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"People Moving Power." This tape includes the reading of scripture and a message by Reverend Mr. Bruce W. Thielman entitled, "Where Great Things Fashion Themselves." At the conclusion of side number one of this cassette, be sure to turn to side number two for the remainder of the message.

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Let us give reverence attention as we continue in our worship to the reading of God's word as it is recorded in the prophecy of Isaiah, the thirtieth chapter, beginning at the verse numbered fifteen. "For thus said the Lord God, the Holy One of Israel, 'In returning and rest you shall

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be saved; in quietness and in trust shall be your strength.' And you would not, but you said, 'No, we will speed upon horses.' Therefore you shall speed away, and we will ride upon swift steeds; therefore your pursuers shall be swift. A thousand shall flee at the threat of one, at the threat of five you shall flee, till you are left like a flagstaff on the

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top of a mountain, like a signal on a hill. But the Lord waits to be gracious to you; therefore he exalts himself to show mercy to you, for the Lord is a God of justice; blessed are all those who wait for him. Yea, O people in Zion who dwell at Jerusalem, you shall weep no more; he will surely be gracious to you at the sound of your cry;

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when he hears it he will answer you. And though the Lord give you the bread of adversity and the water of affliction, yet your Teacher will not hide himself any more. But your eyes shall see your Teacher, and your ears shall hear a word behind you saying, 'This is the day; walk in it.' And may God bless to us and to our understanding this reading from

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his holy word. Let us pray. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. I want to continue this morning our conversations concerning prayer, and to begin by referring to a conversation I had with one of the fine young businessmen of our congregation some

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months ago. It was late in the evening following the meeting of one of our church committees. Our conversation was at first light-hearted, but then he led the conversation into a more serious dimension, and he spoke particularly about his prayer life. And in the midst of what he was sharing, he said this to me, "I understand prayer to be two-way communication.

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That is, I speak to God, and God speaks to me. But to tell you the truth, Bruce, I don't hear the voice of God. I pray, and I pray regularly, and I pray faithfully, and I know that God is at work in my life. I have experienced his blessings in response to my prayers. But when I am seeking some expression of his will, some specific direction or guidance, I often

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do not hear him. How do you discover God's will for your life? How do you hear the voice of God?" Well, that's a very good question. And if we have any spiritual sensitivity whatever, I think we've all asked ourselves that question at one time or another. And it's precisely that question which I want to confront this morning. And I want to confront it in terms

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of a single sentence from the prophecy of Isaiah which I just read in your hearing. That sentence is this, the prophet says, "In returning and in rest you will be saved. In quietness and in trust you will find your strength." Now it seems to me that the first thing the prophet is saying to us is this, if we want to have confidence because we hear

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the word of God, we've got to be quiet. We've got to come to a point of rest. It's very hard to find any place that's quiet anymore. It used to be when you went to the dentist that all you would hear there was the whine of the drill and your own groans. But I've spent a lot of time in the dentist's office recently, and most of the time now they have

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the parade of the wooden soldiers or something like that pouring through a hole in the ceiling over your head. You go into the supermarket and you're serenaded while you select your kumquats, Johann Sebastian Bach and sausage. You get onto an elevator and Leonard Bernstein and the whole New York Philharmonic are there playing for you. Can you find a restaurant

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anymore where old folks at home is not being drizzled over your chef's salad the whole time that you're eating? Get onto an airplane and Doris Day is blasting at you from both sides. Everywhere you go, music. Now music can be noise. And music is used, of course, to cover up worse noises. Squealing brakes, clattering dishes, trucks in first gear, these

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abominable motorcycles that are doing so much to the oral ecology of Glendale and like communities. Scientific American magazine has said that the decibel level in most centers of civilization has now gotten to the place where it's physically dangerous to men. They say that we are all suffering from aural abrasion. And I submit to you that the decibel level has gotten so

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high that we're not only being physically damaged, we're being spiritually damaged as well because we need quiet times. Times apart. Times of rest. And the very first thing that we're told about discovering God's will for us, hearing the voice of God speak to us is this. You've got to get to a place where it's quiet. A place of rest. I think of the words

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of Thomas Carlyle who said, "Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves." That's worth repeating. Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves. Rudyard Kipling, the great English author, has some place in one of his writings in which he lists what are to him the five greatest military heroes that he knew. They were William

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the Conqueror, the Duke of Wellington, Generals Grant and Lee, and Marshal Foch. And with regard to these men, he says this, "They learned how to use silence creatively." Well, if you're going to be an effective prayer warrior, that is, if your prayers are going to be answered by the voice of God and you're going to hear that voice and understand it, you've got to

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be in a place of quiet where you can creatively use silence because God's voice is always a thin, small voice and those are the only circumstances under which you're going to be able to hear Him. Whenever God speaks, He speaks gently. When He spoke His most perfect Word to us, that is, when the Word became flesh and our Lord Jesus entered into His

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incarnate state on that first Christmas, did Jesus come with a crash and a clatter? Not at all. "O little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie! Above thy deep and dreamless sleep the silent stars go by." Any tumult there? Not at all. The world in silent stillness waits to hear the angels sing. God is heard, you see, in silence. Now

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when I talk about seeking the place of silence in which to pray, I'm not making some kind of plea to return to nature. I'm not saying we're supposed to go out to the Cathedral of the Pines. I'm not suggesting that we become 20th century Henry David Thoreau. Here's a man who's so cynical and anti-social that he goes out and sits under a bush and listens

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to the morose hooting of owls for the rest of his life. I'm not talking about that. I'm not talking about the contemporary fads which are the carrying of that position to the extreme. I'm not talking about Zen Buddhism or yogi which is being practiced in our time where people set themselves aside and then in that aside position proceed through the contemplation

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of the navel or something like that to philosophize with themselves. I'm not talking about that kind of irresponsibility where you have no responsibility to God and no responsibility to the state and no responsibility to the society. I'm not talking about that kind of separation. I'm not talking about going to a place where you have that kind of silence.

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I'm talking about literal silence. I'm talking about having a chair, a place in your bedroom, a place in your office, perhaps in your car, your basement, your backyard, I don't care where it is, but some place where you can sit down and be quiet for a while and let silence sort of sweep away the litter in your mind and then let silence begin to speak to

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you. God will speak in silence. God will reveal himself. One of the most beautiful names applied to God in scripture is the name Logos and that word means word. God identifies himself as word. He identifies himself as that which communicates. He identifies himself as that which reveals. God is not dumb. God is not mute. God does not stand back and say nothing.

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God is ready to speak, but we have to be quiet enough to hear him. So when this young man said to me, "How can I hear God's word?" the first thing I said to him in response is this, "Have you forgotten how to be quiet? It is in silence that great things fashion themselves." The second thing that the prophet says to us is that in this silence we are to return

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to the Lord. We are to turn toward God. And I submit to you that the most important way in which we turn to God is to turn to his word. And I refer, of course, to the holy scriptures which we describe confessionally as the word of God written. There is a famous painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds called "Little Samuel." It is a picture of the child Samuel

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about four or five years of age and he is depicted as a very beautiful child with lovely flowing curls and his chubby hands are folded in a very pious gesture and his eyes are cast heavenward with a very ecstatic look upon his face. This was a day, you know, in which the word of God was rarely being heard in the land, but here is Samuel and he is just

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sitting down with his hands folded looking up and hearing the voice of God. And it is a very beautiful picture and artistically it is a masterpiece, but I submit that it does not give us much understanding about the way God most often speaks to us. Because we just do not look heavenward and fold our hands and start hearing the voice of God in

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our ear. It is not quite that simple. I have only known three people in all of my life outside of some individuals in insane asylums who made statements like this, whose testimony, of course, one lays aside because of their pitiful mental condition. But I have only heard three people in all of my life say that they actually heard the voice of God and who

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saying this, I believed. There is no doubt that God sometimes speaks that way. I would not dispute that for a moment, but it is a rare occasion when he does so. Most generally he speaks to us through his word, that is, through his word written, through the pages of Holy Scripture. When we go into this quiet place then, we do not go in alone, we go in

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with the Bible. There is a province in France, southern France, where when a boy and girl get serious with each other, they are described as talking to one another. That little bit of folk wisdom I think is very precious because real love always starts there. Heart knowledge always begins with head knowledge. The exchange of words, communicating with one another,

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is how we begin to build affections, alright? When we get into this quiet place, you see, we talk with God, that is our prayer, that is what we have been talking about in the last weeks. And then, we permit God to talk with us. And most occasions, God speaks to us through the pages of his word. Look at the book of the Acts, in which the experience

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of the early church is recorded in such detail. And you discover that almost without exception, the early church experiences the voice of God through the pages of Scripture. Their Bible was the Old Testament, and certain letters which they passed around, which later became part of our New Testament. And it was while they were studying these that they discovered

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the will of God. When Cornelius and his family were reading the word and studying the word, and having the word preached to them, the Spirit of God spoke to them. When the Ethiopian eunuch was studying the word and having the word interpreted to him, it was then that the Spirit of God spoke to him. And just as God spoke then, so God speaks now. I don't

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mean in this quiet place after we have prayed, we are supposed to pick up the Bible and treat it like some kind of spiritual Ouija board. There are people who do that, you know. They just flip open the Bible, you know, and stick in their finger and figure whatever verse comes up is the verse that speaks to them. One man did that, and the verse read, "And

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Judas went out and hanged himself." So he flipped a few more pages and stuck his finger in again, and it said, "Go and do thou likewise." And he flipped back a few more and tried it once more, and the verse read, "What you are about to do, do quickly." We're not supposed to treat the Bible like some kind of charm. We are to study it intelligently and relevantly.

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Let me illustrate it in this way. Now suppose that someone whom you love very much had just died, and you were going to the pages of Scripture for comfort. Would you begin with the first chapter of Genesis and proceed to read through all of the Scriptures, hoping every now and then to pick up something which speaks to you in your moment of need? No, you wouldn't

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do that. Would you start reading things like Genesis 3 when it talks about the head of the serpent being crushed, or the exploits of Samson, or the adventures of Ruth, or Matthew 28, the passage which concerns the Great Commission? Would you read those passages? Not at all. You'd turn to the 23rd Psalm where it talks about the valley of the shadow of death. You'd

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talk to John 14 where it says, "In my Father's house are many mansions." You'd go to 1 Corinthians 15 where it says, "Death, where is thy victory? Thanks be to God who giveth us the victory." You'd turn to 1 Thessalonians 5 where it talks about those who are asleep. You would turn to the passages that speak to your need. Well, just so, when you read the Scripture in the

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discipline of prayer, turn to the passages in Scripture which speak about the thing you're praying about. If it's a vocational decision, or a marital difficulty, or a temptation with which you're struggling, some problem of relating to your young people, perhaps it's the question about whom you will marry. I don't care what it is. The Scripture is ready to speak and

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there are passages that are appropriate. This is the reason it's so important to have a Bible like the Thompson Chain Reference Bible, for example, in which you can follow thoughts through the pages of Scripture. Or a good concordance which can guide you to the relevant passages. Or best of all, your own Bible which you have marked in your study across the years.

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Passages that have spoken to you in other times that you can go back to now, in the light of the particular need which is yours, and let the Spirit speak to you through those passages. And then when you've read the Scripture like this, relevantly, then be quiet and meditate upon what you've read. Don't just close the book and jump off and go into something, but

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be still before God and think about what you've read. And it's then that the Spirit begins to move the clouds away and that ideas and truths and things about which you've wondered come clear. I remember about six years ago a man came into my office. He was very upset. He was a Christian businessman. He was concerned about a matter of business in which he was

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seeking the guidance of God. He prayed about it, he worried about it, he fretted about it, he fumed about it. He got himself so uptight and so concerned and so anxious that he wasn't getting anywhere at all. Seeking guidance, seeking guidance all the time in his car on the way to work, in his car on the way home from work, and all the rest of it, and never,

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never finding what he was after. So the first thing I said to him was, "All right, now let's get quiet." I always insist wherever I'm working that my office be a place of quiet, where outside noise cannot interfere. And we got quiet. And I said, "I want you to relax." I put him in a comfortable chair, and I remember the image I used was of the last piece of

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spaghetti on a plate. You know, that last piece that kind of drizzle-drazzles across the plate and onto the table. Like that, you know. And then when we got relaxed like that, we prayed together about the need. And then after we had prayed about it, we read some passages of Scripture which were appropriate to what we were praying about. Now I said,

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"For ten minutes, we're just going to be quiet and think about what we've just prayed and what we've just read. Ten minutes seems like a long time when you're not used to doing it, but for ten minutes we sat there." And at the end of the ten minutes, he looked up at me and he said, very calmly, with a completely opposite attitude from that with which he'd

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entered the room, he said, "I've got it. I know now what I've needed to know." Now it doesn't always happen that dramatically and that overtly, but I submit to you that if you follow the discipline which I am suggesting, you will find that in quietness, that in rest, that in turning to God's Word and focusing yourself upon it and allowing that Word with

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relevance to speak to your need, that you will discover God's will. You will get the confidence and the strength of which the prophet speaks. There's another thing you can do. You can then go out and seek the counsel of other Christians. Now this is a very important thing. One of the other things we learn about studying

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the book of Acts in terms of discovering God's will is this. Those early Christians always did things together. They were together at Antioch. They were together at Troas. They were always seeking God's will and God's Word together. They were always checking with one another, "Is there any word from the Lord?" They were always testing what they believed

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they heard with what other people were hearing. So we need the counsel of one another. I'm saying that our prayer partnership is not only to be a partnership with God, but a partnership with other Christians. Let me illustrate this to you in philosophical terms. This will get deep for a moment, but

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it will be worth your plunge. I promise not to come up too dry. There's a philosophical school, very powerful today, called linguistic analysis. And we're not going to go into all the implications of that philosophy now, but there's one dimension of it that's very germane to what we're talking about. The linguistic analyst says this. It's impossible for one

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person to communicate with another person. The best we can do is have our words speak to another person's words. Now what they're suggesting is this. That when I say something to you, or you say something to me, what you hear is not me but my words. And what I hear from you is not you but your words. And your words may mean something totally different

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to me than you mean when you utter them. For example, I might say to you in a particular situation, "I thought you were very cool." And when I use the word "cool," I'm using the word in the sense of being the master of the situation, you know, calm, cool, and collected, not upset by the circumstances, but controlling them well. "I thought you

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were very cool." But perhaps when you hear me say that, you think of the word "cool" in terms of giving someone the cold shoulder, you know, giving somebody a cool reception, unloving, unwarm, frosty. Now you see, I have said one thing, and I know what I mean when I say it. But you don't hear me, you hear my words, and you may interpret those words

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in a way altogether different from what I intend to say by means of them. So what you really hear is not me but my words. Now I bring this up now to point out that everything we experience in our lives, we run through the sieve of our own subjectivity. Everything we see, everything we hear, everything we encounter, we run through our past experiences.

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We have been molded by life. We have been made to think a certain way, to react in a certain way. And when something happens, we each one of us respond in our own way. Now the value you see of checking with others your understanding of what God is saying to you is this. You may believe that you are experiencing God's will. After you have prayed

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in a quiet place and read His word and thought about it, you may believe that you are hearing an authentic word. That may very much be so. But what is always worthwhile is to talk with others who can be a little more objective about you than you can be. And their counsel will be of invaluable assistance to you in understanding this word from the Lord which

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is yours. I remember back when I was trying to decide whether it was God's will for me to come to California to serve this church or not. And I spent a lot of time apart. And I spent a lot of time in prayer. And I studied every passage in the scripture I thought had any relevance to it whatever. And after a while I felt that I began to have some clear

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word from the Lord. And then I proceeded to check this with my friends. And after they had confirmed this, their understanding of this, then I checked it with you. I came out here and I said, "I will come provided that a certain percentage of the members of this congregation vote to have me come." And I said a very high percentage. So high that

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some members of my own presbytery said they thought it was arrogant. But I wanted to know what God's word really was. And I knew you were at prayer about this. And I knew that you would vote in accordance with that prayer. And I wanted to hear your input on this. Your vote was crucially important to me. And it was only when that last factor was known,

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in other words, when I had the benefit of your counsel also expressed in that vote, that I said I would come. Because then I felt sure I was in the will of God. And I felt that ever since. And in those moments which have been very difficult and very stressful, as for example in the last ten or fourteen days, when things have really been tough around

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here, the thing that has been most sustaining and strengthening is this. I feel like I'm in the will of God. And when you understand yourself to be in the will and the word of God, then you can tolerate anything else that you might be called upon to encounter. So you see, we turn to the word, and we turn to our brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ.

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And then there's one last thing we do. If we're still not sure, if we still have doubt, we throw a fleece. Now that phrase, to throw a fleece, is a phrase that I've heard many times. It comes from the sixth chapter of the book of Judges. God is seeking to enlist Gideon to defend Israel. Gideon is not sure what God's will is. So he sets up a test.

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He says, "God, I'll put a fleece out on the ground. If you want me to do this, you cause overnight the dew to collect on the fleece, but not on the ground around it." The next morning when Gideon looked, the fleece was so wet that when he twisted it, the moisture filled a bowl, and the ground all around it was dry. And then, not being cowardly or doubting,

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but wanting to be positive, Gideon said, "All right, Lord, I'll put out the fleece again. This time, let the dew be on the ground, but not on the fleece." And it was so. And Gideon obeyed the Lord and did magnificent and marvelous things in the power of God. A fleece, you see, is some test which you set up in which you say, "Now, God, I'm not absolutely sure

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about this, and I want to be absolutely sure, so if you want me to do it, do this. And if you don't want me to do it, do this." And God will answer. You have to be careful that you don't do this too often and too casually. There are some people, you know, go around throwing out a fleece about every little question or anxiety that they have. That's not the

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way the fleece is intended to be used. In most instances, you will be able to discover God's will from the other things of which we've spoken. But it's when you come up against that nut that you just don't seem to be able to crack with your prayers and your study and your counsel with other Christians, it's then that you throw out the fleece. And let

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this be certain. The fleece must be an authentic test. Don't just set up some circumstance that can come to pass by coincidence or by chance. It's got to be something which God is going to have to actively intervene in to bring to pass. A young man came to me the other day. He's all uptight about certain decisions he's trying

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to make. And he told me that he'd set out a group of fleeces, and he told me what they were, and they were very inane and simple things. They'd all come to pass, and he thought, "Well, that's God's will. I'm supposed to do this." Then he started to do it, and he ran up against some really tough nuts, some really tough situations that he didn't seem

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to be able to handle. And he couldn't understand how the fleeces were saying yes on one hand, but the circumstances seemed to be saying no on the other. How could that be? And I said to him, "Where you've made your mistake is this. You should make one of those circumstances your fleece." In this particular incident, he needs a lot of money to be able

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to do this thing. I said, "Make that your fleece, then. God, if you want me to do this, you make the money available, and if it isn't available, then I won't do it." When you throw out a fleece, you have to do something which involves a real test of God and a test of yourself. There has to be some risk on your part. You know, we don't just

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launch out into the deep and expect the fish to jump out of the water into the boat. We throw our nets into the water, and it may be when we pull up the nets, they'll be empty, and we'll stand there and we'll look mighty foolish. Having gone out in the search of this fleece, things don't come to pass as we expect them to come to pass, and there

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we stand there with our bare face hanging out. And if that bothers you, well, then don't get wrapped up in this prayer business at all. If you're not willing to risk looking foolish in order to know the will of God, then you're never going to know the will of God, because it has to involve adventure on your part. Nothing ventured, nothing gained

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is a truism, but it is a truism. And you've got to venture something if this fleece is going to be meaningful, and having ventured it, you must be obedient to it. You cannot say, "Now, God, if you want me to do this, then you do that." And then that comes to pass and you change your mind. Uh-uh. Once a fleece is thrown, it must be obeyed to the

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uttermost. You know, I hear a lot of people worrying about their prayers, and they say, "I wonder if God hears me." I'll be frank and tell you, when I talk to most people about their prayers, my question is, "I wonder if they're hearing God." It was Kierkegaard who said,

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"You know, the common man talks to God. The Christian listens to God." Now, what I'm suggesting is that when it comes to throwing out a fleece, you've got to really listen and obey. You know, not like the hymns we sing. You know, we sing, "I'll go where you want me to go, dear Lord, over mountain or plain or sea. I'll say what you want me

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to say, dear Lord. I'll be what you want me to be." Now, suppose he took you up on that. I've heard this congregation stand and sing, "Take my silver and my gold. Not a mite would I withhold." And most of you haven't even begun tithing yet. You can't approach a fleece like some of us hymns that we so casually and indifferently and meaninglessly

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sing. The real question you see about this discovering the will of God for your life is this, not whether God will speak to you, but whether you're willing to listen to the God who speaks to you. It's said that on the night the Titanic sunk, that there were boats all in the area that wanted to get through to the Titanic with a radio message

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warning the ship about the icebergs in the area. But they could never get through because all the people on the Titanic were having a good time sending silly messages back to their friends at home. Well, I oft times think we fill our spirits with so much silliness that the word of God can't get through to us. To hear it, we have to be quiet, because

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it's in silence that great things fashion themselves. We have to study the word relevantly so that God's Spirit can speak through these pages. We have to seek the counsel of our Christian friends in order to eliminate the peril of our own paralyzing subjectivity. And then, if need be, we throw a costly fleece and follow it to the end. So you will be able

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to hear if you'll listen like that. Joseph Raincloud is a Cherokee Indian. He went to Carlisle College in Kansas, biology major. Then, after he graduated, he and a friend of his went to New York City for their vacation, and they were walking down Broadway. And Joe Raincloud turned to his friend and he said, "I hear cricket." And his friend said, "That's

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ridiculous. In the first place, there's no crickets on Broadway, and in the second place, even if there was, with all this roar around you, you couldn't hear it." He said, "I'm telling you, I hear a cricket." And he walked over to a garbage can sitting on the sidewalk, and he lifted up the lid, and sure enough, right inside the lid, on top of some papers,

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was a cricket. And his friend was amazed. He said, "That's astonishing that you could hear that." "Oh no," he said, "it's not astonishing. Look, I'll show you." He took a quarter out of his pocket. Now, he said, "The noise of this quarter hitting the ground won't be any louder than the noise that cricket made. But watch." And he flipped the quarter onto the

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ground, and immediately, everybody stopped and started looking around to see where it was. And then he looked at his friend and he said, "You can always hear what you're really listening for." This, then, is the word of God. "In returning and rest, you shall be saved. In quietness and trust shall be your strength. Then your eyes," says Isaiah,

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"shall see your teacher, and your ears shall hear a word behind you saying, 'This is the way; walk ye in it.'" Let us pray. Oh God, it's true. We hear just what we're listening for. By thy grace, may we be willing to pay the cost of listening to you, to so discover your will for our lives. And the Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face to

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shine upon you and be gracious unto you. The Lord lift up the light of his countenance upon you and give to you and to all those whom you love and to all those whom nobody loves his peace. [music]

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And the Lord bless thee, God Almighty, the Father of God and Holy Ghost, be upon thee. Amen. [music] [music]

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[music]