My Sheep Hear My Voice

My Sheep Hear My Voice

Reflections on hearing and heeding the voice of God, part two. Read part one here.

Commentary by Dave Liezen

When I was reconciled to the Lord God (perhaps more accurately, “When the Lord God managed to reconcile me to Himself,”), a former heroin-addict named Rick offered excellent advice. He counselled I should read the Gospel of John, then begin at Matthew and read the New Testament straight through. After that, pray about which book to read and carry on from there. These 52 years later, I am still in phase three, currently reading Daniel through Malachi.

Reading John the first time, my lasting impressions were of how Jesus reconciled Peter to himself after the resurrection and John’s aside to the reader of why he wrote that book. The second time around, these words in chapter 10 grabbed my attention:

“[To the shepherd] the gatekeeper opens [the gate]; the sheep hear his voice and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out [from the fold] all his own, he goes before them and the sheep follow him, for they know his voice. A stranger they will not follow, but they will flee from him, for they do not know the voice of strangers.” (John 10:3-5, Revised Standard Version)

In the midst of reading this I stopped, exclaiming, “God, this little lamb needs to learn to hear your voice!” I didn’t know how that was to be done or what it might entail, but I needed all the help I could get.

In those days, I addressed him as, “God.” Speaking to him directly still felt a bit awkward, for I was not sure how intimately connected he was to me and all the details of my life. In this paragraph I wrote of him in the lower case, for he had not yet shown me the depth of his love. Nonetheless, I read the Bible regularly, prayed at length at least once a day and tried to be sensitive to the possibility of hearing his “still small voice.”

To my surprise and delight, he spoke to me. Being his own person, he selected when and about what he said. Sometimes when I asked him to explain a line of Scripture he would bring a book or sermon or Bible study my way. Sometimes I heard a direct response to my spirit, from his Holy Spirit.

Hearing his voice was both comfort and challenge, comforting to one so lonely, damaged and painfully aware of how stunted a person I was. Challenging in that what God said might not fit my own experience or expectation.

I had a lot of things wrong, not just wreckage within of poor parental choices, but ideas taught me by my culture that run counter to his ways and aims.

Hearing him was both easier and harder than expected. I found if my focus was on something he has expressly forbidden, I rarely heard anything from him until I had confessed my bull-headed actions.

On the other hand, he loves us enough to snatch us from certain destruction. When I recounted to someone or reviewed in my own thoughts (so long ago I forget which), the scene in which I was ready to commit suicide, it struck me how often the word, “you,” occurred. Whereas I might give myself a talking-to, “Now you’ve done it!” when ruminating on serious matters my thoughts are directed at the subject at hand. Self-reference occurs in my inner voice in the first person.

This, though, this was Someone Else, the outside force I so desperately needed to redirect my focus and reconfigure my habits and hopes. This Someone Else broke through my contorted absorption in pain and sorrow to be unloved and unworthy, demonstrating in the way that worked best in my case how completely he loves me and us.

He knew what He was about: Dangle a set of ideas to lure my questing mind to find answers for; hint that hope may be found in this way.

Reading Genesis, I found the God Who made all things by His Word: “Light be.” Light was.

God, the Lord of all things had made me His son. From then on I called Him Father, and reverenced Him in print by capitalizing words that directly referred to Him.

This is the only God Who carefully orchestrated matters in Eden so that when Adam and Eve disobeyed His voice, He promised the adversary that her Seed would crush his head. My Bible says, “bruised,” but I can tell you putting my heel to a snake’s head would be fatal because the whole thing is fragile. Anyone who has watched a snake eat a bird or rodent has seen it walk, right side above and below, and then the left, over the meal in order to get it down its gullet.

How many people notice what was at work here? God spoke, again and again, not some misty mumbo-jumbo, but in a variety of settings with different intentions. He would come to walk in the cool of the evening and just talk with His people. Showing them around the garden He gave them a simple directive: You may eat of the fruit of any tree but this one, lest you die.

The adversary’s line to Eve? “Tush, ye shall not die.” (Tyndale) The Oxford English Dictionary defines the archaic expression “tush” as an exclamation expressing disapproval, impatience or dismissal.

That’s right, the adversary is a liar from the start. He tosses away God’s Word; dismisses it as so much bluster.

Is it any wonder hearing God’s voice — and heeding it — are so important to us now?

Why does it all matter? Because God created us to be loved and to love Him in return. If He had made us to love Him as automatically as an infant takes its first breath outside the birth canal, that love, although valid, lacks content, can be a shallow thing when compared to love realized through a grasp of how deeply the Lord God loves each of us.

Sin upped the ante.

It is easy for us, encumbered by sin from a proper relation to God, each other and the world He made, to disregard the wonders of His investment in making the world, in making us, in preparing redemption in the wake of our disobedience. Huh, my sin is so big and close I cannot see it, much less identify it all in order to confess it.

But He knew. Before He ever kick-started time He knew all about me. All about you. And because He knew and planned from the get-go that you and I would add our own bits of wrongdoing to the sin we inherit as later generations of Adam, the Lord Jesus calls us each by name.

When He calls me, I want to hear and follow Him. I can do no better.

Read part one of this series, “Hearing God’s Voice.”