could I, how in the
world could I help encourage and minister to these kids that were
so desperate to hear from God? And I remember at some
point this question came to me.
Not that question. Join us, question mark.
Do I have slides, Pastor Will? Thank you.
Is the problem that God is speaking to us less, or is the
problem that we are listening less to what God has already spoken
and therefore unable to distinguish between what is his voice and what is not?
There's this warning in Matthew 12:38. The Pharisees and
scribes had Jesus standing right in front of them, and they
demanded a sign from him. They needed to feel
more and hear more and experience more to be sure
he was who he claimed he was. And because of chasing
that sensation, they actually missed the
gift of Jesus standing right in front of them.
And I sense that in our culture today, we are sometimes, guys,
tempted to overspiritualize and incorrectly
categorize and attribute his voice to all
kinds of thoughts and actions when it's actually
more our feelings that are leading us.
I was just talking to a friend of mine last week who told me a
story. Uh, one of his buddies got a call from a girl and this girl
said, the Holy Spirit is telling me I'm not supposed to date you.
The very next week, That guy got a call from that girl again and said,
the Holy Spirit is now telling me I'm supposed to date you.
And here's a freebie for the youth group kids. If anyone
ever says that to you, all you have to say is,
the Holy Spirit didn't tell me that. Okay?
This kind of thing happens all over the church today, and I just
want to be careful that we are not chasing a sensation
or an experience or an audible voice to the point where we forget
Altogether, that we have the gift of his
word right at our fingertips. We
have the gift of the Holy Spirit dwelling within us, who
according to John 14:26 teaches us all
things, brings to our remembrance all that Jesus has
said, or God has said. And I want to be clear about this up
front. I don't want it to get twisted. This teaching is not a
commentary on whether or not God still audibly speaks.
Okay, it's not a commentary on that. I'm 0%
interested putting him in a box like that. He can do as he
pleases. But I think of that youth that
was crying out, God, why aren't you speaking to me anymore? And I
want to encourage, like, any heart that may be here today asking
that same question, there are hundreds of
thousands of words of scripture
breathed out by God, accessible to each one of us.
2 Timothy 3:16. These are not dead words.
The effectiveness of these words are not confined to a culture and
time. They are alive and active and sharper than any two-edged
sword, according to Hebrews 4:12. So I believe
our best hope for discerning his voice starts
with knowing and loving and trusting what
God has already spoken and having affection
for him who spoke them as well. Today,
if I encountered someone who was struggling in that way to hear his voice, I'd
probably ask them what their prayer life is like. I'd say, are you making—
like, when you— are you just giving up prayers, sending up prayers, and then going
about your day? What is your Bible reading like? Are you going through the Bible
and then just giving time for him to speak to
you through his word? These are all things, guys, that
we really have to fight for. I know I
do. My attention is always being pulled in all kinds of different
directions, especially father of 2 young
kids. Uh, my favorite time to get alone with the Lord and read his
word is very early in the morning before my family wakes up. So
I get up, make breakfast, get my coffee, get the word open, and
right about that time I sit down, these 2 happy little
5-year-olds, a 5-year-old and a 7-year-old, the most extroverted 7-year-old you'll
ever meet, come bebopping down the stairs and they're ready to go,
right? So then I make their breakfast, get them situated, go back to the word,
and now I'm trying to read Isaiah or something with cartoons and
wrestling and yelling in the background.
And I don't remember what comedian it was that said this, but he was
referencing the advice they give parents of a newborn baby.
And they say, just sleep when the baby sleeps. And anybody who has
a baby knows that that's impossible cuz you have so many other things that you
have to do. And his follow-up was like, yeah, and I'll do the taxes when
the baby does the taxes. And I'll fold the
laundry when the baby folds the laundry. In this sense, it's, I'll read Isaiah
when the baby reads Isaiah, you know, but
making and guarding that time for prayer in his word.
is so important. It shows what we value. It's important because it
allows us to better tune our ears to him.
His word is clear, guys, to tell us his
voice is not the only one that we will encounter in our
lives. And I'd probably argue that the
voices that aren't his are much easier to hear on a daily basis.
We experience news and information more than any other
generation before. endless social media feeds, these
voices constantly promoting unthinkable,
unspeakable evil, promoting, aiming, and tempting us.
Voices that even claim to be in Christ but share
a gospel that is not in alignment with his word.
His word tells us that we are to test these voices.
His word tells us that we are to test the words of prophets. His word
tells us that our own hearts and thoughts deceive us. So this
is what I'm getting at. In a world full of
noises and voices and feelings and
influencers and influence and devices and vices
and uncertainty, the infallible and final
authority of God's word is absolutely certain.
It's a sure thing. Knowing his word,
loving his word, Trusting his word. It's critical
for every believer because every single voice that
we encounter has the potential
to echo that first voice in the garden
that planted doubt in the heart of man and woman
with one simple question: did God
really say? Did God really say?
The strategy of the enemy has been clear since the beginning:
plant doubt that God has spoken, distort our understanding of
what God has spoken, and by all costs cause us to lose
trust that what God has spoken is
absolutely best for us. So all of these realities
are visible in our text today. Uh, we're gonna be looking at Matthew
4. So if you brought your Bibles, please turn there with us. Jesus
practically teaches us some really important ways to discern what is and isn't God's voice.
through the use of his word. And also Jesus himself
identifies himself as the living word, and he's made the way for us to
turn our ears toward God once again. So this is Matthew 4.
Do I got it? There we go. Then Jesus was
led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.
And after fasting 40 days and 40 nights, he was hungry. And the
tempter came and said to him, If you are the Son of God, command
these stones to become loaves of bread. But he answered, it is
written, man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that
comes from the mouth of God. Then the
devil took him to the holy city and set him on the pinnacle of the
temple and said to him, if you are the Son of God,
then throw yourself down, for it is written, he will
command his angels concerning you, and on their hands they
will bear you up lest you strike your foot against the stone. Jesus
said to him, again, it is written, you shall not put the Lord
your God to the test. Again,
the devil took him to a very high mountain, showed him all the
kingdoms of the world and their glory. And he said to him, all
of these I will give to you if you will fall down and worship me.
Then Jesus said to him, be gone, Satan! For it is
written, you shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you
serve. Then the devil left him, and behold, angels came and
were ministering to him. And Luke 4 has a parallel telling of
this story that ends with verse 13 and says this: When
the devil had ended every temptation, he departed from him
until an opportune time. So we see from these scriptures,
there is a crystal clear picture of the
supernatural reality of spiritual warfare that is in
motion around us at all times.
Supernatural reality of spiritual warfare right now in this very
moment, tempting to distract us away from worship,
distract us away from what the Lord has to say.
We see that our enemy looks for these opportune times to tempt. He does
it here when Jesus is weak, when Jesus is hungry and
suffering through the wilderness. We should have no doubt that he would
look for those moments in our lives as well. And this is what the Apostle
Peter reminds us: be sober-minded, be
watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a
roaring lion seeking someone to devour. So we rejoice in
a few things. The enemy is not
all-powerful. Okay, we rejoice in that. The
enemy is not omnipresent like God. Okay,
he can do nothing outside of God's sovereign
will and permission according to scripture. But
Peter here is reminding us we should be mindful of his
existence. We should be watchful of his
tactics and his methods and his goals as they are revealed to
us through scripture. And he's using the same method here on
Jesus in the wilderness that he did in the garden all those years
ago. And he still uses on us today. If you are the
Son of God, like God says you are. So this
moment is following the baptism of Jesus, where God says, this is my
Son. So the devil is immediately saying,
did God really say? Again, casting doubt on what
God has already and really said. We notice here,
Jesus' response to Satan with every
temptation is the word of God. What God
has already spoken. Okay. The first temptation to turn
stones into bread is an appeal to
Jesus's God-given desire to eat. This is something
we all have. So the enemy likes to try to invert
and pervert desires that God himself has put in us,
put in each one of us. God has given us the good desire
to delight in food and drink, The enemy tempts us to
overconsumption. God has created us to be
worshipers. The enemy tempts us to bring worship
upon ourselves. God has given us the good desire for
physical intimacy within the covenant of
marriage. The enemy tempts us to pursue pleasures
of that gift outside the boundaries of what God has
designed it for. And that list just goes on and on and
on. And on, on. This is what I noticed about
Jesus. He does not go to God and
ask God to make exceptions for his or to his
word. He trusts that God's word speaks what is best.
We are not called to bring the word of God into submission to our
desires. We are called to submit our desires to the
word of God. We are not called to bring the word
of God into submission to our desires. We're called to submit
our desires to the word of God. I once heard this story,
it's actually last week, uh, of a pastor that was interviewing for a
staff position at a church. And he got all the way through the interviewing process
and he got that last interview with the senior pastor. And the senior
pastor was asking him about his home life, like it was about his wife. And
the guy said, Well, me and my partner, we're not married because we don't believe
in marriage in the traditional sense, but we're committed to each other. We
love each other. We're going to live with each other forever. We already live with
each other. And you know what? We prayed about it and
we feel peace. And the lead pastor, no joke,
had to look him in the eye and said, I don't know what voice
gave you that peace, but it certainly wasn't God's. Okay.
Here's what God's voice sounds like regarding this. 1 Corinthians 7:9,
if they cannot exercise self-control, then they should marry, for
it is better to marry than to burn with passion. So this is
a good takeaway. The Holy Spirit will not lead
us in opposition to the words that God himself has breathed
out for us. The Holy Spirit will not lead us in
opposition to the words that God has breathed out for us.
And one of the interesting things
through this, and we don't— I don't have time to make all the connections, but
Jesus is replying using Deuteronomy 6 and
8, which is where we find Israel struggling through the wilderness as
well. So we have all these amazing parallels of the garden and
Israel struggling through the wilderness, and now Jesus in the wilderness.
And this is the arc of the Redemptive story.
It's showing us, guys, that Jesus will stand
faithfully where Adam failed. Jesus will
stand faithfully where Israel failed.
Jesus will stand faithfully where we all
fail as well. Jesus's second temptation,
something that I see really affecting and
challenging the church and lives of
believers today, and that is scripture that
is misquoted, misapplied and used out of
context. Matthew 4:6, Satan says— he shifts
now— it is written, and begins quoting Psalm
91:11. That should floor us. That should
bring us pause.
Satan knows scripture well enough to quote it
and use it against us deceptively.
So it isn't always just like the obvious lies that we need to test
against the word. Many times it's subtle omissions,
distortions of truth that we need to be testing
against God's word. When we pull up Psalm 91:11, and I'm going to
add verse 12 to it, 'cause I think it's pretty interesting. This is what I
see. For he will command his angels concerning you to
guard you in all your ways. They will lift you up in their hands.
So that you will not strike your foot against the stone. You will tread on
the lion and the cobra. You will trample the great
lion and the serpent. First of all, super
convenient that Satan did not go to verse 12 in this.
Super convenient. Secondly, within the
verse that he quoted, he skipped guard you in all your ways.
And that word, uh, word ways there is the Hebrew word Derek. It's not
connected to the name that we know Derek, but figuratively it, it
reflects Uh, it, um, connects to God's divine path
for us, his ordered steps for us. So Psalm
91 is not telling us to go and throw ourselves
in front of lions and serpents in order to force God's hand
of protection and provision so then we can learn to trust him.
Okay. It's a promise
that we can trust God to provide provision and
protection In his wisdom as he orders our
steps and in his timing and not ours.
And what I love about this is at the end of Matthew 4, the
angels do in fact come and minister to Jesus
in God's timing. So
simply hearing someone quote scripture is not enough
to know that what they are saying is from God. The question
is not only is this in the Bible, the question is, is that what the
Bible means when that is said?
And that this, guys, is like one of the reasons you often hear us up
here say, Lord, will it— will you let anything that is of me fall
away? We are fallible. Okay.
But we also say, test every word that we say.
Okay. You should be doing that. We all wanna be students of the word.
And we have to contend with this kind of thing a lot in today's culture
because we live in what I like to call catchphrase Christianity
culture. This is the
condensing or watering down of biblical truth
into these small, palatable,
marketable, easy-to-retain catchphrases
that, in my opinion, are just unable to properly communicate the
scope of the truth in scripture. So how many of
us have heard this phrase, God will not give you more than you can handle?
See, here's the deal. Everybody laughs at that, but nobody raises their hand.
In first service, like, no one raised their hand, and I thought I was crazy
and I was gonna have to take it off. But then when I asked it
again, like, 20 people raised their hands. So let me ask again, how
many of us have heard the phrase, God will not give you more than you
can handle? Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, Lord. I thought I was
crazy. We'll go to point 3. No. So this is what cracks
me up. Taking that in concept, somebody goes up to
Job, right? Says, brother Job,
you're going through it, man. Like, I know what happened to your
animals, stolen, killed. I know what happened to your
servants, your family taken out in the most horrible way.
Your wife is all crazy and, and mad at you and all this
stuff. And also all these sores and these boils, but I've got some good news.
Good news, man. Be encouraged.
The Lord would not give you more than you can handle. That's
crazy. Don't say that.
That's crazy.
Sometimes it's just best to be quiet and hurt with people.
Compassion. Now that phrase is really well-intentioned.
It's not like the same heart that Satan is using. But we
have to be very careful because depending on how, when, and when
we use that phrase and what we mean under the surface, that may not be
truly consistent with God's voice in scripture. Here's why I say that.
This is 2 Corinthians 1:8-9.
For we do not want you to be unaware, brothers, of the affliction
we experienced in Asia. For we were so
utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of
life itself. So this thing that's happening to us,
so beyond our strength, we wanted to die. That
sounds like beyond what they can handle. Indeed, we felt
we had received the sentence of death. This feels like a death sentence,
but this happened that we might not rely on ourselves, but on
God who raises the dead. So
with that, it feels like Paul is saying, you know what, he does allow
more than we can handle. And when he does it, he is allowing it with
a divine purpose in mind that we might not rely on
our own ability to overcome or handle
anything, but we might rely on his presence to sustain
us. Using scripture catchphrases about
scripture out of context may give us a sense of temporary
encouragement, but it cannot give us long-term sustenance
that comes from the truth of the word of God.
And that appears to be consistent with what the enemy is
going after here. Every chance he gets, he wants to
misdirect and take our attention away from God who can sustain
us and turn our attention towards temporary,
momentary satisfaction. So about 13 or
14 years ago, I was newly saved
and I was just going through the most incredibly difficult,
spiritually challenging season of suffering.
And I was suffering through things that certainly felt like more than I could handle.
And because I was so new to the Lord and new to his word, I
really didn't know anything about what the word said regarding my
suffering or how to process it. And someone came along and shared
this verse with me. This is James 1:2-4.
Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various
kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness.
And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete,
lacking in nothing. And when I heard that, it pierced my
heart. I knew this is an important verse— verses. I need to
hold on to this. But honestly, I was in such a fog
of what I was going through. I really didn't know what to do with that
to help me through. Okay. So I remember going to Pastor Wayne.
Everybody needs a Pastor Wayne in their life. Okay. And
asking him about it and him just patiently walking me through those
verses. It kind of felt like, uh, in Acts there's an Ethiopian
man who's trying to read the book of Isaiah and Philip hears this and runs
over to him and says, do you understand what you're reading? And he goes, how
can I understand it if nobody guides me through this? Like, we need
people to guide us through these things, being led
by the Holy Spirit, of course. And Pastor Wayne was doing that. He was showing
me the scripture is clear to say here, there
are joys and there are trials. God
intends for these trials to produce a fruit in you that you might not
otherwise get if you weren't going through this.
And he gave special attention to the count it all joy thing, and he gave
me some real practical application here. He said, get a
pen and paper, write down joy at the top of one
column and trials at the top of one column. Write down all your joys
and then all of your trials, and then take all your trials and
literally move them over to the joy column.
Count it all up. Count it all joy. And give thanks to
God because the struggles and the suffering
that you're going through is not meaningless.
And that was so meaningful for me because
he wasn't diminishing or discounting my trials down
to something that I could just get over myself with enough
willpower. He was simply pointing me to the word.
The word shows that my suffering has purpose, that God is not
distant from it, and that he is walking with
me through it. This is evident in Matthew 4, because we remember the
Holy Spirit led Jesus into this wilderness. I have
no doubt that the Holy Spirit was with him this whole time.
God's word studied and shared and taught and
understood in proper context is
sustenance.
Life-sustaining. Those— that truth, those truths that Pastor Wayne helped me in have
served me through multiple times rough
patches and suffering that I've gone through in my life. Man shall not live on
bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.
So when I looked up that phrase, God won't give you more than you can
handle, try to figure out where that comes from, my searches
suggested it was most likely some amalgamation of
1 Corinthians 10:12-14, which says this.
Maybe. There we go. Therefore, let anyone who
thinks that he stands take heed lest he fall.
No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man.
God is faithful, and he will not let you be
tempted beyond your ability. But with the
temptation, he will also provide the way of escape,
that you may be able to endure it. And therefore, my beloved,
flee from idolatry. So we
can see where that idea of that phrase comes from. We read those
verses, we see it's more about our temptation than it is our suffering,
which brings us back to Matthew 4. And
we notice here that in God's faithfulness,
he has changed our ability in some way to be able
to choose God and flee from idols that we didn't have
before the cross. And his faithfulness
provided the way of escape. And I want to point out that that is singular
and not plural. The way of escape.
So not overcoming temptation in my own
strength, of course, but through Christ in me.
In the final temptation of Jesus in Matthew 4,
Satan takes Jesus to a very high mountain, shows him the
kingdoms of the world and their glory, and says this: All these I
will give to you if you will fall down and worship me.
This is what we need to understand. Jesus,
prophesied Messiah, King of Kings, Lord of Lords,
these kingdoms and this glory have all been appointed and promised
to Him by His Father. But Satan is
tempting Jesus in a very subtle
and sinister way.
Satan is suggesting that there is a way To have all the
kingdoms and all of the glory without any sacrifice.
A crown without a cross, glory
without suffering, kingdom without obedience.
And this is the voice, the lie of the enemy that the people of God
have bought into far too often.
To have the benefits of Christ without embracing the call
to sacrifice and joyful obedience in him,
as Pastor Wayne led us last week, chasing the living
water but forsaking the fountain.
Jesus's response to this lie: Begone, Satan!
For it is written, you shall worship the Lord your God and him only
shall you serve. Now Jesus here is quoting Deuteronomy
6:13, and that verse falls in the middle of an address
to God's people Israel, where it actually starts in verse 4. And this
is what it says: Hear,
O Israel! Hear, O Israel! The Lord our
God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your
God with all of your heart and with all of your soul and with
all of your might. So the first directive given in this
address to those who are being called to hear the voice of their Father
And respond to his voice is to turn our hearts and our
thoughts and our affections to him and worship.
So Jesus this whole time has not
been showing us how to overcome sin by
Bible memory verses. Okay? It's much
deeper than that. This was not a supernatural
JBQ competition.
Jesus's words, God's words flowing through Jesus,
were flowing from a heart that not only knew and
trusted the words of his Father, but he also found
supreme satisfaction in the Father
himself. John Piper says this: sin is
what we do when our hearts are not satisfied in God.
No one sins out of duty or obligation.
None of us wake up and go, I need to sin today. Let me get
that off my checklist. We sin because it feels good
and it holds some promise of happiness. John
Piper continues, I know of no other way to triumph over
sin long-term than to gain a distaste for it because of a
superior satisfaction in God.
That's what I want. That's what I
want for all of us— superior
satisfaction in God.
The temptations that Christ faced in Matthew
4 was not the end of the
temptations that he would face. That voice
that left and was waiting for that opportune time
comes back again at the cross
with that same lie again. Matthew
27:40. If you are the Son of God,
come down from that cross, throw yourself
down. Guys, I'm
so glad Jesus did not listen to that
voice. That was
not the voice of the Father.
Through his perfect sacrifice and obedience to God,
Jesus has reconciled what sin had separated. He
himself became the way for those that put their faith and trust in
him. Making a way for us to hear and
know and love and delight in the voice of our
Father again. Could I
have a few people to pray? And if you would
stand with me this morning.
If you find yourself struggling this morning to hear
God's voice, If you're struggling through the wilderness,
struggling with your love for his word, struggling
to overcome the same old temptations, the same old lies,
struggling to see the joy of the cross that was once
so clear to you, I want
to end with the voice of your Father in heaven
from Revelation 22:17. Come.
Let the one who is thirsty come.
Let the one who wishes to take the free gift of the water
of life come. So this morning, if that's you,
please come. Let us encourage you and pray for you
that you would see the goodness of God and
put— and have joy and satisfaction in him and his word.
Let's sing.