Do You Hear His Voice?

A few weeks ago my family was in town to visit (actually, our house has been a virtual hotel this month, but I digress). For part of that visit my father and his wife came to the modern service at our church.

As the MC (for lack of a better word) of that service, I was sitting backstage while the table discussion was going on (at this service, after the pastor speaks we take time to process what was said in small groups). I'm usually back there and most weeks all I hear is a mix of crowd noise and adults from Peanuts cartoons with the odd roar of laughter.

But this week was slightly different. There was one voice I heard over everyone else's. My father's. It's not that he was loud or anything, it's just that for a good part of my life I was taught to hear my father's voice, to recognize it, to listen to it, to obey it. As a child I learned to pick out my dad's voice and now, almost twenty years after I moved out of the house, it's still there. I can still pick it out over all the other voices.

Jesus tells us to do that same with His voice. In John 10 He speaks of being a good shepherd and we as His sheep must be able to hear His voice, to pick it out over the bleating of all the other sheep and to follow it wherever He tells us to go. The only way I know to do that is the same way I learned to hear my father's voice, consciously listening for it over time.

So the question is, can you hear your Father's voice? And if not, how can you learn to hear it better?

T