Elevation with Steven Furtick - I'm Confused About My Calling Part 1

Episode Date: February 2, 2024

People throw around the word “calling” in church. But how are you supposed to find yours? Knowing when God is actually calling you to do something in your life is often a lot more complicated to figure out than we'd want it to be. It would be great if we could get a clear, 'Yes' or 'No' but often we need to learn to move on a 'Maybe'. If you’ve just made a decision for Christ, please respond HERE: ele.vc/tIepfr To support this ministry and help us continue to reach people all around the world click here: www.elevationchurch.org/giving/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Hey, this is Stephen Ferdick. I'm the pastor of Elevation Church, and this is our podcast. I wanted to thank you for joining us today. Hope this inspires you. Hope it builds your faith. Hope it gives you perspective to see God is moving in your life.

Enjoy the message. There is a passage of scripture that is always fascinated me, and I knew it was the one to start this series with, because most of my sermon ideas come from a text. usually a text in the Bible, but this whole series came to me through a text on my phone. And somebody texted me, but I didn't have their number in my contacts, but they had texted me before, and their name was in the text. So, you know, Steve Jobs is so smart, even from beyond the grave. He made a suggestion on my iPhone, and he said, maybe, and then it said it could be this person.

And when I saw it on my phone, I realized that that would make an amazing way to spend several weeks in the Word of God talking about those times where we don't know if it's God or not. And so we're trying to lead our families, some of us, or we're trying to get our education, or we're trying to decide about jobs or dates, or trying to decide about moving to a new house or new apartment, or just trying to figure out what it is that we were put here on earth for. But the series is called Maybe God. Maybe God. We worship a God who can be best explained as mystery, and yet we live in a culture that worship

certainty. And so I want to talk about that for several weeks with you, and I'm so glad you're here. Touch somebody and say, he's so happy you're here. That preacher is happy you're here. That's true. I'm so glad you're here. And what I need you to do right now is give you attention just to this text in 1st Samuel Chapter 3, where we will encounter a young man who's encountering God.

And I pray that we will encounter God in the process today. 1st Samuel 3, verse 1, the boy Samuel ministered before the Lord under Eli. In those days, the word of the Lord was rare. There were not many visions. One night, Eli, whose eyes were becoming so weak that he could barely see, was lying down in his usual place. The lamp of God had not yet gone out. Somebody say, there's still time. There's still time.

I know you might have got off track in your life, but there's still time. I know there might be some things out of order in your house, but there's still time. I know you might have wasted some years chasing your own ways, but God brought you here because there's still time. God left you here because there's still time. If you're still breathing, there's still time. I got a friend named Perry Noble. His favorite quote is, if you're not dead, God's not done. And I just believe that.

I believe it. So the light had not yet gone out, and Samuel was lying down in the house of the Lord where the ark of God, which symbolized the presence of God, was. And then the Lord called Samuel, and Samuel answered, Here I am. And he ran to Eli and said, Here I am. You called me.

But Eli said, I didn't call. Go back to sleep, man. Wake me up in the middle of the night. I didn't call you. Go back and lie down. So he went and lay down. Again, the Lord called. Samuel!

And Samuel got up and went to Eli and said, Here I am. This is really strange, right? Like, because you expect when God calls, it'll sound so deep, so baritone. Samuel. Apparently, it sounded so much like what he was used to being around that he ran to the place where he normally went.

And he was like, here I am. You called me. My son Eli said, I did not call. Go back and lie down. But you need an ambient, a weighted blanket, some milk, a cookie. Samuel did not yet know the Lord. The word of the Lord had not yet been revealed to him. A third time the Lord called, Samuel, and Samuel got up and went to Eli and said, Here I am, you called me. I know you're messing with me. Then Eli realized that the Lord was calling the boy.

So Eli told Samuel, go and lie down. If he calls you, say, speak Lord for your servant, is listening. The title of this message is something that I have heard people say to me of all ages, of all ethnicities, of all economic status positions. And I want you to look at the screen for the title of my message. It goes like this. I'm confused about my calling. I'm confused about my calling. I love God and I love my family and I want to make a difference. But look at somebody next to you and say, you look confused.

Tell him, I am. I'm confused about my call. Lord, have your way. Speak your word. We're listening in Jesus' name. Amen. Now be seated. You are forgiven if when I say calling, you roll your eyes a little bit.

It is one of these terms that is so popular in culture that it almost means nothing anymore. And it can be frustrating, the older you get. it when people talk about lofty ideals like finding your calling. You need to find your calling. For most of us, that's way outside of the realm of our everyday life. We're trying to pay bills. It's like, you need to find your calling and you're like, well, I'm doing good to find my keys in the morning. And you want to talk about finding your calling. And as much as I understand that, I also understand that there There's a reason that the majority of questions that I have been asked as a pastor in these 13 years going on 14 years, the reason for it is that there is something inside of you that wants to find the thing that you were made to do. And you will never be satisfied with anything else.

And no matter how much sex you have, money you make, friends you meet, no matter how big the house is that you build, no matter how big the house is that you build, no matter how much. how many cars you park in the driveway, there will always be something unsatisfied in you until you find that thing that we call a calling. And yet, so much damage has been done in popular culture by the concept of calling that it actually makes us discontent with our lives because rather than understand the real nature of a calling, we have a concept of a calling, and often we spend our lives wishing that we were doing something that God did not tell us to do. The Bible says in verse one that in those days, while Samuel, the 12-year-old who was apprenticing in the tabernacle, because his mother, Hannah, prayed that she could have a son and she had trouble conceiving.

And when she finally had the son, she dedicated him to the Lord, and she dropped him off at age four and only saw him once a year. and she put him under Eli, who wasn't doing a very good job. He was letting his sons run around in the tabernacle and have sex with women at the entrance to the tabernacle. And he knew about it, but he wouldn't do anything about it. And he was letting his sons beat people up who had brought their sacrifice to the temple. And they brought their sacrifice to God, but the priest took it for themselves. Hoffney and Phineas, Eli's sons, would send their messenger out to the tent and say,

Hey, Hoffney said, you've got to give him the fat portion. And the people who came would be like, well, that's for the Lord. They can get the portion after it burns off. That's the priest's portion. But they had gotten confused about what it meant to honor God. And they had started honoring themselves and their opinions and their desires. And they started treating God as common. And so the Bible says something interesting in verse one.

It says, in those days, with all of that going on, the word of the Lord was rare. Because they treated the Lord as common, the word of the Lord was rare. Because we live in a day where it is so easy to get information but so difficult to get truth, I figured this verse would apply to us. Would you agree with me that we are drowning in information, drowning in opinion, drowning in agenda, drowning in projection, drowning in projections, but starving for truth. You know I'm right about it.

It's such a crazy time. You don't know who to trust anymore. You don't know if it's real. You don't know if it's fake. You don't know if it's inflated. You don't know if it's a statistic. Let me give you a statistic. 83% of statistics are made up.

That's a statistic. I made it up. It's a time where truth is hard to find. And it doesn't mean that there wasn't access to the Bible. God knows we have access. to the Word of God. You can pull out your phone right now and a British person will read you the Bible on the Bible app. That made me think of something real funny. One time Graham asked me, do British people find American accents soothing? Probably not. But here's the thing about it. It's not access to the Word of God. It's our attitude to the Word of God. It's our attitude. It's why some people can come into church.

and look narcoleptic in church. It's why some people can come into church and leave during the invitation, because God forbid it takes you seven minutes to get to Cracker Barrel. It's why some people can click around to different sermons and be like, ah, yeah, I don't know, Ferdic's not on today. I'm going to go over here to this one and that one, and that's what. See, when the Word of God becomes common to us, we will have access to the Word of God, but it will not have impact on our life.

And so the first thing I wanted to mention is the culture. The culture in Eli's time was a culture of neglect, a culture where the value of who God was and what he said was negotiable. Therefore, there was an absence of that special presence of God. The word of the Lord was rare because the Lord of the Word had become common. And I just want to say to you today that many of our cultural concepts of calling are really just self-help, individualistic, ambition-oriented delusions dressed up in Christian cliches. And because you got a trophy when you were seven does not mean you get to play Major League Baseball. And the culture of our day is kind of like instead of worshiping God, we worship our idea of God's will. And rather than being in relationship with God, we want God to be a resource who is more like Siri than he is like a Savior.

I don't know if you'll come back next week the way I'm starting this sermon. But we need to get something straight right off the bat that until I treasure the voice of God, value the voice of God, harken to the voice of God, make time for the voice of God, consecrate myself. I can't get it by skimming. I can't get it by just running around to this person and that person. It is the revealed will of God that we're after. It is the revealed will. of God. Now, when I was in my 20s, I did all this teaching and preaching. And now, you know, now that I'm wiser, I turn 40 next year, y'all better start working on my gift now, because it's a big one. It's kind of cringy for me to look back on the way I spoke about calling

in my 20s that probably left people feeling at the very least confused, at worst, frustrated and maybe even full of resentment, because the way it happened in my life is different for all of us. Here's Samuel, who is receiving a revelation of God. And in my life, I never heard anything audible that God said to me. I never, you know, the Lord never said, verdict. Well, God call you by your last name or first time. I don't know.

But he said, he never said, you know, preach to me out loud. There were desires. There were opportunities. I noticed some effectiveness. It's the weirdest thing. When I first got up to pray for Pastor Mickey, who asked me to pray at a Lions Club meeting, I noticed that people seemed to be blessed as I prayed and they connected him.

And it took Pastor Mickey to explain to me that that was the hand of God on my life. I didn't know that. If he hadn't been there to guide me, I would have maybe thought I was just a charismatic speaker. But he helped me to see that there was something supernatural involved, and I was 16 years old. And I had someone who had been around long enough to see some things to tell me it was special. Otherwise, I wouldn't have known it. Now, here's what I did with that knowledge.

I preached in my 20s that just like God called me to preach, God has called each Christian to do something. You agree with that? But here's the part that I think was incomplete. While I'd be up there saying to people, you need to find your calling, you need to find your calling, you need to find your calling, you need to find your calling, you need to find your calling. You need to find you calling. You need to find your calling.

You need to find your calling, you need to find your calling. Because he gets annoying after a while, right? It's like, I'm just trying to, like, I need a job, man. I don't know about a calling. I just need a raise right now. It makes it sound as if it's something that you can just get and just know. And yet, did you notice in the passage that even Samuel, who was the link between the period of the judges and the monarchy of Israel, a thousand years before Jesus,

that even Samuel, who none of his words fell to the ground, even Samuel didn't get it right the first time. I don't know why, but that encourages me. Just reading this little story to know that there's someone that God used to do something great, and he called him, and he chose him, but even this great prophet didn't get it right the first time. I want to set you free today from the feeling that you have to find your calling. That's a cultural concept. It's not a biblical one. You don't have to find your calling.

In fact, if the text is correct, if Samuel is an illustration, then I don't have to find my calling because if I will serve the purpose of the season that I'm in in my life right now, watch this. Get ready to shout. My calling will find me.

In that good news, Christian soldiers, aren't you glad to know that when Samuel heard a voice? And he didn't even know whose voice it was. And here's the thing about it. I want to talk about the culture. And then I want to talk about the contact. The contact. Because when he first heard the voice, it sounded like something he had heard before. Have you ever noticed it's hard to know the difference?

between when you're speaking to you and when God is speaking to you and watch out for the Christians who are running around so sure that it's God speaking to them. Those are the weird ones. Those are the crazy ones. I mean, I'm serious. You got to watch out for them. And they're here at elevation just like they're at every church and they'll find you in the bathroom and they'll say, I have a word from the Lord for you and they don't even know you and it's weird because it's the bathroom. Can I wash my hands? If God spoke to you, he'll do it in the lobby. Now let me finish using in the bathroom. I'm serious, y'all, because I'm a preacher, and people always think I want to be spiritual.

And people will stop me in the bathroom sometimes at a restaurant and give me a word from the Lord. But if it was really the Lord, he would have told you it's weird to talk to people in the bathroom and wait till a man gets outside because there is such a thing as germs and God doesn't cancel out germs. I don't want your prophetic word while I'm trying to... But because it gets weird, because he gets weird, we still have to realize that the only way that the will of God or the Word of God or the voice of God can be recognized.

That's what the Bible said that Eli, who was old, who couldn't see physically. I've been on this thing lately that we really need people in our life who are older than us who have been along the journey and to respect the price that they've paid and to not just think that because they don't go on SoundCloud or because they don't have a lot of Instagram followers that they have nothing to teach us. I'm really seeing the value in people who they may not have the physical vision that they used to have, but they can discern spiritual things. And Eli wasn't even a perfect priest.

In fact, God was in the process of moving him out of the way. And even in that transition, because the whole passage is about transition, it's Samuel transitioning from a boy to a man, from boys to men. I was just thinking, you know, it was hard to say goodbye. But when Eli is transitioning out and when Samuel is transitioning up and he's ultimately stepping into the thing God created him for, God deals with Samuel, but he does it through Eli. And whatever God is going to speak in your life is going to come in the context of relationships.

And I chose the word contact to describe it. Because whoever you put around you the most will start to affect the voice inside of you that speaks to you. And have you ever noticed that God's voice sometimes in your life sounds like your wife? Sometimes for me it sounds like my kids. Sometimes in my life I've noticed that if I am not selective about my contacts, I will start hearing. I don't mean like out loud voices. I don't want you to send me off after I preach today or anything like that. I mean, the voice in my mind a lot of times when I was going through a counseling session

to try to understand myself better, the one thing that the therapist would keep saying is, whose voice is that? You know these things you say to yourself, you go like, I'm so stupid and you never get anything right, and well, of course you screwed it up, you screw everything up, you know, all that. And she keeps saying, whose voice is that? Whose voice is that? And I didn't know if she was just trying to get me to say, you know, it was my dad. Like the point of all therapy.

My diapers were too tight. I had met it. But what I realized is that most of us who are not clinically insane don't actually hear voices. We process thoughts. Right? So we say the voice of God. How does the voice of God come into your life through thoughts? Through thoughts.

And that's why Samuel was confused, right? Because he heard something. So he went where he knew to go. And I want to point out something about this. He did the right thing. He did the right thing. He ran. I noticed the Bible said that when he heard his name called Samuel.

First of all, it didn't sound strange to him. It sounded like what he was used to. So he ran because that's what he did, because he had the right passion. but he ran to the wrong person. Some of you right now, you have the right passion, but you're running to the wrong person or the wrong place. Now, this is not only true in the case of Samuel, it was true of Moses. God called him to deliver his people from the Egyptians. Moses had the right passion. But where he messed up, listen to this, you see. When he killed the Egyptian, it was the right passion, but it was misplaced.

He tried to do it his way. He didn't get it right the first time. And some of the things that you've gotten wrong in your life, some of the mistakes that you've made, it was God stirring you up, but it was Eli that you ran to. You ran to the thing that God was trying to remove out of your life because that's what you were used to. You ran to the thing that you were familiar with because it's all your mind could understand. And so God gave you a gift, but you used that gift for you for a little while.

until you found out, unless I offer the gift back to the giver, it's going to come back empty. But God brought you here today to let you know that was my voice calling you. That was me that gave you that talent. That was me that made you good at that. That was me that opened the door for you. That was me that gave you that responsibility. That was me that gave you health. That was me that gave you strength.

That was me that gave you that connection. It was him the whole time. is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.