Hearing the Voice of the Lord

Hearing the Voice of the Lord John 10:4 When he hath put forth all his own, [that is the Lord Jesus] he goeth before them, and the sheep follow him, for they know his voice. John 10:16 And other sheep I have which are not of this fold; them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice; and they shall become one flock, one shepherd. John 10:27 My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me, and I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, and no one shall snatch them out of my hand. One of the most common problems amongst those who love and know the Lord Jesus is this question of hearing the voice of the Lord. I suppose it is a problem that I particularly hear more of than perhaps you do, because people are continually coming to us with problems about guidance. Should they take this job or that job? Should they move to this area or that area? Is this the course of action they should take, or is that one? Sometimes these are smaller matters—things to do with jobs, homes, and location. Sometimes they are very significant matters. Sometimes someone wants to know whether they really ought to go to the other side of the world to serve the Lord Jesus Christ. Sometimes it involves the whole course of a person's life. Should this be their career or that? This whole question of guidance is one of the most problematic subjects amongst Christians. I suppose more than anything else, it is one of the most common concerns brought up by children of God. And it all really goes back to hearing the voice of the Lord. And that's why this morning I want to speak very simply about the voice of the Lord. The Shepherd and His Flock Many of us have some very strange notions as to what really is the voice of the Lord. Perhaps I should not say "many"—some have very strange notions about the voice of the Lord. In verse 4, the Lord Jesus said, “When He hath put forth all His own, He goeth before them and the sheep follow Him”. Why do they follow Him? They follow Him because they know His voice. Now here is a wonderful promise. The Lord Jesus speaks of when He puts forth His own. Now, the shepherd you often see in the East—because the weather in the Middle East, generally speaking, doesn't drop to freezing point—brings the flocks into a common fold. We often used to see them in Egypt. They're just a kind of mud brick structure, four walls with a little aperture, a U-shaped aperture. And a number of flocks, perhaps as many as four or five different flocks, were brought in together, all mixed up in the one fold. And then the shepherd had the job in the morning of sorting out his own flock. They used to go out group by group. Where we used to be in Upper Square, sometimes we saw flock after flock going out. We always marvelled as to why the shepherds never got their flocks mixed up. Somehow, they always sorted out this bunch of sheep and goats who all looked very much the same to an onlooker. Somehow, they went out in order. First one flock went out as the shepherd stood at the door, and gradually his own sheep sorted themselves out, and out they went. And he just spoke, that's all. Sometimes they have a whistle, sometimes a call. It is said by the rabbis that in the days of our Lord, the shepherd always called his own name, not the sheep's names. It's a common idea that he sort of said, "Now, Billy and Maudie and Aggie, come on out." Of course, the Lord knows us all by name. But it wasn't the way the shepherd got the flock out. Often he had a special noise or special call or special whistle, and all his own sorted themselves out. But the rabbis said sometimes he used to call his own name. And as he called his own name again and again and again, so all his own sheep sorted themselves out from the rest and went out. And of course we are, we are called by the name of Jesus. This is the way we are sorted out from the world. We know the value of the name of Jesus. We know the authority of the name of Jesus. We know the salvation which is in the name of Jesus. We are people of the name. However, we mustn't digress. He puts His sheep forth, and as He stands in the opening of the fold, and as He puts them forth when they're all waiting obediently, as it were, outside, then He goes from behind them and takes His place in front of them. And so He starts to move off, and the sheep, the whole flock, follow Him as He moves off. You see, they know His voice. And the Lord's point here is that if someone else stood in the door and tried to say something to imitate the shepherd, the sheep wouldn't bother, they would all stay put. Because they didn't know the voice of a stranger. They only knew their own beloved voice of their shepherd. And it was that tone, that particular voice, that particular call that they could distinguish from the others, and only when he called. Now this is so, for when you have a number of flocks mixed up, the fact is, as I've already pointed out, stray sheep never get mixed up in different flocks. The Bedouin shepherds of the desert are far too canny to put their flocks together if they thought there was any chance of losing even a lamb to another shepherd. They are far too canny for that. They know that the sheep have got an idea as to who their shepherd is. And therefore each shepherd can stand in the door one after another and see their own flock through. Now, the Lord Jesus gave this wonderful parable, this wonderful story about Himself and ourselves and really it all to do with guidance. Not just guidance in the sense of whether we should do this or whether we should do that, but being led of the Lord, being provided for by the Lord, being cared for by the Lord. All these things come into this matter of hearing and knowing His voice. The Necessity of Hearing His Voice So I want you to note first the necessity, the importance and value of hearing His voice. I do not doubt that all our troubles come in the end from a failure to distinguish the Lord's voice from other voices. The failure perhaps to listen for the Lord's voice, the failure to really know the Lord when He speaks. Now we've got it again in chapter 10. Look at verse three. To him the porter openeth, and the sheep hear his voice. And he calleth his own sheep by name and leadeth them out. Now, verse five. And a stranger will they not follow, but will flee from him, for they know not the voice of strangers. It is absolutely necessary for you and me, as children of God, to know the Lord's voice. There are many voices, many voices. There is the voice of self. And sometimes many of us fail to distinguish the voice of self from the voice of the Lord. And many Christians get into hot water and real trouble through listening to their own self and thinking that that is the voice of the Lord. Yes, there's the voice of self. And the voice of self can be so deceitful, especially when we particularly want to do something. Other times people have come to me and told me what the Lord wants them to do. And it's been proved later that it wasn't the Lord at all, it was themselves. Then again, there's the voice of others, other Christians. Some of us—I'll come to it in a moment—we're so somehow convinced that “the Lord wouldn't speak to me” that we tend to have voices trained to listen to the slightest inference or implication in the voices of other Christians as to what you should do. Of course, I'm not saying that it's wrong to have fellowship. Fellowship is very important in this whole matter of discerning and trying the spirits, whether they be of God. But, you know, we can have ears that listen to others and then we do what we think they think is the Lord's will for us. And of course, a bit later, when we get into trouble, we... Well, we can't understand it. We wonder whether the people we've listened to, whether they're really so guided of God. Of course, sometimes the Lord's voice can be heard in the voice of others. But you see, you've got to learn to distinguish. Sometimes the most godly people can put us on the wrong track. And then, of course, there's the voices of the world. Well, of course, we all know the voices of the world. They are there all the time. And we can hear the voices at work. We can hear the voices if we live in an unsaved home. We can hear the voices all the time, in all kinds of ways, we hear the voices of the world. And of course, there's the voice of Satan himself, who lies behind everything that would deviate us from the Lord's path. But the important thing is to know the voice of the Lord. It's absolutely necessary, absolutely important in the Christian life, to learn from the beginning to distinguish the voice of the Lord. The Spirit's Communion with Our Spirit You know, the Song of Solomon is a wonderful explanation, interpretation of the heart's desire of God for fellowship. I think sometimes there's so many of us, we're saved, we're children of God, and we're getting all the value we can in one sense, out of the grace of God, and yet the Lord gets very little out of us. For the Lord not only wants us to speak to Him, but He wants us to hear His voice so that there should be communion. And this is what the Song of Solomon is all about. This intimate, real and genuine heart communion that there ought to be between the Lord and His child. And you see, it all comes back to this question of the voice of the Lord. How Do We Hear His Voice? Now, the second thing I just want to underline is how do we hear His voice? And this is the crux of the matter. How do we hear His voice? Now, let me be very, very childish almost this morning. The Lord's voice is not a physical voice and is not heard in a physical way normally. I say, “normally” because in fact there's no doubt at all that the Lord has spoken in what amounts to a physical voice to certain people. I have had an experience myself which I proved to be of God, and I know others who have had such experiences. You cannot just laugh at it and you cannot simply dismiss it as hallucination. If you explore it, in some cases it could be hallucination, but in many cases, when you really explore and investigate, you discover something you cannot explain. The Lord does sometimes, for reasons known to Himself, speak to us in an absolutely clear-cut physical way. But normally the Lord does not speak to us like that. How do we hear His voice? Well, how are you hearing my voice now? You have a little organ in your ear which is specially created to receive certain sound waves and transmit what it receives to the brain so that you are not hearing, I trust, a jumble of sounds this morning. But every word that I am speaking is being translated immediately in that little organ in your ear—what we call the ear—up into your brain and is making sense. You understand the words anyway, if not what lies behind them. You see, you have an organ. When anything happens to that organ, that eardrum, we lose our sense of hearing. We become deaf, or partially deaf, or we become so stone deaf that we can't hear anything. When a person can't hear anything at all, it's not that the sounds aren't there—they're all there. But the little organs specially created to receive those sound waves have stopped functioning. Do you understand? Now, there are all kinds of voices and sounds going through this room, which if we had a transistor radio, we could turn on—much to everyone's horror, I'm sure—but we could turn it on and suddenly those signals passing through the room would be transmitted into sounds we would understand. They're here in the room right now. If this were television time, pictures would be passing through this room as well, but you and I can't see them because we haven't got the set—the device necessary for receiving and transmitting them to us. Similarly, you and I have a physical organ of hearing, but in our spirit we also have something which corresponds completely to the physical organ of hearing. The Spiritual Ear for Spiritual Hearing Now this is why the Lord Jesus... Let's turn to Revelation chapter 2. The Lord Jesus in Revelation 2:7 says: He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith to the churches. Verse 11: He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith to the churches. Again, verse 17: He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith to the churches. When I was first saved, I used to think that the Lord Jesus was being a little bit sarcastic here actually, saying, "Well, if you've only got one ear, listen with it." But I've since come to realise that the Lord Jesus wasn't being sarcastic at all. What He was trying to point out was that we have not merely physical ears but a spiritual organ, a spiritual ear. Not twofold, but one faculty in our spirit specially created by God for hearing the voice of God. Now this is not silly. It's absolutely logical and rational. If we have a body which has physical organs, if we have a soul which has soulish organs, then we have a spirit also which has organs adapted for spiritual life. My physical body is adapted for physical life. I have teeth and I have a mouth which can bite into an apple and eat it. It's adapted to keeping me alive. But I have something in my spirit also which is adapted to keeping me spiritually alive that I may spiritually feed upon God. "Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good." How can you taste and see that the Lord is good? You can't do it with these teeth or with this tongue. You can't do it just with your soul, but you do it with the spirit. And so in our spirit there is an organ of hearing. And this organ, this spiritual organ of hearing, is especially created and adapted to picking up spiritual sounds. I can't put it any other way. And the Lord Jesus, again and again, uses this. "He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says." Now, my dear friends, the Spirit has not got a body and the Holy Spirit of God has not got a soul. The Spirit of God is spirit. He hasn't got a mouth, He hasn't got a tongue. His voice is a spiritual voice. "He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith." Now it doesn't mean that because the Holy Spirit hasn't got a mouth like mine, hasn't got organs like mine that you can see, He cannot speak. Of course He speaks, but He speaks in a spiritual way, using spiritual organs. And in the same way in your being there is a spirit that is adapted to understand what the Spirit says. Now I believe this is very, very important. Spiritual Senses Require Exercise If you look at Hebrews 5:11, we read this: Of whom we have many things to say and hard of interpretation, seeing ye are become dull of hearing. What does he mean? That through old age they're losing their hearing? What does the writer of the Hebrews mean here "ye are dull of hearing"? I’ll tell you what he means. He means that spiritually something's happened to their spiritual organ of hearing. For he says: When by reason of the time ye ought to be teachers, ye have need again that someone teach you the rudiments of the first principles of the oracles of God and are become such as have need of milk and not of solid food. For every one that partaketh of milk is without experience of the word of righteousness, for he is a babe. But solid food is for full grown men. Even those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil. Now these spiritual senses have got to be exercised. They've got to be exercised. If they're not exercised, well, we become dull of hearing. It's just like a muscle in the arm. You know, when a person lies in bed for a few months, unless they exercise daily, the muscles of their legs become so weak that with an older person it's sometimes impossible for them to walk again. You've got to exercise things if you're going to keep them going. Now in 1 Timothy 4:7 we read this: But refuse profane and old wives fables and exercise thyself in godliness. Exercise thyself in godliness. Well, now, my dear friends, really we have all by spiritual birth, if we're born again, we all have a spiritual organ of hearing. Amongst other spiritual organs we have the spiritual organ of hearing. And the whole business is to learn to use it. That's all. Learn to use it. How did you learn your mother's voice from other voices? Because you heard it again and again and you knew that voice meant food, care, love and protection and you sort of began to think that any other voice, well, it didn't mean that. But you know how quickly when you were a little child, and I've noted it by observation amongst others since, how quickly they distinguish voices of those who don't pamper and do anything with those who sort of run round and they can get anything out of. Children are very quick to distinguish, even as babes, voices of those who will really be very loving and very kind and they can get anything they want out of them. We learn it by distinguishing. You know, some children, they only have to hear a voice, and they start to wail, and they only have to hear another voice, and they start to gurgle. You see, at that early age, they've learned to distinguish a voice. They don't understand what's being said, but they know who's voice it is. Now, my dear friend, I don't know how old you are in the Lord. You may be very, very young in the Lord, but you can early learn to distinguish the voice of the Lord from other voices, even though you can't understand what He's saying. You know, inwardly, that's the Lord, and that isn't. We've got to exercise these things. We've got to learn to grow up in these ways. You remember the Lord said to the prophet Isaiah in chapter 6: Go and tell this people, hear ye indeed, but understand not, see ye indeed, but perceive not. Verse 10: Lest they see with their eyes and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart. Isn't that interesting? The prophet's told to go and speak to them, and they shall hear, and yet they shall not hear. They shall see, and yet they shall not see. In other words, you can hear with your physical hearing and with your mental hearing, if you like, and yet spiritually be absolutely deaf. Well, now we've said I think a little bit about how we hear that voice. That voice is not a physical voice. It doesn't use physical tones, but it is as genuine and as real as my voice this morning. Just because it cannot be heard with this ear doesn't mean to say that it's not real. And if we are a child of God, the common, ordinary and logical thing is that we should begin to hear the voice of the Lord. We should be able to hear it, and learn to understand it. We should be able to have communion with the Lord. A Personal Example of Communion I know one old saint, and I never could get over this old lady when I was first saved, for she conducted a conversation—of course some people would say it was hallucination, I suppose. But all I can say is that she got some remarkable things out of hallucination. For she used to conduct a proper little conversation with the Lord. And she would say to me, "I said to the Lord, so and so and so and so. And what do you think He said to me? So and so and so and so and so." "And I said, but surely it can't be like that, Lord. What about such a..." And He said, "Well, it's like this." Many of you know that old lady. But I mean, she is a remarkable old lady. And she was the first one, not a minister, that put me on the path of a really inward knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ. Many of the other Christians used to think she was a crank. They used to say, "Well, she's rather poetic, you know," and so on. But in fact, she knew the Lord and she got insight into His word that many of the others who were up in the pulpit hadn't got because she knew how to commune with the Lord about some of the problems in Scripture. And I learned one or two things from her about Isaiah and Zephaniah and a few others that I never read in any book. I believe that they're right. They seem to be. However we digress. The point is that the Lord has a voice, obviously. And He has given us a spiritual organ whereby we may hear that voice. Reasons for Not Hearing the Lord's Voice Now, I would also, just in closing, like to ask, what are the reasons for not hearing the voice of the Lord? I mean, it's so amazing that so many of us don't really hear the voice of the Lord. I want to suggest one or two reasons why we don't hear. I'm going to make it personal. I'm going to suggest one or two reasons why you don't hear the voice of the Lord and why I don't at times. 1. Listening with the Wrong Ear The first is, I think we are listening with the wrong ear. Quite simple. If we're listening with the wrong ear, we won't hear the voice of the Lord. Many brothers in particular tell me they've never heard the voice of the Lord. But I suggest it's because they're listening with the wrong ear. As simple as that. They expect physical tones. They expect a physical voice. And they're all the time waiting for this tremendous visitation from on high, which they will go on waiting, I am quite sure, till the Lord does visit them and takes them to be with Himself. But they'll never hear the voice of the Lord in that way. They're listening with the wrong ear. They are oblivious to the fact that within them there is the right ear. And they are, as it were, bypassing the right ear and listening with the wrong ear. Therefore, they naturally don't hear the voice of the Lord. And when they hear other people speaking about the voice of the Lord, they look aghast. 2. Listening to the Wrong Voice Secondly, I would say another reason is that we are listening to the wrong voice. I think some of us have got our ears well and truly clamped upon the wrong source. We're either so busy listening to what other Christians feel or say that we have no life with the Lord, we don't listen for His voice. Or it may be that we're so self-centred or so self-important that we have only an ear for ourselves and we gloss it all up. This is where damage is done to this whole matter of hearing the voice of the Lord. People go round glibly saying, “The Lord said to me, the Lord said this, the Lord said that.” The Lord never said anything of the kind. Taking the name of the Lord in vain. The Lord will not hold him guiltless that takes His name in vain. It's a very serious thing to take the Lord's name in vain and it does such dishonour to the Lord. It stumbles young ones in the faith. It unhinges some who are older as well. It's a dangerous thing. Of course all of us make mistakes, that's the whole point. We sometimes do say, “The Lord showed me this,” and later on we find the Lord didn't. And all we can do is to admit it humbly. Well, we're none of us infallible. There are far too many popes amongst Christians, far too many. They're absolutely infallible. And once they've said that the Lord said so and so and so and so, they can never admit that they've made a mistake on it. I don't know why. They seem to feel that if they should admit such a thing they'll lose their salvation altogether. 3. Believing the Lord Would Never Speak to Us Anyway, listening to the wrong voice is another reason. Another reason I'd just like to give very briefly is the firm belief in some of us that the Lord would never speak to us anyway. There are some who have said to me, when I said, "Well now look, you ask the Lord" and they hesitated and then said to me, "I just don't think the Lord would ever speak to me." A Personal Illustration: Selective Hearing When I was a little boy I suffered a lot from deafness. I had a strange complaint which I won't go into, but it was a strange complaint in the ear which produced a dry wax. And when I was a little boy I couldn't hear often properly. And my grandmother, dear old thing, she was very suspicious of this. She was the one who took me to see the specialist. She was very, very suspicious and so was the specialist to begin with. And when we got home, I never heard what she was saying. So she tested it out and she talked away. And I didn't listen, didn't hear her. And then, all of a sudden, she said very quietly, "Would you like some apple pie?" And I immediately... I've never forgotten this. I perked up straight away and said, "Oh, yes, please." And she said, "Well, that's very funny. You never heard anything that went before that." And I was sort of found out. The reason was that I had got dry wax. They discovered that. But the reason was that I had a little capacity, which I still have today, that when I don't want to hear what people are saying, I sink into myself and I just don't hear. Just don't hear. Do you know that we were told later that some people become permanently deaf psychologically, because when they're children, they don't want to hear and they train themselves not to hear, and in the end they don't. They become deaf. It's an amazing fact. And you know, this is a spiritual thing as well often. Sometimes we're just not listening. We've got a firm belief that the Lord wouldn't speak to us. And the result is that we never hear the voice of the Lord. We've got to believe. Faith is the necessary prerequisite of hearing the voice of the Lord. There's no real faith there if the spiritual organ is not even open to the voice of the Lord. 4. Being Too Far Away from the Lord Well, I think I must end. But there are other reasons, I would suggest. Sometimes we're too far away from the Lord. If we're too far away from Him, of course we won't hear His voice. The sheep have got to stay near the shepherd. They've got to stay near enough to hear what He's saying and so on. And you know, it's a very true thing that in the east, it's the stragglers on the outside of the sheep, of the flock that get caught and killed. Those who press nearest to the shepherd in the centre of the flock are the safest. Always. It's a lesson. Conclusion Well, we could say so much more. We could talk about the cross and the Spirit. The cross removes one kind of ear that can't hear the voice of the Lord. The Spirit brings in another kind of ear which can hear what the Lord is saying. We could talk about many other matters as well. But here are just a few things that may set you on the path of really inquiring of the Lord. If you've got your spiritual hearing impaired, may the Lord help you discover the reason and get it put right.