Spokesman for God

spokes::man
I samuel 3:I-4:I 'spOks-m&n probably irregular from spoke, obsolete past participle of speak >> a person who speaks as the representative of another or others often in a professional capacity

I don't just want to be a Hannah. I want to be a Samuel too.

"Samuel grew up. God was with him, and Samuel’s prophetic record was flawless. Everyone... recognised that Samuel was the real thing - a true prophet of God. God continued to show up at Shiloh, revealed through His word to Samuel at Shiloh."

- 1 Samuel 3:19-21 The Message

I just celebrated my twenty-third birthday yesterday. Or was it more like a lament of my twenty-third birthday? For amidst the good food, wine and the even better company that accompanied it, there was a strange hollow feeling inside of me.

Not just a big two-one, but I was an eve bigger two-three now. I pondered over the last twenty three years of my life, and I wondered what I had been doing with it all this while. I pondered over the six years since I had professed Jesus as my Lord and Saviour and I wondered if I had really been that faithful follower of Christ that I thought myself to be.

Twenty-three – an adult no doubt, yet somewhere inside, I still felt like the boy Samuel, the child that still needed growing up. Deep down inside, I still longed to grow up, to grow up as Samuel did: To grow up with God and to be a spokesman for Him – to stand in the gap and be a true spokesman for God, a true representative of Christ.

I was struck that Samuel hadn’t always heard from God, until now. Nevermind that he had been called to minister as a servant of God even before he was formed in his mother’s womb. Nevermind that he had spent all this time in the temple since he had been weaned. Nevermind that he had grown up under the supervision of Eli the priest and ministered to the Lord under his guidance.

Nevermind all that, for Samuel, as Eugene Peterson put it, had still yet to know God for Himself, and the revelation of God had yet to be given to him personally (1 Samuel 3:5-7, The Message). In fact, the truth was that Samuel could barely tell whether it was Eli’s voice or God’s voice calling.

Nonetheless, where Samuel failed, Eli perceived that it was the voice of God calling, and taught Samuel to not just hear Him calling, but to respond to His calling.

I guess it sometimes takes another to point out to us that it is the voice of God calling us, to recognise the potential that is latently residing inside of us, and to prod us to respond to His calling to take hold of the destiny that He had meant for us. Perhaps that was why Timothy found himself being reminded by Paul to stir up the gift of God which was already in him (2 Tim 1:6).

So Eli directed Samuel, ‘Go back and lie down. If the voice calls again, say, ‘Speak God. I’m Your servant, ready to listen’…

Then God came and stook before him exactly as before, calling out, ‘Samuel, Samuel!’

Samuel answered, ‘Speak, I’m Your servant, ready to listen.’

I am ready to listen. To listen to the desires that God has placed inside my heart. To recognise the gifts, the talents, the tools that God has placed in my hands. To respond to the groanings that words cannot express as they arise in my spirit each time I flip through the papers, greeted by pages and pages of grim and grey stories, to survey our world, our predicament, and intuitively cry out that this is not what it is supposed to be.

That’s not how the fairy-tales end.

That’s not how the movies we watch and the stories they tell portray it.

The bad guys aren’t meant to have their way.

Evil isn’t meant to have the run of the day.

Innocent children are not meant to lose their families in a car crash.

Whole communities are not meant to be wiped out just like that by the unrelenting waves of a tsunami.

Governments are supposed to provide good leadership for its people. Not tangled up in a web corruption, in-fighting and red tape.

‘Where is God in all this?’ sceptics ask.

And rightly so, for we may just have become so unfamiliar to the voice God in an age that perhaps is really not that far removed from the times of Shiloh, where the word of God had become rare and the revelation of God hardly heard or seen (1 Samuel 3:1).

Perhaps, we have become all too familiar and glib with our rhetoric of good biblical theology. Perhaps to be a true prophet, a true spokesman, is not just about raining judgement on the sorry state of our world, or to simply tell people that they are sinners who need a Jesus that hardly means anything to them, but rather to “be Jesus”, to lay down our lives, to speak and to relate to them in ways they may understand.

Perhaps to be a true prophet is to be in touch with the grim and grey stories of our world, to weep as Jeremiah wept, to weep as Jesus wept as he looked upon the multitude who were like sheep without a shepherd and had compassion on them. As governments change hands and new leaders step up to the platform, perhaps that should stir us to pray as Paul exhorted Timothy to pray, and especially for kings and all who are in authority that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and reverence. This is what is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Saviour (1 Tim 2:1-7).

Perhaps that is how none of God’s truths may fall to the ground, but that all may know that God is alive and present in each our world – even when we did not know it.

Help me Lord, to listen.
Speak, Lord, for Your servant hears.
Teach me Lord, to respond to You in prayer.
To grow Lord, as Samuel did.

Amen.