Voice of God

Hidden acoustic wonders called “whispering walls” have awed listeners since ancient times. The field of “archaeo-acoustics” studies the way sound and archaeological sites interact. Cathedrals and capital domes have been noted for the way they capture and amplify sound. A whispering gallery is usually a circular, hemispherical, or elliptical enclosure, often beneath a dome or a vault, in which whispers can be heard clearly in other parts of the gallery.

A whispering gallery allows whispered communication from one part of the internal side of the circumference to another specific part. The sound is carried by waves, known as whispering-gallery waves, that travel around the circumference clinging to the walls. This effect has been discovered in the whispering gallery of St Paul's Cathedral in London, the Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol, and Grand Central Station in New York, among others.

When a visitor stands at one focus the sound waves carry the words so that others will be able to hear the whispers from the opposite side of the gallery. Even when the room is filled with many people talking, the whisper can be heard, but only by standing in exactly the right location, others in the room won’t hear the whisper at all.

Possible Preaching Angle:

It is possible to hear the slightest whisper spoken in a massive room filled with people, but only when you stand in just the right place. In the same way, in a noisy, bustling world, it is possible to hear the “whisper” of God (1 Kings 19:12), but only if we are standing in the right place of obedience, readiness, and quiet waiting.

Dilli Lumjel gave his life to Jesus on May 4, 2011, at 1:33 a.m. Earlier that day, he had performed a Hindu funeral service for his father-in-law in a refugee camp in eastern Nepal, where he lived with more than 12,000 other refugees.

As was the custom, Lumjel spent the night at his wife’s uncle’s house. Both of Lumjel’s parents-in-law had recently converted to Christianity. That night he had a vision: His mother-in-law approached him and shared the gospel, stating, “If you enter this house, you have to believe in Jesus.” Then he saw a flash of lightning from heaven and heard a voice saying, “What you are hearing is true; you have to believe.” In the dream, he knelt down crying and committed his life to Jesus.

When he woke up, his face was wet with tears. Lumjel called a local pastor and told him he had had a dream and was now a Christian. The news shocked his family of devout Hindus. He said, “Every­body—my relatives, my wife, sisters—they all woke up asking, ‘What happened to Dilli? Is he mental? He says he’s a Christian!’”

The next day, the pastor explained the gospel to Lumjel and his wife. The two committed their lives to Jesus. A day later, Lumjel began attending a monthlong Bible school in the refugee camp. Then church leaders sent Lumjel out to preach the gospel to other refugees. Several months later, he became a church deacon, then an elder.

One year later, Lumjel arrived in Columbus, Ohio, as part of a massive resettlement of about 96,000 ethnic Nepalis expelled from their home of Bhutan to the United States. There he joined Yusuf Kadariya in pastoring a group of about 35 Bhutanese Nepali families. As more Bhutanese Nepali refugees settled in Columbus and the group brought more people to Christ, the church continued to grow.

Today, Lumjel is a full-time pastor at Emmanuel Fellowship Church in Columbus. On a wintry Sunday morning in December, about 200 people streamed into the sanctuary, greeting one another with a slight bow and “Jai Masih,” meaning “Victory to Christ.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

God is bringing the nations to our neighborhoods here in America and is bringing many to faith in Christ. We can carry out the Great Commission in part by welcoming them with Christian love and sharing the gospel to those with hungry hearts.

Molly Lee was a passenger on a flight from Charlotte to New York when another passenger made it clear she was not comfortable. She said it was at that point the woman began crying. One of the flight attendants overheard the woman and immediately went to comfort her and help her overcome the anxiety she was experiencing.

Lee said, “He just was so reassuring, so calming and said, ‘You know what? I got you.’ 'I'm gonna be there for you, just anything you need to let me know.’ With every little noise, she'd be like, 'What's that?' He's like, 'That's okay. That's just the jet bridge pulling away' or whatever the case may be. And that really helped her. He didn't have to do that, you know, and to just see someone extend their heart in that way to a stranger was just beautiful to me, and I wanted to capture it.”

Lee said the flight attendant, Floyd Dean-Shannon, sat next to the woman for nearly 10-minutes just holding her hand and reassuring her that she was safe. She captured the moment in a photo and posted it to her Facebook. The post has since been shared more than 11,000 times.

Possible Preaching Angles:

1) Experiencing God; Presence of God – Jesus told us never to fear because the Father’s full attention is on us, even to numbering the hairs of our head (Matt. 10:29-30); 2) Comforter; Holy Spirit - The disciples were full of fear to hear that Jesus would be leaving them. But he reassured them by saying, “And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever” (John 14:16; John 16:7)

Carolyn Arends is a Canadian Christian musician, author, and speaker. In an issue of CT magazine, she writes:

Years ago, I toured as an opening act for Rich Mullins. I loved overhearing conversations at the autograph table; they often turned serious and urgent.

More than once, a fan asked Rich how to discern the will of God. Rich would listen and then offer an unexpected perspective. He’d say, “I don’t think finding God’s plan for you has to be complicated. God’s will is that you love him with all your heart and soul and mind, and also that you love your neighbor as yourself. Get busy with that, and then, if God wants you to do something unusual, he’ll take care of it. Say, for example, he wants you to go to Egypt.” Rich would pause for a moment before flashing his trademark grin. “If that’s the case, he’ll provide 11 jealous brothers, and they’ll sell you into slavery.”

When I find myself wrestling with life decisions, I think of Rich’s Egypt Principle. It makes me laugh, and then it asks me to get down to the serious business of determining which of my options allow me to best love God and other people.

Maybe that’s why Rich could claim that loving God and others takes care of most of our discernment questions. After all, the psalmist assures us that if we delight ourselves in the Lord, he will give us the desires of our heart (Ps. 37:4). God can be trusted to teach our hearts what to desire, and to lead us—by jealous brothers, burning bushes, or quiet inclinations—to the places where our own unique giftings meet the movements of his kingdom. There we find consolation and joy.

R. Douglas Fields writes about the vigorous activity of the brain during sleep:

Midway between our unconscious and conscious minds there is the altered mental state of sleep. If you should live to the age of seventy-five, you will have spent perhaps twenty-five of those years asleep. What goes on in your head during that block of your lifetime is largely beyond your knowledge or comprehension. It is a mysterious and still mystical chunk of ourselves.

If sleep were simply a nightly hibernation, a shutting down of our system in the dark, it could be understood as a reasonable strategy to save power for the daytime when we can be physically active. Sleep might be much like a laptop computer going into temporary hibernation to save resources during long periods of inactivity. But hibernation is hardly what goes on in the human brain during sleep. Sleep is a vigorous period of brain activity. It is an altered state, not an inert state.

There are cycles and patterns of activity during our nocturnal unconscious life shuttling enormous amounts of activity through different brain circuits. Events of the day—conscious and unconscious—are reexamined, sorted, associated, filed, or discarded. Memories are moved from one place in the brain and filed in different places in our cerebral cortex according to such factors as the type of information they contain, their connections to other events, and the internal emotional states of mind stamping them with significance.

Possible Preaching Angle:

We read repeatedly in Scripture that God spoke to one servant or another in a dream, or while they slept. He even spoke to unbelievers whose actions could impact his people. Why does God choose to speak to people while they sleep? Maybe it is because they are so busy or so distracted or so obstinate while awake that he speaks to them when they are asleep.

In his testimony in CT magazine, Johnathan Bailey tells how he went from repeatedly “getting saved,” to eternal life in Christ.

Jonathan grew up as a pastor’s kid. His father pastored a nondenominational, charismatic church. He and his brother had BB gun shootouts in the vacant sanctuary and learned how to do donuts using the youth pastor’s car before he could legally drive. When he got older, he threw himself into the behind-the-scenes work of the youth group. Jonathan insisted on working the sound booth, because it allowed him to avoid worshiping and watch others worship instead. Jonathan writes:

As a teenager, I was pretty sure I believed God existed, but without firsthand experience of him, “Christianity,” went in one ear and out the other. I knew facts and Bible verses but there was my arch nemesis: the altar call. I had never experienced any long-lasting change after raising my hand and repeating a prayer, so over time, I came to loathe phrases such as “walk the aisle,” and “repeat after me.” Each attempt at getting saved seemed to take life rather than give it.

At the age of 22, he became a summer camp counselor along with one of his best friends. On the final night of camp, the sermon ended with an altar call. Jonathan saw his friend walk forward. But more shocking than that was the later evidence that something had really happened to him that night. His friend stopped drinking and partying, he began to read the Bible and Christian books voraciously, and attending church. He seemed to want to know God, be like him, and he had joy.

Jonathan says,

This was the opposite of what I had experienced growing up. The cycle usually went something like this: get saved in a burst of emotion, commit to Jesus for a few days or weeks, then let the devotion fade away.

But my friend grew month after month. His commitment and love for God were unwavering. The thought seized me: “Change is possible. It’s actually possible.” It gave me hope that Christianity could bring real change in my life.

One morning, an honest prayer began to spill out of me: “God, I don’t love you. But I want to.” Then one night everything changed. I was in a deep sleep, when suddenly my eyes opened. I was feeling confused about why I was awake at 5 a.m. I lay silently in the dark for a few seconds. Then I heard something in my mind, distinct and clear. It was like no other thought I had had. I heard these words: “Get up, pick up your Bible, and sit down at your desk.”

I got up and found my Bible, which had been collecting dust under a lamp on my nightstand. I picked a random spot. I looked down to see the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 22, verse 37. I read: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” Like the destruction of a great dam, the flood waters of God’s love crashed into me. In that moment, my secondhand spirituality became firsthand. My knowing about God was replaced with knowing God, and like my friend’s experience, the change was permanent.

That doesn’t mean faith has been easy, but it has been the most thrilling adventure of my life. Battling habits of pride, anger, lust, and gluttony has become an adventure. Through the joy and the pain, Jesus has shared his eternal life with me, filling and freeing me.

To illustrate that God’s people are a trusting people, pastor John Onwuchekwa tells about watching the 2021 NCAA Men’s basketball championship game, between Baylor and Gonzaga:

I was watching the game intently, texting my friends as I watched. There came a time when [Baylor] took out one of its star players. And Gonzaga started to make this run. And I was infuriated. I was in the group chat saying, “I can’t believe that they did that. Things are gonna turn out bad.” And my friend said, “What are you talking about? He’s back in.” And I realized there was a lag in my internet connection.

As the game went on, the lag started to get worse. The announcer’s voice would say, “And he made the shot.” (But on my screen) the guy would be dribbling. And then he would shoot it and the shot went in. And I realized, oh, there’s a lag in my connection. I was so anxious about really wanting us to win that when I discovered there was a lag in my connection, I didn’t log on to fix it, I just let it stay there.

Do you know why? Because I trusted the announcer’s voice. I didn’t think that he was going to lie. I know that his word proceeded, what would happen. So, I let him speak. And I waited. I didn’t worry. I celebrated when he spoke, not when I saw what took place.

Possible Preaching Angle:

I want you to know that because of the broken world that we live in there is a lag in your connection. We’re going to have to wait. But we mustn’t worry. You can trust God’s Word. He lets us know what is going to happen before it happens. He’s never let us down. And he never will.

You know him as the smart, nerdy dude from Jurassic Park and Independence Day. But if things had turned out differently, Hollywood actor Jeff Goldblum might have added another role to his long list of credits: the voice of Siri.

Speaking on the Today Show in Australia, Goldblum revealed that Apple's late cofounder Steve Jobs once offered him the opportunity to do some voiceover work. Goldblum said, "Steve Jobs called me up a few decades ago to be the voice of Apple. That was early on, and I did not know it was Steve Jobs." Sadly, the collaboration never came to pass. A Georgia-based voiceover actress named Susan Bennett went on to become the first voice of Siri.

Possible Preaching Angle:

As a young boy, Samuel heard the voice of God in the night calling him. On the third hearing, he obeyed. Elijah heard the voice of God, not in the whirlwind earthquake or fire, but in a gentle whisper. Moses heard God’s voice in a burning bush. Are you careful to listen to the still small voice of God as he invites you to follow and obey?

Forty-seven-year-old Anthony Oliveri was riding his Harley Davidson motorcycle down a busy street in Indiana when he was struck by another vehicle. Oliveri later recounted the incident, “I remember it happened and I didn’t quite know what was going on for a split second … as I looked back around my left shoulder, all I see is her tire and the left bumper getting ready to run my face over.”

Interestingly, both drivers attributed the crash to God's will. The driver of the automobile did not stop, but police located her a few miles from the accident. When she was asked to explain her actions, she had an interesting response, "God told me to let him take the wheel." Police summarized her statement: "She was driving and out of nowhere God told her that he would take it from here and she let go of the wheel and let him take it."

By contrast, Oliveri recounted: "I was inches from that bumper and I just said to myself today is the day I die. I just shut my eyes and said if this is the way that God wants to do it then I guess that this is the way we’re going to do it." Later, he attributed his survival to divine intervention.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Both statements exhibited a degree of trust. Notice the difference between their beliefs. One presumed on God’s power based solely on human desires or feelings. The other took what was known about God and his sovereignty, and gave him glory for whatever came next. One attempted to force God’s hand, the other recognized his involvement and said “Whatever you want here."

Douglas Murray is a prolific humanist writer and social critic who has authored two bestselling books. He finds himself in the odd position of being a self-professed non-believer who nevertheless has great respect for Christianity and the positive role it has played in building Western civilization--to the point of calling himself a “Christian atheist.”

On an episode of the Unbelievable podcast, Murray was asked, “Why don’t you just believe in God?” His response has always been that he genuinely finds it difficult to accept certain aspects of the Christian argument. Belief in God, he noted, cannot be faked or forced.

Esther O’Reilly, also a guest on the program, noted that if men are rational animals, then God must deal with them as such. Therefore, there can be evidence that fully satisfies man’s search for these truths, both intellectually and spiritually, as opposed to requiring a blind leap of faith. The historical reliability of the New Testament, for instance, is one such piece of evidence, since it attests to the truth of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. This evidence is available to all who wish to judge it, point by point.

The host of the program, Justin Brierley, asked Murray what it would take for him to make a return to faith in God and Christianity. Murray said “I think I’d need to hear a voice.” Brierley asked “Literally a voice from beyond?” “Oh yes,” he replied, “I mean it literally.”

He admitted to being fascinated by the lack of such experiences in the West when compared to places like the Middle East or Africa. He also cited the utter incredulity with which Christians in the West treat individuals who claim to have had such experiences. He said, “this has historically been one of the ways in which religion has thrived, in visions.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

God has given us evidence for belief in him through creation (Psa. 19:1-6; Rom 1:4), through fulfilled prophecy (Isa. 7:14; Micah 5:2), and through the resurrection of Christ (John 20:1-9; Rom. 1:4) to name a few. But there are many who simply choose not to believe.

Florencia Rastelli was mortified. As she wiped the counter at the cafe where she works, she knocked over a glass and it shattered loudly on the floor. The customers all stood still, petrified, Ms. Rastelli recalled. “I was like: Of all days, this one,” she said. “Even a police officer popped in and asked me to keep it down. I was so embarrassed.”

The people of Cremona, Italy, are unusually sensitive to noise right now. The police have cordoned off streets in the bustling city center and traffic has been diverted. The city’s mayor implored Cremona’s citizens to avoid any sudden and unnecessary sounds.

Cremona is home to the workshops of some of the world’s finest instrument makers, including Antonio Stradivari, who produced some of the finest violins and cellos ever made. The city is getting behind an ambitious project to digitally record the sounds of the Stradivarius instruments for posterity. And that means being quiet.

So that future generations won’t miss out on hearing the instruments, sound engineers are producing the “Stradivarius Sound Bank”—a database storing all the possible tones that the instruments can produce.

The engineers thought their project was finally ready to get underway. But a soundcheck revealed a major flaw. The sound of a car engine, or a woman walking in high heels, produced vibrations that ran underground and reverberated in the microphones, making the recording worthless.

The police cordoned off the streets. The auditorium’s ventilation was turned off. Every light bulb in the concert hall was unscrewed to eliminate a faint buzzing sound. The violist played a C-major scale as the recording team watched their screens responding to the crisp sound of the instrument.

Then it happened, and they froze. “Stop for a moment, please,” the sound engineer said. They rewound the recording, and played it again. The technician heard the problem, loud and clear: “Who dropped a glass on the floor?”

Possible Preaching Angles:

1) Bible; Scripture; Word of God – The Bible accurately records the very words of God so that we can hear his voice generations after he has spoken; 2) Meditation; Silence; Fellowship with God - In order to meditate on Scripture and to fellowship with God we must silence the constant noise around us and focus on him.

Mark Batterson describes the amazing ability of the human ear in his book Whisper:

The act of hearing is detecting vibrations of the eardrum caused by sound waves, and the intensity of those waves is measured in decibels. On one end of the sound spectrum is the sperm whale, the loudest animal on earth. The clicking noise it uses to echolocate can hit 200 decibels. Even more impressive, researchers believe that whale songs may travel up to ten thousand miles underwater! Next to the sperm whale is jet engines (150 decibels), air horns (129 decibels), thunderclaps (120 decibels), and jackhammers (100 decibels).

What's on the other end of the sound spectrum?

A whisper, measuring just 15 decibels.

Technically speaking, our absolute threshold of hearing is 0 decibels. That corresponds to a sound wave measuring 0.0000002 pascals, which causes the eardrum to vibrate by just 108 millimeters. That's less than a billionth of the ambient pressure in the air around us and smaller than the diameter of a hydrogen atom!

The President of the U.S. has the power to push text messages to just about every smartphone in America, anytime he deems it necessary. Who knew? The Wireless Emergency Alert (WEA) system was born of President Bush's frustration with the Federal Emergency Management Agency's response during Hurricane Katrina, and has morphed since. If you've ever received one of these alerts, it was probably about a missing child Amber alert or a severe weather warning.

But buried in the documents describing its function is this fact: The President of the United States can mass-message the entire phone-carrying nation at the same time whenever he deems it necessary. Oddly enough, if you do get a presidential emergency alert and you're on the phone, it won't show up until after you've finished your conversation. I guess the apocalypse can wait?

Preaching Angle: This illustrates the profound truth that God is in instantaneous and personal contact with every believer, at any time, under any circumstances, by his Spirit.

Doctors warn that a steady onslaught of loud noise, particularly through ear buds, is damaging the hearing of a generation wired for sound, although they may not realize it for years. More than 1 billion young people are at risk of hearing loss because of personal audio devices, such as smartphones, and damaging levels of sound at entertainment venues like electronic dance music festivals, where noise levels can top 120 decibels for hours, according to the World Health Organization.

"Probably the largest cause [of hearing damage] is millennials using earbuds and [smartphones]," says Dr. Sreekant Cherukuri, an ear, nose, and throat specialist. Hearing loss among today's teens is about 30 percent higher than in the 1980s and 1990s, Cherukuri estimates.

"You (once) had a Walkman with two AA batteries and headphones that went over your ears," he told NBC News. "At high volume, the sound was so distorted and the battery life was poor. Nowadays, we have smart phones that are extremely complex computers with high-level fidelity."

The damage happens when sound travels from the earbud deep inside your ear to the cochlea, where some 20,000 hair cells transmit the sound to the brain. But if the sound is too loud, and listened to for too long, it can damage those hair cells, or worse, cause them to die off. Permanent damage can happen in minutes, experts say.

Possible Preaching Angles: Physical hearing loss is a serious situation, but spiritual hearing loss is devastating. Will anyone in the wired generation be able to hear the voice of God amidst the constant barrage of noise?

In1973 the journal Science published an article titled "On Being Sane in Insane Places." It described an experiment in which eight "fake" patients with no history of mental illness went undercover and checked themselves into a few psychiatric hospitals across the United States. All of them had the same complaint: they told medical staff that they regularly "heard voices." Apart from this fabrication they behaved normally and recounted their own (normal) past experiences and medical histories.

Nonetheless, all of them were diagnosed as schizophrenic (except one, who was diagnosed with "manic-depressive psychosis"), hospitalized for up to two months, and prescribed antipsychotic medications (which they did not swallow). Once admitted to the mental wards, they continued to speak and behave normally; they reported to the medical staff that their hallucinated voices had disappeared and that they felt fine. They even kept notes on their experiment, quite openly (this was registered in the nursing notes for one of the fake patients as "writing behavior").

This experiment, designed by David Rosenhan, a Stanford psychologist and one of the fake patients, found that the single symptom of "hearing voices" could suffice for an immediate, categorical diagnosis of mental illness even in the absence of any other symptoms or abnormalities of behavior. In other words, "hearing voices" could only have one explanation—you're crazy.

Possible Preaching Angles: Of course mental illness is a reality, but at times smart people in our society are quick to judge that Christians who hear from God are also crazy or deluded.

Dear Fear-Of-What-Others-Think:

I am sick of you, and it's time we broke up. I know we've broken up and gotten back together many times, but seriously, Fear-Of-What-Others-Think, this is it. We're breaking up.

I'm tired of overthinking my status updates on Facebook, trying to sound more clever, funny, and important. I'm sick of feeling anxious about what I say or do in public, especially around people I don't know that well, all in the hope that they'll like me, accept me, praise me. I run around all day feeling like a Golden Retriever with a full bladder: Like me! Like me! Like me!

Because of you, I go through my day with a cloud of shame hanging over my head, and I never stop acting. The spotlight's always on, and I'm center stage, and I'd better keep dancing, posturing, mugging, or else the spotlight will move, and I'll dissolve into a little, meaningless puddle on the ground, just like that witch in The Wizard of Oz. I can never live up to the expectations of my imaginary audience, the one that lives only in my head but whose collective voice is louder than any other voice in the universe.

And all of this is especially evil because if I really stop and think about it, and let things go quiet and listen patiently for the voice of the God who made me and the Savior who died for me, in his eyes, it turns out I'm actually—profoundly—precious, lovable, worthy, valuable, and even just a little ghetto-fabulous. When I find my true identity in Christ, then you turn back into the tiny, yapping little dog that you are.

So eat it, Fear-Of-What-Others-Think. You and I are done. And no, I'm not interested in "talking it through." I'm running, jumping, laughing you out of my life, once and for all. Or at least, that's what I really, really want, God help me.

Roc Bottomly writes in Discipleship Journal:

One night in a dream, my wife saw the mangled body of one of our children. She frantically tried to help, but nothing worked. She was helpless, desperate, and terrified. After waking, she agonized through the morning about her dream. Finally, she called me at the office and asked, "Roc, do you think this is God telling us to prepare for the death of our child?"

I listened and reasoned a bit. After all, the Bible gives examples of God telling people they are going to die. Then I thought about the nature of the dream (gruesome carnage and helpless despair) and the impact of the dream (fear and grief). I told Bev I was confident that this was not God speaking. It's not like Him to frighten us for no reason. This sounded more like a message from her heart, which wrestled regularly with fears of losing a child, or a message from Satan, who is well known for lies and terror. Years have passed, and none of our children has died in a gruesome manner.

A similar "message," on the other hand, had a very different feel. While on vacation, my daughter Bethany was speeding down a California freeway with three teenage friends. One of them, Jody, told of having dreamed the night before that they were in a serious wreck and that she had been the only one with a seat belt on and the only survivor. Hearing that, they all fastened their seat belts.

Later that day, their car swerved into the grass median and rolled. The investigating officer looked at the car and the shaken but unhurt teens and said, "If you hadn't had your seat belts on, the outcome would have been a lot different."

Where did Jody's dream come from? Consider the message: a warning of a danger that turned out to be very real. Consider the tone: an urging to do something that was right and reasonable, something that traveling teens often neglect. Consider the effect: saved lives. Who speaks in this way? A Father.

God speaks to us not only once in a while, but always.

God always answers us in the deeps, never in the shallows of our soul.