GYC 2008: For This Purpose

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Generation. Youth. Christ. (GYC)

Ron Clouzet ~ A Voice Behind You: How To Know God's Will For Your Life

Ron Clouzet

When God Speaks

Welcome, I'm Ron Clouzet and this is the seminar that has been titled, A Voice Behind You.

That's because I have a fairly heavy travel schedule and I didn't turn in those titles on time to Philip.

He says, I think this is what you're going to be talking about.

And so when I gave that to him, this is really what it is, listening to God for real.

In order to tie that, let me just read that beautiful verse alluded to in the title in your program.

This is about a hundred, 150 years before the Babylonian captivity.

The Israelites never ever thought they would be forsaken in their view by God because of idolatry.

They recognized that they were not following God.

God was telling them, You know, I'm going to let you reap the consequences and so forth and so on.

He used prophet after prophet after prophet.

And when it finally came, it's like cancer.

Everybody knows that happens to other people or a tragic accident.

Then when it happens to you, you're devastated, or you're saying, wow, how could this happen?

Well that's exactly what happened with Judah in Israel.

And so we'll pick it up here in verse 18, Isaiah 30, verse 18, Therefore the Lord longs to be gracious to you.

God is trying to anticipate what this great, this very bitter pill lesson, which is the captivity of Babylon, will do for them.

God longs to be very gracious to you and therefore he waits on high to have compassion on you for the Lord is a God of justice.

How blessed are all those who long for him.

O people in Zion, inhabited in Jerusalem, you will weep no longer.

At the sound of your cry, when He bears it, He will answer you.

Although the Lord has given you bread of privation and water of oppression, He, your Teacher, will no longer hide Himself, but your eyes will behold your Teacher." In other words, God wants to give them messages of hope and encouragement in spite of the fact that they are in the midst of absolute devastation, you know, due to their fault, but anyway.

And then verse 21, a relevant verse, and your ears will hear a word behind you, this is the way, walk in it whenever you turn to the right or to the left.

So the amazing thing about God is that the people of Israel had been rebellious and stubborn.

You know the famous Old Testament expression, stiff necked.

And because of that, they are reaping terrible consequences.

And God saying, now He's saying, but look, there's a better day coming.

In spite of all of what you have done, I have better things for you.

And I will keep speaking to you through my spirit.

It will be like a voice behind you who will tell you exactly where to go.

Because here is God who has been forsaken by His own people.

Here is God who has been neglected, who has been disobeyed.

They have not listened to His voice and yet God says, I will still speak to you and if you listen yet again, you will know exactly where to go.

That's a beautiful thing And so we're going to be talking a little bit about how to listen to God's voice in this seminar.

But let's pause for a moment and have prayer.

Father in heaven, thank you so much for GYC.

Thank you so much for this convention that brings together thousands of young adults with a desire to count with the mission of Jesus Christ.

Thank you for the challenges that we meet.

Thank you for the situations we find ourselves in because we recognize that in spite of the fact that sometimes we do not like them.

You intend to use those situations just to work through us and to work on us so that we can receive a blessing and be a blessing to others.

We thank you for this seminar and we pray, Father, that your holy angels may delight to be in this place.

We have very few chairs left, but the angels don't need chairs.

And we thank you that your promise is that your presence will be with us.

And I pray Father that you guide us in our conversation, in our learning today, in our questions.

I pray especially that the Holy Spirit may speak to us directly, individually.

You know exactly what we need to hear, and that is more important than what I need to say.

Because of that lack of a clicker, I am not going to be as free with this, but let me just say a word about this seminar so you have a little bit of an idea.

There are some wonderful seminars being offered and I don't want you to be deprived of some other good ones.

But I want you to know something about this 1.

The sessions, the 6 sessions are in sequence and so you'll see a certain momentum.

Session 4 makes more sense after you have heard the first 3 and so forth and so on.

There is not going to be a PowerPoint available or handouts available.

1 of them is the kinds of, you know, the pictures and copyright issues and things of that nature.

My hope is that we are able to put this on 1 of our websites.

I'm director of the Evangelism Institute for the division.

North American Division Evangelism Institute.

That's 1 of the institutes at the seminary.

I'm in addition ministerial secretary for the whole division.

So I really have 2 or 3 jobs that sometimes feels like 5 or 6.

We might be able to put this in the future, so check with some regularity as to what might be available there.

My goal here with this seminar is to let God speak to you through what is going to be shared.

There's going to be a number of stories, a number of references to scripture.

I really believe that God's Spirit can speak to us.

Each of you come with a different set of circumstances to this place, trying to know and understand God's will for your life.

The seminar, I'll be honest with you, the seminar was designed at the beginning for a prayer.

There are a few chairs, 3 or 4 chairs that are available still.

This seminar was designed originally for a prayer conference.

And I thought, wouldn't it be interesting to talk at a prayer conference about listening to God instead of talking to God.

That's basically what we do with prayer, right?

And so what if we really learn to listen to God?

And so that's the original thing and that's how it started.

We're not going to do singing in this first session.

We're going to get acquainted a little bit.

And then the second session we're going to do some singing together.

And I think the Lord is going to bless that too.

If you don't feel like singing you don't have to.

It's not like I'm going to have you walk out of here if you don't sing.

Learning To Listen

We've talked about whether it is possible to listen to God's voice today.

If you've ever been a student of mine at Southern, You probably have heard this song or have known this song.

Follow me and if there's 3 or 4 of you who know this song, right along with me sing it.

Creating me The likeness of you, restore in me your spirit anew.

Like your heart, I want mine to be, so that Jesus may clearly be seen in me.

There are some half tones there, you got to listen carefully alright?

And I don't have a big, is that microphone something that would work?

It might be easier for you guys in the back to hear me.

And everybody in the tape is going to really say, oh, now that's loud.

If we lift that up a little bit, can we make it happen?

Creating me the likeness of you, restoring me your spirit anew.

Like your heart I want mine to be, So that Jesus may clearly be seen in me.

Father in heaven, we know from the book of Psalms that whenever we praise You, angels delight to be in that presence.

We thank you that you are here and you have been here and you will be here as we invite you.

We'd like to ask you, Father, that you speak to us and that you tell us and you teach us and you instruct us today.

Let me give you this back if we can put that back out there.

Yes, because I need to be on this side because I need to have this close in at a certain level.

I don't have my clicker so that's another problem.

Alright, let's talk about do you really want to listen or learning to listen as we have in our plan, in our program.

I taught a course in Christian spirituality when I was a dean at the school of religion at Southern.

The few perks of being in the administrative, educational administration is that you can assign yourself the classes you want to teach.

Nobody does that for you, you just do it yourself.

1 of the first things I said, well, the best thing to really understand God is to really soak up Scripture.

And so I said, I'm going to make these guys really learn Scripture and memorize a bunch of it.

And so every, you know, we met twice a week and I intended for them to have a passage of scripture memorized every time and then an entire chapter every week.

Well, that was a little too much to stomach And only 1 of my students really processed all of that.

And I said, you know, the final exam is going to be very simple.

So I'm already telling you from the first day what the final exam is.

Well, then I downscaled that to say 1 chapter every...

You know like 1 Corinthians 13 or Hebrews 11 or Isaiah 53 or some of those major ones or even Revelation chapter 21, etc.

The text, 1 of the texts that we spent some time on was Colossians 3.2, set your mind on the things above, not on the things that are on earth.

And a basic other principle, open your mouth wide and I will fill it.

This is the picture of a mother bird with her chicks, right?

You've seen those pictures on Discovery Channel or whatever, you know, these little birds with throats bigger than the rest of their bodies, going like this, desperate, It's like, food now!

The biggest, the mouth, the 1, you know, that's how it is in the animal world, right?

The 1 that is the most eager, gets the most fed, gets to be the biggest, the first.

If you really open your mouth wide, I am going to fill it.

Or, text like Psalm 101.3, I will set no worthless or wicked thing before my eyes.

Very practical things that have to do with our spirituality.

We're going to talk about meditating on Scripture on the fourth session.

That's going to be this afternoon, the last session.

We're going to actually practice some of that too.

According to this text, the way you will know that God is God is if you stay still.

Now that's interesting because in most of our cases we are full of activity.

That may mean that in part We religious people, church people, Christian people, are the ones that have the hardest times knowing who God really is.

Because we're so active doing the things of God that we don't have time to stay still in order to know who God is.

The reason we need to slow down and listen is that only by doing so we will understand God is in control.

Now think about the logic of it and this is why it's important.

That's why the Bible was given to us to chew on, to meditate, to process it.

Not to just read it 1 time and say, Oh, that was interesting.

But so by doing so, we will understand God is in control.

You see, It's a lot easier for you to know, if I ask for a miracle and that miracle takes place, I say, well, God is in control.

But there are other times when the miracle doesn't happen.

Suspended Judgment and Other Great Habits

All right, we're going to be talking about an interesting subject, suspended judgment.

This probably generates 1 of the most recurrent questions.

How do I know it is God who is speaking to me, etc.?

So that's what we're going to be talking about, suspended judgment and other great habits.

Dear Heavenly Father, again we thank you for the opportunity we have to encounter or to be encountered by the Word of God today.

Lord, thank you that you are kind and good and generous and you love us and you deal with us gently and you're extremely patient.

Thank you that you want to teach us and time and again we walk away dismissing what you said or forgetting it so quickly And yet you continue to teach us.

You just keep inviting us back to listen to your voice.

Each of us needs to hear something that is unique and special and appropriate to where we are in our lives.

We believe that you are a big enough God that you can speak to 150 people all at the same time and say different things because you know us.

We long to know you the way that you know us so please speak to us today we pray in Jesus' name, Amen.

The cookie story, see if I remember that story.

Yeah, yeah, this is a setting I find myself in a lot You know how when you have to wait for a flight and a flight is delayed you got you know a lot of people sitting The same waiting area there was a lady there waiting for her flight, and she really was looking forward to these chocolate chip cookies.

So she figured that the flight was slightly delayed and so she got them.

No, no, no, no, no, That's not how the story goes.

She got to the gate, but didn't have enough time to get the cookies that she wanted.

But she had forgotten about that and she sat down and she was reading in oblivious but there were some cookies right next to her and so thinking that she got them, she just pulled 1 and started eating them.

And then when the man sitting across from her also got into the bag and picked up another cookie, and he ate it, And she thought to herself, that's pretty mold.

And then she got another 1 and she ate it.

And the way that it was working, it was his turn.

And so she says, well, he got the last 1 and ate it.

And then she realized she hadn't bought those cookies.

Rushing to judgment can be very embarrassing because she really condemned the man for eating her cookies.

It was his cookies all along and she was the 1 that was eating them.

We rush to judgment, especially when it comes to having opinions about why people do what they do.

The title of this presentation is the opposite of that.

It's a concept that comes out of the counseling arts.

Suspended judgment basically says that you make no judgment at all when you listen to somebody's story.

You do not conclude, well, this must be the reason why this is happening, or this is happening because of that.

You hold back, and it takes some skill to do that, because a natural human tendency is to rush to judgment, right?

You hold off judgment of what's going on until all the data is in, until the entire story is in.

When I was a pastor, people would come to me and sometimes there were problems with the family and so forth, and I only had 1 story.

And it was a very difficult thing to say, you know, because it was very easy from that person's point of view to find what was wrong.

My husband is, you know, or my kids or whatever it is.

To hold off on judgment is to wait until all the chips are in and then evaluate it more objectively.

The Good Shepherd himself, here's my point, the good shepherd himself, Jesus Christ, practiced suspended judgment.

Listen to this, John chapter 5 verse 30, he says, I can do nothing on my own initiative.

The NASB, you know, there are about 7 or 8 major versions that you can trust.

In case somebody does not know it, Paul did not use the King James.

You know, he says, well, I'll use the King James because that was the 1 that Paul used.

So this is from the ANSB, but it's not as good English, but it's good Greek in Hebrew.

And My judgment is just because I do not seek my own will, but the will of Him who sent me.

Now, there's a number of statements like that, particularly in the book of John, where Jesus says that kind of a thing.

This is Jesus, the Son of God, holy, undefiled, powerful, beyond comprehension.

I can do a whole bunch of things of my own initiative, and I'm just a mere human being.

How can He say, I can do nothing of my own initiative?

Because He has made a choice, a conscious choice.

And my judgment is right because I don't seek my own will but the will of my Father.

In other words, even though he as God could make every decision and every 1 of those decisions would be right, right?

All of those decisions would be right because he is God, He's perfect, right?

He chooses not to make those decisions and to defer to His Father.

And as He hears from His Father, then He makes those decisions.

Here is God saying, I am not going to evaluate this.

Here's God saying, I am not going to make a decision about this until I hear from my Father.

You say, boy, if I had that kind of an attitude, I would never get anything done.