It’s Hard To Hear God

The central claim of this sermon is straightforward and uncomfortable: hearing God is genuinely hard, and pretending otherwise doesn’t help anyone. Steven Furtick opens with a story about his five-year-old son Elijah at airport security. A TSA agent separated them, and Furtick began yelling so loudly that the airport intercom announced him as a “code one” — a problem passenger. When he finally reached his son, Elijah was completely calm. “I could hear your voice the whole time,” he said. The contrast is the whole sermon: a child’s confidence in his father’s voice versus an adult’s confusion about God’s. The problem isn’t that God stopped speaking. It’s that we’re trying to hear him through fear, shame, past failures, and the noise of a thousand competing voices.

Why it’s hard — and why that’s normal

Furtick grounds the sermon in 1 Samuel 16, where the prophet Samuel is mourning the failure of King Saul. God tells Samuel to stop grieving and go anoint a new king from Jesse’s sons. But Samuel is afraid — Saul might kill him — and God’s instructions are incomplete. He tells Samuel to go to Bethlehem and anoint one of Jesse’s sons, but doesn’t say which one. The prophet has to fill his horn with oil and move forward before he knows what he’s looking for.