This transcript was generated by whisper.ai.

Welcome to Day 5, our last day of looking through 1 Samuel 1 through 3, this
first week of looking through the books of 1 and 2 Samuel. Samuel is helping us
to learn how God can open our hearts, about how you and I can live before God
with an open heart, open to His love, open to His leadership. Would you like to
be more willing to follow God's leadership?

That's what it means to live with an open heart, more willing to find discipline
for living above your circumstances even when you don't feel on top of the
world. Would you like to have a deepening compassion for people, to see God
making positive changes in your life? That's what we're learning from Samuel,
what we can learn from Samuel, how to live with this open heart.

God used Samuel in so many ways. He was a prophet, he was a priest, he was a
judge in Israel. He held all of those positions.

He was unique in holding all three of those offices. And today we're going to
learn from Samuel the prophet. Now to learn from a prophet, first you have to
know what's a prophet.

To a businessman, you don't see how I'm even spelling this, to a businessman
it's being in the black at the end of the month. No, this is the prophet with
the pH in the middle. That's what we're talking about here.

But even that kind of word, prophet, there are many Christians who are just as
far away from the idea of what a prophet is as that businessman might be. We
think of a prophet and we think a prophet, a prophecy, that's somebody who like
foretells or tells the future. Well, not really.

Every once in a while God used a prophet to tell something about the future. But
a prophet is someone who speaks the Word of God. And many times the Word of God
is about what's happening right now in your life.

God revealed the future at times, but only so that they might speak in a way to
what God wanted to do in their lives right then. Here's what's going to happen
in the future, so get your lives in line right now. Samuel spoke four major
prophecies in this book, each of them in a different location.

Each of them was something special to teach us. And the first of them is the
most unusual because it came at such a young age and Samuel didn't even know
what was happening when it came. When we look at the prophecies of Samuel, we're
going to look at them as we walk through these next several weeks together as we
come across them, we're going to see that they teach us how to have an open
heart before God and an open mouth before God, open lips.

How to open our heart in such a way that it opens our mouth to share with
others. Open our mouth in such a way that it opens our heart to recognize the
goodness of God. This first prophecy happens at Shiloh, something like Lincoln's
Gettysburg Address.

You can mark these prophecies by where they were given. This prophecy teaches us
some wonderful things about how to open your heart to God, especially at the
very beginning. If you think, "I don't know how to do that," Samuel didn't know
either.

He had to learn. You realize in this prophecy that he gives that in order to
open our hearts before God, God's going to bring you and I face-to-face with our
mistakes, with our sins. That's part of opening our hearts before God, and
Samuel was called to bring Eli face-to-face with that.

He'd made some real mistakes with his family. He'd placed his sons before the
Lord, as we looked at earlier this week, and because of that, his sons had
become an embarrassment in the priesthood, and God's going to call Eli to face
that, and he's going to use the prophecy of Samuel to do that, but he does it in
a very unusual way. Listen to what happens.

Beginning in verse 2, "One night Eli," this is in chapter 3, "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, and Samuel was lying down in the temple of
the Lord where the ark of God was. Then the Lord called Samuel, and Samuel
answered, 'Here I am.

' And he ran to Eli, and he said, 'Here I am. You called me. ' But Eli said, 'I
did not call.

Go back and lie down. ' So he went back, and he lay down, and again the Lord
called, 'Samuel. ' And Samuel got up, and he went to Eli, and he said, 'Here I
am.

You called me. ' 'My son,' Eli said, 'I did not call. Go back and lie down.

' Now, Samuel did not yet know the Lord. The word of the Lord had not yet been
revealed to him. The Lord called Samuel a third time, and Samuel got up, and he
went to Eli, and he said, 'Here I am.

You called me. ' Then Eli realized that the Lord was calling the boy. So Eli
told Samuel, 'Go and lie down.

And if he calls you, say, 'Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening. ' So
Samuel went, and he lay down in his place. The Lord came, and he stood there
calling, as at the other times, 'Samuel, Samuel.

' Then Samuel said, 'Speak, for your servant is listening. ' And the Lord said
to Samuel, 'See, I am about to do something in Israel that will make the ears of
everyone who hears of it tingle. At that time, I will carry out against Eli
everything I spoke against his family from beginning to end.

For I told him that I would judge his family forever because of the sin that he
knew about. His sons made themselves contemptible, and he failed to restrain
them. Therefore, I swore to the house of Eli the guilt of Eli's house will never
be atoned for by sacrifice or offering.

' Samuel lay until morning, and then opened the doors of the house of the Lord.
He was afraid to tell Eli his vision. But Eli called him and said, 'Samuel, my
son.

' Samuel answered, 'Here I am. ' 'What was it that was said to you? ' Eli asked.

'Do not hide it from me. May God deal with you, be it ever so severely, if you
hide from me anything he told you. ' So Samuel told him everything, hiding
nothing from him.

And then Eli said, 'He is the Lord. Let him do what is good in his eyes. '
There's this incredible example here of God opening our hearts to him.

Here is Samuel. He hears God's voice speaking to him, and he doesn't recognize
it. You ever missed God's voice?

God's trying to speak to you through another person, through a message, through
a sermon, and you missed it? Samuel missed it. In fact, God had to come to him
three times, and it took Eli, who was really struggling in his own life but at
least knew enough about God, to tell him, 'Oh, it must be God speaking.

' God uses the most unusual people in your life sometimes. And finally, he said
these words, 'How do you open your heart before God? Speak Lord, for your
servant is listening.

' You have a heart to serve. When you have a heart to serve, God speaks. Because
God is leading us to serve.

And this first prophecy is all about sin. It's all about the mistakes that Eli
had made with his family, the fact that he allowed his sons to get involved in
sin. They were mistreating the sacrifices in the temple.

They were laughing about them and treating God as nothing. Now, we want to hide
from our mistakes. We want to pretend they don't exist or that they're somebody
else's responsibility.

But that shame and blame reaction, it closes our hearts. It closes our hearts to
God's will. It closes our hearts to personal joy.

And so God causes us to face our sins, to face our mistakes, in order to open
our hearts. Not to embarrass us. God's not out to embarrass you.

He could if He wanted to. He knows everything. He could put it all on a page.

God's out to open your heart before Him. The question is, when that happens,
when He touches your heart with a recognition of your own sin, how am I going to
respond? How are you going to respond?

How are you responding right now, even as I talk about this? We've got choices.
It's almost as if you see this black smudge in a mirror.

What are you going to do about it? Three choices. One, you can get away from the
mirror.

And a lot of people do that. They don't like what they're hearing from God, so
they try to keep God at arm's length. They think somehow God is against them.

When God is nothing but for you, He wants nothing but His best in your life. But
some people do that. It's like staying away from the doctor because they might
tell you that you're sick when you know that you're sick.

You can try to get away from the mirror. Or you can just resign yourself to the
situation. Well, there's a black smudge.

I guess I'll have to live with that the rest of my life. I'll just look around
and I won't be able to see this part of myself. In many ways, that was Eli's
solution.

Samuel comes and tells him this terrible story. And Eli just says, "Well,
whatever God wills. There's no repentance.

There's no heart to change. That's why He faced that judgment. If in this moment
He'd had a heart to change, what might God have done?

But we'll never know because He didn't have that heart. " So he says, "That's
just the way I am. " And there's some people like that.

When God challenges you with coming face to face with your own sins, your own
mistakes, your own failings, deep down you know the real truth. God's doing it
because He loves me. God's doing it because He wants to bring His change into my
life.

So the third choice is to trust God to change. Now the smudge in the mirror, all
you need is a washcloth and some water and you'll wash it off. But with the
darkness that's in our hearts and our character, we need a willingness to trust
God with our lives.

And when you do that, in many ways, it's easier than washing the smudge off the
mirror. Now the hard part is humility. Instead of responding in pride, "I'm
going to clean this off," you respond with humility, "I trust God.

" When you do that, He washes your heart clean because He already did the work
on the cross. Jesus died on the cross to wash your heart clean. When I look at
this first prophecy of Samuel, it challenges me to search my own heart.

God, where do I need to confess my sin before You? And where do I need to
recognize Your cleansing? Because You're a God who wants me to live with an open
heart before You.

None of us are perfect, but we can live with a clear conscience by confessing
our sins to God and recognizing His forgiveness. And when you do that, when you
open your heart to God like that, then you're able to open your mouth, open your
lips, to share with others the joy of God's forgiveness. When it comes to
Samuel, talk about opening his mouth to say God's prophecy, it should not escape
our notice that Samuel's first prophecy was to proclaim judgment upon his dad,
his father, with the house he'd grown up in.

Can you imagine how difficult that must have been? The truth isn't always
pleasant, but the truth in the end is always good. The truth does hurt
sometimes, but the truth also heals.

You sometimes have to choose whether you're going to offer people pleasant
platitudes or solid hope. What are you going to offer your own heart? What are
you going to offer to other people?

Now, as we take some time to pray together today, let's just ask God to search
our hearts. Father, we spend a moment before you and we ask you to search our
hearts. Help us to see those places where we've struggled, where we've sinned.

We might call it a mistake or a sin or a slip or whatever the word we've used.
It's something that is hurting our heart because it's not what you want in our
lives, God. That lie, that lust, that living for myself, whatever it is, it's
not what you want in my heart.

Lord, instead of us trying to make ourselves perfect on our own energy, we take
a moment right now to recognize your forgiveness and to ask you to mature us, to
perfect us, to grow us, to be more like you. Thank you for the wonderful
forgiveness we have in Jesus. Thank you.

In your name, amen. Well next week we're going to continue our study of 1 Samuel
and we continue to learn from Samuel how to live life with an open heart.