They Denied Him Entry. Sinatra Fought Back For His Friend! 

Las Vegas, 1955. The neon lights never sleep in this town. They burn all night, every night, casting their goddy glow out across the Mojave Desert like a dare, like a promise, like a lie, depending on who you are and what side of the door they let you stand on. The Sands Hotel stands at the center of it all.

 The Copa room inside is the most electric room in America on any given night. Presidents have sat in those seats. Movie stars have laughed at those tables. The champagne flows like water and the money moves like a river and everybody inside believes at least for a few hours that this is what the good life feels like. And tonight, the man responsible for all of that electricity, all of that energy, all of that packed house, standing ovation, hold your breath and listen magic.

 That man is Sammy Davis Jr. He is 29 years old. He has one eye. He lost the other one the year before in a car accident out on a California highway that should have killed him and maybe would have killed a lesser man. But Sammy Davis Jr. is not a lesser man. He is a force of nature stuffed into a small frame.

 And when he walks out onto that stage, something happens in a room that you cannot explain and you never forget. He sings and grown men get quiet. He dances and women forget to breathe. He does an impression of Jimmy Kagny, then Humphrey Bogart, then Carrie Grant, and the crowd loses its mind all over again. He plays trumpet, he plays drums.

 He taps his way across that stage like the floor is trying to keep up with him and can’t quite manage it. The Sands is making a fortune off of this man. Every seat is filled. The casino floor after the show is packed wall to-wall because people who came to see Sammy Davis Jr. don’t want the night to end. They order another drink.

 They roll the dice one more time. They linger because something about Samms performance makes you want to hold on to the feeling just a little longer. And then the show ends. The applause crashes through the copa room like a wave. Sammy takes his bow. That deep full bow he always gave. The one that said thank you like he truly meant it because he always truly meant it.

 He walks off stage still warm from the lights. Still vibrating from the music. still wearing that grin that could light up a room all by itself. He walks through the corridor toward the lobby. And that is where the city of Las Vegas shows him exactly what it thinks of him. A security guard steps into his path. The man doesn’t raise his voice.

He doesn’t have to. The message is delivered in the flattest, most matterof fact tone imaginable, which somehow makes it worse. Staff and colors. The guard says, “Use the kitchen entrance.” Sammy Davis Jr. who just made that hotel enough money to run itself for a week, who just made 500 strangers feel something true and beautiful.

 Sammy stops. He looks at the guard and something behind his eyes goes very quiet. He had been through this before, growing up in Harlem, traveling the country with his father and his uncle in a vaudeville act, pulling into towns where certain hotels would not take them, where certain restaurants would not feed them, where the geography of dignity was drawn in invisible lines that everyone could see and almost no one would challenge.

 He knew how this went. He lowered his head. He started to turn toward the kitchen corridor and then a hand came down on his shoulder. Frank Sinatra. He had been standing just behind Sammy, still in his performance clothes. Still carrying that easy coiled authority, he wore the way other men wore cologne.

 Frank Sinatra looked at the security guard. The way a man looks at something, he is deciding how seriously to take. He took his time. He let the silence do some of the work. Then he spoke, not loudly. Frank Sinatra never needed volume to be heard. If he goes through the kitchen, Sinatra said, “We all go through the kitchen.

” And if that’s how it is, then none of us go on tomorrow night. The guard blinked. Sinatra didn’t. That was the difference between them. To understand why that moment mattered, why it shook the foundations of that city. You have to understand who Frank Sinatra was in 1955. Not just as a singer, not just as a star.

 You have to understand what he meant to Las Vegas and what Las Vegas meant to him. And why? When Francis Albert Sinatra spoke, everyone in a room with a financial stake in anything stopped what they were doing and listened. They called him the chairman of the board. Not as a joke, not as flattery, as a simple statement of fact. Frank Sinatra was the most powerful entertainer in the world.

 And in Las Vegas, the most powerful entertainer in the world was functionally the most powerful man in the city. This was a town built on entertainment and gambling. and Sinatra was the engine that drove both. When Frank Sinatra was booked at the Sands, the hotel didn’t just sell out the Copa room. It sold out every room in the building.

 It packed the casino floor. It drove up the table minimums because the clientele coming to see Sinatra had money and were willing to spend it. Restaurants filled up. Bars overflowed. The whole economic organism of the strip breathed a little easier when Frank Sinatra was in town. Jack and Tratter, who ran the entertainment operation at the Sands, understood this better than anyone.

 He had seen what Sinatra did to a bottom line. He had seen the numbers before Sinatra was booked and after, and the difference was not subtle. Sinatra was not simply a performer. He was a financial event. And Frank knew it. He wasn’t arrogant about it. Not in the way that smaller men are arrogant.

 He didn’t wave it around like a weapon looking for a target. But he understood leverage the way a chess player understands the board. He knew where his pieces were and he knew what happened when he picked them up. He also knew something that the hotel owners and the casino bosses had perhaps not fully reckoned with, which was this.

 Frank Sinatra did not need Las Vegas. Las Vegas needed Frank Sinatra. That distinction in a town built on the illusion of mutual dependency was everything. But the power alone does not explain why he put himself in that corridor for Sammy Davis Jr. Power explains what he could do. It does not explain what he chose to do and why.

 For that, you need to understand the friendship. Frank Sinatra met Sammy Davis Jr. when Sammy was still a child performing with the Will Masten trio, his father and his uncle and himself on the vaudeville circuit. Frank was already on his way up, already recognizable, already carrying that voice around like something he’d been born knowing how to use.

 and he watched this kid perform and understood immediately that he was looking at someone extraordinary. The friendship that grew between them was not the polished press release kind. It was not two men who agreed to be photographed together and called it brotherhood. It was real. It was earned across years of late nights and shared meals and long conversations about music and life and what it meant to be the kind of man who stood for something.

 Frank saw in Sammy a purity of talent that moved him. And Sammy saw in Frank a kind of fearless integrity that he admired more than he could easily put into words. Here was a man who came from the streets of Hoboken, New Jersey, who had fought his way to the top of an industry that would have eaten him alive if he’d let it, and who arrived at the summit of his success without surrendering the part of himself that knew right from wrong.

 Sammy once said that Frank Sinatra was the first man of real power and real fame who ever treated him simply as a man. Not as a novelty, not as an exception to some rule. As a man. That sounds like a small thing. In 1955 in the American entertainment industry, it was not a small thing. It was for Sammy Davis Jr. one of the most significant things in his life.

 And Frank felt the weight of that. He understood what Sammy was living with. Even if he couldn’t fully understand what it felt like from the inside, he understood it well enough to be angry about it. And Frank Sinatra’s anger, when it was righteous, was a remarkable and effective thing. Because what was happening to Sammy Davis Jr. in Las Vegas was not subtle, and it was not isolated, and it was not accidental.

 Las Vegas in the 1950s was, in the language of the time, the Mississippi of the West. The gambling industry had built a city in the desert and imported all of the ugliest racial customs of the American South right along with the dice tables and the showg girls. The hotels on the strip enforced what were then called Jim Crow rules.

 The same framework of enforced separation and deliberate humiliation that had defined life for black Americans in the south since reconstruction. Black entertainers could perform on the strip. In fact, the strip wanted them. The white audiences who filled the casinos loved jazz and blues and the kind of explosive, joyful, heartbreaking performance that artists like Sammy Davis Jr.

 and Nat King Cole and Lena Horn could deliver. The hotels were happy to put those artists on a stage and collect the profits. What they were not prepared to do was treat those artists as human beings once the performance ended. Sammy Davis Jr. after finishing a show at the Sands was not permitted to gamble on the casino floor he had just filled.

 He was not permitted to eat in the restaurant that fed the audience who had just given him a standing ovation. He was not permitted to book a room in the hotel he had just made significantly richer. He had to travel across town to the west side, the part of Las Vegas where black residents and performers were permitted to exist freely and stay in rooming houses and small hotels that catered to a clientele that the strip pretended didn’t exist.

There is a story and it is one of the ugliest stories to come out of that era about a hotel pool. Sammy Davis Jr. was on some occasion permitted to use the hotel swimming pool, an exception, a gesture toward normaly. And when the hotel management discovered that a black performer had been in the water, they drained the pool, the entire pool, they drained it and refilled it as though the water itself had been compromised as though a human being’s presence in it had made it something other than water.

When Frank Sinatra heard about this, the people around him said the temperature in the room changed. That is not a metaphor. The people who knew Frank Sinatra knew the difference between him annoyed and him angry. And they knew that when he was truly deeply angry, something in the air around him shifted. He went quiet. He went still.

 And that was when you paid attention. He was not a man who wrote letters to newspapers about injustice. He was not a man who delivered speeches or organized marches. Those things were not in his nature, and he would not have claimed they were. What was in his nature was the direct application of force to a problem.

 He was a man from Hoboken who had grown up watching the world divide itself into people who pushed and people who got pushed and he had decided very early which kind of man he intended to be. He started making demands, not requests, not suggestions, demands. He told the management at the Sands with the clarity and brevity that were the hallmarks of his communication style that if Sammy Davis Jr.

 was performing at the Sands, Sammy Davis Jr. would be treated at the Sands with the same respect and given the same access as every other performer on that stage. He would eat in the restaurant. He would walk through the front door. He would be housed in the hotel in a room befitting a man of his stature and his contribution to the hotel’s revenue.

 Or Frank Sinatra would not be performing at the Sands. This was not an idol threat. The people in that room knew it was not an idol threat because Frank Sinatra did not make idol threats. He made promises. And the difference between a Sinatra promise and other men’s promises was that Sinatra had both the will and the means to keep them.

 The men who owned and operated the Sands Hotel were not gentle businessmen. They were connected, as the saying went, to organizations that did not generally respond well to ultimatums. The casino industry in Las Vegas in the 1950s was in substantial part a creation of organized crime. And the men who sat across the desk from Frank Sinatra that day were men who were accustomed to being the ones who issued ultimatums rather than received them.

 They looked at Sinatra. They weighed their options. On one side of the scale, their principles, their customs, the system they had built and maintained, the social architecture that kept certain people in certain places. On the other side of the scale, Frank Sinatra. The economics of that calculation were not complicated. Frank Sinatra did not move.

He sat in that chair the way he stood at a microphone with complete and utter ownership of the space he occupied. There was no bluster in him, no performance of toughness. He was simply a man who had decided what he was going to do and was waiting for the other side to accept reality. He had by some accounts the contract in his hand or close enough to it.

 The implication was clear and it was not dressed up in diplomatic language. The contract could be torn up. the engagement could be cancelled. The coper room could sit dark. And every night it sat dark was a night the casino floor ran a little quieter. The bars moved a little slower. The whole economic machine of the Sands Hotel turned a little less efficiently.

They did not call his bluff because it was not a bluff. They said yes. And then Frank Sinatra pushed further because that is what Frank Sinatra did when the other side said yes. He kept going. Not out of cruelty, out of the understanding that Halfway was not the same as Dunn. He brought in his friends Dean Martin, Peter Lofford, Joey Bishop, and yes, Sammy Davis Jr.

 And together, this group of men who would become known as the Rat Pack made it a condition of their collective presence at the Sands that the hotel operate without segregation. All of them or none of them. And all of them meant all of them had equal access to every part of the building, every facility, every room. The Sands agreed.

And then, because the Sands was the standard setter on the strip, because what the Sands did, the other hotels watched and often followed, the pressure began to spread. It was not instant. It was not clean. The history of civil rights is never clean. There were still indignities.

 There were still moments of ugliness. The machinery of prejudice does not simply stop because one powerful man draws a line in the desert sand. But the line was drawn and it held other hotels watching the sands navigate the economics of integration and discover that the sky had not fallen, that the casino floors had not emptied, that the audiences had continued to come and the money had continued to flow, began to make their own adjustments slowly, grudgingly, with the particular grace of men who were changing their minds for financial rather than moral

reasons and would prefer you not notice the distinction. But they changed. The barrier cracked and where it cracked, light got in. By the time the rap pack was performing together at the Sands in the early 1960s, those legendary shows that people still talk about, that people who were there still describe with a kind of reverent disbelief, as though they witnessed something that shouldn’t have been possible, but was by that time.

 The Copa room was integrated, the audience was integrated, the hotel was integrated, and Sammy Davis Jr. was walking through the front door. Not the kitchen door, the front door. Sammy never forgot what that cost Frank. Not financially. Sinatra could absorb a financial risk without flinching. What it cost him in terms of confrontation with powerful, dangerous men who did not like being told what to do.

 In terms of making himself the center of a controversy that he could easily have avoided. He had nothing to gain from this fight except the satisfaction of doing what was right for his friend. And in a world where most people find reasons to look the other way, that kind of friendship is not a small thing. It is one of the largest things there is.

Sammy Davis Jr. in interviews late in his life was asked about Frank Sinatra many times. He was asked about the performances, the parties, the legendary nights at the Sands. And he always answered those questions with warmth and humor and the storytelling gift that never left him. But when he was asked about what Frank meant to him personally, when the conversation moved away from the performances and toward the man, Sammy Davis Jr.

‘s voice would change. Something in it would get very quiet and very still. And he would say that Frank Sinatra was the man who made him feel for the first time in a significant and sustained way that someone with real power in the real world was going to use that power to stand beside him. Not in front of him, not in a way that reduced him or made him a cause rather than a person.

 Beside him, as a friend, as an equal, as a brother. Frank Sinatra did not do this because it was easy. He did it because Sammy was his friend and his friend was being wronged. And for Frank Sinatra, that was the beginning and the end of the moral equation. He was not a complicated philosopher about it. He was not working through a political framework or calculating the public relations implications.

 He saw his friend being humiliated and he could stop it. So he stopped it. There is a word for that. It is not a fashionable word in an age that prefers its heroes to be complicated and its morality to be ambiguous. But the word fits. And the word is simply this loyalty. Real loyalty. Not the kind you perform for an audience.

 Not the kind that costs you nothing and asks nothing of you. The kind that shows up in the corridor of the Sands Hotel when a security guard is pointing your friend toward the kitchen entrance and puts a hand on that friend’s shoulder and says without hesitation, without calculation, without a single moment of wondering whether this is the smart play, no, not tonight.

Not ever again. That is what Frank Sinatra did for Sammy Davis Jr. and Las Vegas has never quite been the same since. The neon lights still burn all night on the strip. The casinos are still there, though the names above the doors have changed. The Sands itself is gone now. Imploded in 1996, turned to rubble and then to memory and then to the kind of story that gets told in documentaries about what once was.

 But the thing that happened inside it, the quiet, furious, completely effective act of one man refusing to accept the terms that the world was trying to impose on his friend that remains. It remains in every performer who walks through a front door without thinking about it because someone before them made sure that door was open.

 It remains in the idea which is not always honored but is never entirely abandoned. That loyalty is not just a feeling. It is an action. It is a choice you make in real time under pressure when it cost you something. Frank Sinatra made that choice. He made it in a hallway in 1955 while the casino lights hummed and the dice rolled and the whole goddy, beautiful, complicated machine of Las Vegas spun on around him.

 He made it because Sammy Davis Jr. was his friend and some things the chairman of the board had decided are simply not negotiable.

The In Touch Daily Devotional. Now available in easy to read large print. Order yours today.  male announcer: “In Touch,” the teaching ministry of Dr. Charles Stanley. Next on “In Touch,” “Listening to God.” Dr. Stanley: It is a very comforting thought to think about the fact that God loves you and me enough to have made a plan for our life.

And He planned it before you and I ever existed because He’s known everything for all time. So that you weren’t just an accident. God had a plan for your life. Now whether you understood that or not is a different issue. But He does have a plan for every single one of us. And the very fact that He has a plan is an expression of His love for us, that He thinks enough of us that He wants the best for us.

He has a plan that He has laid out in His Word, that if we will just follow His Word, follow His plan, we’ll have life at its very best. Because His plan is always the best. His plan is not always the easiest, but it is the best. Some of His plans may lead us to places like we have to climb mountains, or walk through valleys, or whatever it might be.

But He has a plan. And I would simply ask you in the beginning of this message: Have you ever asked God to show you His plan for your life? Have you ever asked Him if you were following His will and His purpose for your life? Or did you just sort of grow up thinking, “I’ll do what comes next,” or “I’ll do what’s the most convenient to do”? If you have never asked, “God, show me Your will for my life.

What is Your plan for my life?” If you’ve never thought about it, you need to think about it now, and this is a good time in this message for you to think about it, because God has certainly done that. He’s made a plan, and the question is, if He has a plan, is He willing to guide you in that plan? And the answer is yes, because here’s what He says.

He says in Psalm 32, “I will teach you and instruct you in the way which you should go; I will guide you with My eye upon you.” So that’s what I want to talk about. The very idea that God would guide our life. But in order for Him to do that, there’s something that people oftentimes don’t think about. And that is if He’s going to be my guide, I’ve got to be willing to listen to what He says.

God has a plan for your life. And He’s continuously giving you a sense of direction. But if you’re not listening, you’re going to miss it. Because you see, it’s one thing to be guided, it’s something else to be a listener, and that’s the part that I want to talk about today, and that is the fact that our responsibility is to listen to Him.

Now if you’ll turn to Mark, the 4th chapter, look there for a moment. There are three passages here in Mark that I want you to notice because Jesus was very conscious of the fact that whenever He spoke, He wanted people to listen to Him. And so, look if you will, in this 4th chapter of Mark and beginning in verse 1: “He began to teach again by the sea.

And such a very large crowd gathered to Him that He got into a boat in the sea and sat down; and the whole crowd was by the sea on the land. And He was teaching them many things in parables, and was saying to them in His teaching,” now watch this, and this is the way He begins. “Listen to this! Behold, the sower went out to  sow.

” So He begins His parable by saying, “Listen to this.” And if you look at the 23rd verse of the same chapter, He said, “If anyone has ears to hear, let him hear.” And He was saying to them, take care what you listen to. It’s not only necessary to listen, but you have to be careful what you listen to. And then look, if you will, in the 7th chapter.

We stay right in Mark. Look in the 7th chapter and look, if you will, in the 14th verse of the 7th chapter, and He begins here. “After He called the crowd to Him again, He began saying to them, ‘Listen to Me, all of you, and understand.'” Because He knew that regardless of what He said, if they weren’t listening, it wasn’t gonna do them any good.

So you ask yourself the question: I wonder if God’s been speaking to me and I haven’t been listening. God’s guidance is of no value if I’m not listening. And no one else can listen for you. There may be someone who can give you a suggestion here and there and so forth, but God doesn’t speak–watch this carefully.

He doesn’t speak most of the time for somebody else to come tell you. But there are lots of times we hear through other people, God saying something that really applies to our hearts, but God can speak to you personally. He spoke to the apostle Paul, but He spoke to those people whose names are not in the Bible.

God speaks to those who are willing to listen, and all of us need divine guidance in our life, in every area, and He is ready and willing and committed to showing us and telling us. So when we talk about listening to God, you say, “Well, how does He speak?” His primary way of speaking to us is through His Word, the Bible, and sometimes people will say, “Well, why do you–how do you hold up a big old Bible?” I’ll tell you why.

Because I’m not the authority. This is the authority. And if you’re going to church somewhere that you don’t see one of these, doesn’t have to be just like this one, but nobody opens a Bible, you should have questions. Why is it that the ultimate final authority is not opened? Because this is the authority.

And what I want to share with you came from the authority, so the Word of God, this is the way He speaks. This is His primary way of speaking, and of course, He speaks to us through prayer. He gives us guidance oftentimes, and when somebody says to me, “Well, I’ve never heard God speak,” I would say to you because you’re not listening.

Because I know that He speaks to a lost person through His Holy Spirit to convict them of sin. They can brush it off very easily and move on. He speaks to one–any one of His children very clearly if we’re willing to listen to Him. So I’ll ask you this, in your prayer time, how much time do you give to listening to God, or you do all the talking? If you sit down to pray, you sit down and say, “Heavenly Father, I just want to thank You for today and–” and go, you go on and on and on.

And then you say, “in Jesus’s name, amen,” and you get up and do whatever you’re gonna do. That’s not the way to listen to God. So I simply want to say this. You need to give God time to speak. Because if He has a plan, He wants to show you what the plan is. He wants to guide you in the plan. When God speaks, He speaks to you about your life and it’s always good.

It may be a warning sometimes, but even that’s good. So He speaks through His Word, for example, He speaks through prayer, He speaks through circumstances, the things that happen to us that God will speak through those things. And you know, I mentioned to you about falling, and my first thought when my head hit my arm, thank God, not the floor, I thought, “God, what are You up to?” Because I don’t believe there are accidents with God’s children.

You’re walking in His will and something happens, He’s up to something, and I instantly wanted to hear what He had to say. Well, did I hear? No, not then. It took me two or three weeks to really begin to understand what He was doing in my life. But He had to get my attention. Now you say, “Well, you mean to tell that God did that to get your attention?” I can tell you absolutely, yes, He did, and I listened to Him and thank God and secondly, I would go through it again if necessary for God to show me what He showed me.

So sometimes His circumstances are painful. But you have to ask yourself the question: What’s more important, my ease, comfort and pleasure or hearing from God? If you’re willing to listen, He will use circumstances that are difficult sometimes in order to get the message to us, and then sometimes God speaks through other people.

He may choose someone that you don’t even like. Or someone that you have a difficult time having a relationship with, but sometimes God speaks through others, so the important thing is this, and that is that He’s speaking because He wants to give us clear direction for how He wants us to live. And it’s unwise for me to think that He’s got a plan and that I’m not gonna listen.

Listening is–listen. Listening is the key. And so I would simply say to you when you decide to pray, when you kneel down or sit in the chair, whatever it might be, just think about this: before you start talking and telling God everywhere–about all these things that He already knows about, or complaining about, or whatever it might be, why don’t you take time just to be quiet? And just sit quietly and just say this to Him: “Heavenly Father, I need to listen to You.

I’m going to be quiet and I just want You to speak to my heart and help me to listen carefully so that I can do exactly what You want me to do.” How do you think God will respond to that? I’ll tell you how. He will say to you exactly what you need to hear, and when He does, don’t say, “Oh well, I– that’s just my imagination.

” No, God promises to lead you. Listen to what He says: “Trust in the LORD with all your heart, lean not to your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him, He will direct your path.” But I must acknowledge Him, respect Him, love Him, adore Him, and obey Him, whatever He says. And so oftentimes people have a difficult time admitting and being willing to do that.

Now, how can I identify the voice of God? Because people oftentimes say, “Well, I’m not sure God is speaking.” Well, first of all, it’s always gonna be consistent with the Word of God. It’s always gonna be consistent with the Word of God. He’s not gonna say anything to you that is inconsistent with the Word of God, and usually He speaks quietly, softly, sort of, it’s like a whisper.

You just know that it came from God. It doesn’t make any difference what anybody else thinks. You know that He’s spoken to your heart. And so, when He speaks to you, He will speak to you–listen, He will speak to you in a way, the exact proper way, that He knows you can hear Him. So you see, He doesn’t make it complicated.

If He says, “Tomorrow, I want you to go in and resign your job.” What? But you know that God said it to you, crystal clear. What would happen if you did that? I can tell you this. If God tells you to leave one place, that’s because He’s already planned the other place. God is never behind in any issue and so somebody says, “Well, God would never do that.

” I can think of three staff members and two or three other people that come to my mind quickly, that that’s exactly what God did. So don’t underestimate how intense God is on directing and guiding your life, whatever it might be. So sometimes we have to ask ourselves the question, “Okay, God, how are You gonna do this?” It’s always going to be consistent with scriptures.

Sometimes it’s very quietly He speaks to us. It’ll always be clear, He’ll never give you any mumbo jumbo about anything. He’ll tell you exactly what to do. And listen, He doesn’t use a lot of extra words. He goes straight to the issue and says, “Here’s what I’ll have you to do. I want you to do thus and so, I want you to stop that, start this.

I want you to start reading the Word of God every day.” If God says that to you, you know why? Because He wants to guide you in some issue that’s to be found in the Word of God. And so sometimes you’re going to have a clash with what God says to you versus what other people may think. That’s why you don’t have to go telling everybody what God said to you.

Secondly, a lot of things He says to us will clash with our flesh, that doesn’t fit who you are. “I don’t want you heading in that direction. I don’t want you developing that relationship.” Very, very specific and clear, and always speaking to our spirit. So, He’s gonna speak. Our responsibility is to listen.

Now, I think about how few people, for example, tune in to God. They’re tuned in to a certain kind of music. They’re tuned in to certain stations they listen to or news or whatever it might be. But if you tune your heart to God, you say, “Well, how do I tune my heart to God?” I’ll tell you how. You take–you set aside a definite time to sit and be quiet and just say, “God, I want You to speak to my heart.

” You’ll be surprised what you begin to sense about the presence of God in your life. You say, “Well, I’ve never felt that.” Well, did you give Him an opportunity? He’s promised–listen. He’s promised in His Word to guide us. And if He’s going to guide me, I must be willing to listen, and the question is, Am I willing to listen? You’d be surprised how clearly God will speak to your heart if you’re willing to listen to Him.

So, somebody says, “Well, how does He get our attention?” Well, one way He gets our attention is restlessness, and I think about one of the first times in my life that I realized that. My wife and I were planning to go to California with the Home Mission Board, it’s what they called it in those days, and work in a church out there for the summer, and we had everything all set because we had the summer off in June, July, and August.

It sounded like a good thing to do, and I felt like that was the right thing. One Saturday morning, I woke up and I felt very restless. I thought, what’s this? And I knew enough to know that that feeling was from God. This restless feeling, I had no idea what the subject was, so I just said to her, “I just need to spend some time praying and just asking God to give me direction.

” And so, I just got on my knees, and I remember that Saturday morning sometime around 9 o’clock or thereabouts, I don’t know what time, but I know that I was there till 6 o’clock. I was so restless, wondering, “God, what in the world are You saying to me?” And what He said to me was so unlike what I expected.

He said, “I want you to go to the mountains and spend these three months and just relax and trust Me.” Well, that sounded selfish as it could sound, go to the mountains and–so happened that her father had given her a house up there and so we’re going to pack up and go to the mountains for three months and just take it easy and we could be serving God? That’s all I got.

We went to the mountains. We were going to California. We went to the North Carolina mountains. We’d been up there about maybe a month or so and we were out fishing right off the dock there and somebody came–a fellow came down the steps and he said, “Are you Charles Stanley?” I said, “Yes, sir.” “Are you a seminary student?” I said, “Yes, sir.

” So to make a long story short, he said, “Are you–would you be willing to preach for us next Sunday?” He said, “Our pastor’s going on vacation.” Well, I didn’t know him from Adam, I didn’t know anything about the church, and I didn’t know anything about anything up there. But I said yes. So I went and preached for them and they said, “Would you preach next Sunday?” I said yes.

Then they said, “We’re having a party tonight at church. Would you come to the party?” I said yes. Next thing I know, they were calling me to be their pastor. I thought, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, because I had another year of seminary. And so, to make a very long story short, I ended up being their pastor after I finished seminary.

If I had ignored my restless spirit, I would have gone to California and probably would have done a mediocre job, out of the will of God. And so watch this. His plan was totally unlike anything I would think. But in order to get me to the mountains, that church and the teaching at Bible Institute and finally with a few other things going on, finally get me to Atlanta and finally all over the world, suppose I had said No to God.

That’s why it’s so important that we listen carefully. And so when He says–when He says, “Truly, truly.” That’s what He means. He knows exactly what it takes to get your attention. He knows how to stop you long enough so that you start listening. But if you determine you’re gonna have your way anyway, you’re gonna do it your way anyway, will He stop you? Sometimes He will and sometimes He won’t, and nobody knows when that is.

For me, He stopped me dead. For you, he may not do that. I certainly hope that you’d be wise enough to listen more carefully than I did till I got the message. But all of that is an expression of love. He says, “Here’s My plan.” Now, for you to have the plan, you must be willing to listen. And I think there are primary reasons that people don’t listen, and sometimes people say, “Well, I don’t believe God speaks today.

” Well, let me just say this: you are absolutely wrong. God speaks today and what He says to each individual, He says according to what the need is and what He wants to say, what’s His plan for your life. That’s why developing a listening heart is so very important. What that does, that keeps us always in tune with Him.

Lord, what are You saying? If somebody comes to me and says, “I have a question for you,” my first response is, “God, I want to be sure I’m hearing what I need to hear in order to give the answer I need to give.” And if you’ll just think about all during the day, you and I should be in tune with Him. We’re in tune to so many other things, we need to be in tune with Him because, listen, I don’t think God just speaks at 7 o’clock at night or 11 o’clock on Sunday morning.

God is in the process of speaking to you and to me all during the day and evening. Don’t you wake up sometime–I wake up sometime and I think, “God, what are You saying to me?” And sometimes out of a dead sleep He awakens us because He has our undivided attention, no sound, no noise, no light, nothing. Wants to give us direction for our life.

And see, it’s foolish to try to live your life in this day and time without His direction, and it’s the safest thing you can do, is to–listen. Is to invite Him and His opinion and His direction for every decision you and I make. So people say, “Well, I’m not too sure He speaks.” Yes, He does. You know what the problem is? We’re too busy.

But the truth is, we don’t believe Him, we don’t value His voice enough to take the time to listen to Him. That’s the reason people don’t hear, because they’ve got their minds full of other things, and I think about one of the reasons: people are afraid of what God would say. If you opened your heart to God and said, “Lord, I’ll do anything You want me to do.

” Are you willing to say that to Him? And I’ve met a lot of folks down through the years who’ve said, “Oh, I’m not about to say that to God because I don’t know what He’ll say.” Well, what you’re saying is you don’t trust Him. So here’s a God who has a perfect plan for your life and you don’t trust Him? And this plan is always the best plan? Listen, not any of us can come up with a better plan for our life than God has, because he’s the God of love, unconditional love.

He doesn’t love us whether we obey Him or not. He loves us whether we obey Him or whether we don’t obey Him. Because He’s God and because He wants the best for your life. And so when I think about the reasons that people don’t listen, sometimes they’re angry with God. Something happened back there in their life, either with their marriage, with their children, with their finances, with their jobs.

Something happened and they blame it on God and they got angry with God and so therefore, you know, they’re not interested in what God has to say about it. Sometimes they just have a rebellious spirit and sometimes the reason they don’t listen is because there’s sin going on in their life and they won’t give it up.

Listen, if you have sin in your life and you won’t deal with it, don’t expect God to fight you over that. He will convict you in love and convict you and convict you and convict you, and when you decide you’re just not gonna listen, He turns you over to yourself and lets you make a mess of your life because He is not going to give you the most valuable thing you could possibly have and that’s clear direction for your life and power and energy and strength to fulfill it if you’re gonna live in disobedience to Him.

The people who are living confused lives are living because they’re not listening to God’s clear guidance for their life and have an excuse, probably any one of these excuses. So what’s the consequences of all that? It’s very clear. If you decide that you’re gonna live your life and not listen to God’s guidance in your life, you can expect, number one, you’re not gonna have His guidance.

Listen, not any of us are smart enough to figure out a plan for our life that matches God’s plan. We’re just not–God doesn’t give us that kind of smartness. He wants us to trust Him, obey Him, worship Him, adore Him, and serve Him. So we’re not gonna get the plan unless we decide to trust Him. And so one of the things that we’re gonna lack, we’re gonna lack His divine guidance.

And the second thing that’s very bad: you don’t listen to God, you listen to the wrong voices. And there are many people in deep trouble today because they’ve been listening to the wrong voices. Not God’s voice. Somebody else comes along and says, “Well, here’s what I think you should do. This is the most profitable thing to do.

This is the way you look the best. This is the way you’ll be attractive.” On and on they go, not listening to God. They listen to the wrong voices. So I’ll ask you this: What do you watch and listen on TV? What do you listen to on the radio? Who do you listen to among your friends? Who do you listen to that you work with? Who has priority in your listening? Is it God or is it somebody else? The reason people miss His best is because they listen to the wrong voices, and they’re deceived and they make costly

decisions, for example, they miss God’s best, and here’s something else they don’t think about. Think about this: you’re in business and you work with somebody else, for example. If you don’t do your part, you don’t listen to God, somebody else suffers because of what you do. And I think about dads. Father, everybody in your family is gonna suffer if you don’t listen to God and follow His guidance in your life because you’re the dad.

In other words, God has made you the authority in the home, and regardless of what some people think, that’s what God said. Now whether the father lives up to that or not, everybody gets penalized if he doesn’t, but you can’t change the will of God. Father, you and I have the responsibility by example and by our speech and by the way we live our lives, we have responsibility for our families.

You don’t listen to God, how do you expect your children to grow up wanting to listen to God? You don’t listen to God, you don’t get to God’s plan, how do you expect your children to look for God’s plan for their life? And just to tell your son or your daughter, “Well, do your best. Do the best you can,” that’s not–listen, that’s not good enough.

That’s a cop out. Father, you need, by your actions and your conversation, to listen to God, to share what God says to you with your children, so when they grow up they can’t ever remember the time they first saw you praying or heard you praying or saw you kneeling, that you can’t–they can’t first remember the time when you started talking about something that God said to you.

Otherwise, they’re gonna listen to the world. You want them to grow up listening to God and learning to listen very early in life. I can remember still hearing my mother pray. I can still hear the way she said it. And some of the things that she said she prayed over and over and over again. And I watched God answer her prayers.

That’s all I needed. If you don’t give your children, your wife, your husband, a praying, listening husband or wife, or father or mother, you have deprived your children out of the greatest thing you could possibly give them. And my encouragement to you this morning is make a practice every day to get along with God and before you start doing all the talking, be quiet and let Him speak.

Now, if you’ve never trusted Jesus as your Savior, I can tell you what He’s saying. He’s saying, “Repent of your sins. Turn your life over to Christ. He died for you, He shed His blood for you. It’s possible for Me to forgive you of all of your sin and give you a new beginning.” I know He’ll say that. And I trust that if you’ve never trusted Him, you’ll do just that.

And if you have, I ask you the question: How much time in 24 hours of a day do you spend listening to Him in order to make wise decisions in every aspect of your life? That’s my prayer for you. And Father, how grateful we are that You love us enough to speak to us, and You make it clear. You help us to avoid those pitfalls that are always out there.

I pray that You’ll make each one of us a listening servant so we can fulfill Your purpose and Your plan for our lives. And that the impact of our lives would be such that our children will be greatly impacted, the people we work with, the people we love, the people we surround ourselves with. I pray the Holy Spirit will make each one of us like a listening post for people who are seeking godly advice, in Jesus’s name, amen.