Who Are You Listening to, Today?
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- Updated Jun 08, 2023
Discerning God's Voice
“My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me.” John 10:27 NLT
Discernment is a word used to describe who we are listening to. We listen to the people we have faith in and acknowledge those who have proven wise and trustworthy. We make judgments and decisions based on discernment. Yet many leave too little time to determine who we should listen to.
The shepherd in John 10:27 is Jesus. John 10:11 reads, “I am the Good Shepherd.” ‘I am’ carried an important connotation to the people Jesus spoke to then and to us today. ‘I am’ is a name for God. “I AM WHO I AM,” Exodus 3:14 says. “Throughout the Old Testament, others added to His name ‘’I AM’ – translated Yahweh or Jehovah or LORD – “ Cindi McMenamin wrote, “by giving Him names that clarified His character, based upon His provision and His miracles. “
Jesus, fully God and fully man, also identified Himself several times, beginning with the phrase, ‘I am.’ (Reference the 7 ‘I am’ statements of Jesus for further details.) Jesus, Shepherd, the Son of God. Fully man and fully God. The long-awaited Messiah. A hard concept to grasp for His audience then and us today. It’s a fact requiring faith. His voice should have a prominent influence on our lives.
Sheep aren’t smart. They need a shepherd to keep them alive, and so do we. Even the most brilliant minds are limited, flawed, and fall short. The best spiritual leaders stumble, and the most respected political leaders fumble. Leaders in this world will always fall short of perfection because God is the only one who is perfect.
I am who I am is a motto modern society has adopted to explain and excuse faults and frailties as if our very personalities were not specifically crafted with a distinct purpose. Discernment helps us determine how we make our decisions in life. Who better to consult than God, who created and knows everything and everyone and is everywhere all the time?
God is who He is. The rest of us are a work in progress until we meet our Maker in heaven. God never has, or will, change. Our Father is faithful, meaning we can rely on Him fully, trusting Him with our literal lives. All life is birthed and sustained by God. We are known and loved by the one who is Love. His voice spoke the world as we know it into existence—a voice worth deciphering, recognizing, discerning, and depending on for direction.
The following points give us a road map to determine who we are listening to. In an age marked by technology, anyone who’s told Siri where to go knows her route isn’t always the actual fastest …or the most efficient. Artificial intelligence will never fully replace humanity, nor our ability to discern the truth. The human mind will always be limited, leading us straight to our unlimited God.
Faith and Trust
“I am the Good Shepherd.” John 10:11 NLT
To recognize the Shepherd’s voice, we must believe He is who He says He is. Fortunately, there is a load of historical evidence to prove who Jesus is and what He accomplished on this earth. But far outweighing the facts is the way He knows who we are. Before we were born, He knew us. As He died an unfair death for us, He thought of us. Not in general …specifically. Jesus said:
“The good shepherd sacrifices his life for the sheep. A hired hand will run when he sees a wolf coming. He will abandon the sheep because they don’t belong to him, and he isn’t their shepherd. And so, the wolf attacks them and scatters the flock. The hired hand runs away because he’s working only for the money and doesn’t really care about the sheep. ‘I am the good shepherd; I know my sheep, and they know me.” – John 10:11-14 NLT
Jesus, who is fully God and fully man, knows us better than we know ourselves. He relates to the experience of being physically human and all the accompanying feelings. What’s more, He can be trusted with said knowledge. He won’t take advantage of our vulnerabilities nor trick us into an embarrassing scenario. His desire for us is good. It has to be because He is God and God is good …and God …never changes. He even makes good out of our bad decisions and mistakes. Which, even when we’re listening hard to the Shepherd, befall the best of us. All of us. We all fall short. And that, on this earth, won’t ever change, either. Faith and trust allow us to hear, understand, and follow God through Christ Jesus. It’s in all of us to connect with Him, but the choice is ours alone.
Discipline and Patience
“The word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.” Hebrews 4:12 NIV
Listening to the Shepherd means understanding the Word of God. John began His Gospel, ensuring we understood that Jesus is God's Living Word. He’s on every page, not just the New Testament and Old Testament prophecies, but from beginning to end. We could study the Bible our entire lives and never run out of new ways to apply it daily. Life changes, but He never does.
It takes discipline and patience to study the Word of God. Even daily devotional readings that are happy, short, and light still give us much-needed wisdom for our day. The more we read it, the more it beckons to us. It’s alive and active.
Reading the Bible isn’t meant to be something we feel pressured to check off a list and guilty if we don’t, but rather a wonder we crave every day. With discipline and patience, we’ll look back on life alongside our Savior in a deep and rich way best friends and married people don’t share. He is with us through it all. The Living Word of God encourages, motivates, convicts, comforts, loves, teaches, and matures us like nothing else can. We are wise to listen to what He says about us, the world, and all people in it, life, and eternity.
Surrender and Belief
“I am the light of the world. If you follow me, you won’t have to walk in the darkness, because you will have the light that leads to life.” John 8:12 NLT
I am. Salvation is a religious word that describes our surrender to God by believing in Jesus. We have the ability to hear God when we turn our lives over to Him by professing our faith in Christ. It means we believe He is who He says He is. I am. When we follow Christ, we give God control, trusting His plans for us even when they don’t align with our own.
The Messiah is our personal Savior. He is the Savior of the World and the Light of the World. We’re not meant to live our lives in darkness any more than we were designed to live them alone. The sun signals another day, and we rest at night. (Aside from those of us privy to the night shift, who probably understand the value of daylight most.)
To live in darkness is sad. Darkness and loneliness are not things God intends for us. He has set us in generations, on teams, in jobs and families, on purpose. Our lives were meant to bring glory to God, but because of the sin in the world, our minds are clouded from the truth until we surrender and believe. We’re trapped in darkness until rescued by the Light. Discernment in the form of the Holy Spirit rushes into our being the moment we believe, allowing us to recognize His voice.
Silence and Stillness
“When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth. He will not speak on his own but will tell you what he has heard. He will tell you about the future.” John 16:13 NLT
We'd be rich if we had a dollar for every time we wished to know what would happen. My daughter is a movie-ending spoiler. If she starts talking about a movie, and you haven’t seen it yet, run! She will not be able to stop herself, and you will know how it all ends before you see it begin.
The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Truth. He guides us …into all truth. To listen, we must find the time to be silent and still, even in crowded and noisy places. It’s a silence and still of our hearts, in tune with Him. He will guide, nudge, remind, translate, and direct our steps. The clamor and clatter of the world attack us from all angles, from the pit of scrolling through our smartphones to the chatter begging for an audience in our minds.
Clear the clutter. Along with the surrender and belief we release into the atmosphere at salvation comes the spoiler. We know how it ends. Our earthly lives eventually end, but we live on eternally with our God in heaven.
With prayerful practice, we can quiet our hearts and tune our minds, not just in our daily disciplined quiet time with the Lord, but throughout our lives in the most apropos times. We will see the sad woman who needs someone to smile and say thank you for coming over to the self-checkout line to tend to it. Hurting and lonely people will appear on our radar with a directive attached and tuned to love.
Love
“Three things will last forever – faith, hope and love – and the greatest of these is love.” 1 Corinthians 13:13 NLT
Love that lasts forever isn’t the kind we speak in wedding vows. How many times have we heard a couple who deeply loved each other profess this verse and then shockingly end up separated, for death do they part? It’s a great love between two people committed to each other for their entire earthly lives. But it isn’t the greatest love. God is love. He lasts forever.
Our hope is in Jesus, and our faith in Him reconnects us to God …to Love. This love isn’t a fleeting feeling accomplished by two humans but sparked and sustained by God. We aren’t capable of that kind of love, and I believe those married for more years than they’ve been apart from each other can testify love is something bigger than themselves, whether they embrace God or not. Jesus said:
“You must love the LORD your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind. This is the first and the greatest commandment. A second is equally important: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ The entire law and all the demands of the prophets are based on these two commandments.” – Matthew 22:36-40
The greatest of these is love. Love from above. All your heart. All your soul. All your mind. I’ve never loved another person on this earth like that. Not with the all-inclusive “all.” Humans are flawed. I’m flawed. My people are flawed. I love my husband, my daughters and, my parents, my good friends who God, Himself, gave to me. I love them all the most I can …but none more than I love Jesus. He tells us in Matthew’s Gospel to love Him first, foremost, and the most because if we don’t, we’re incapable of loving anyone at all …even the most we are capable of on this earth.
Discernment is a fancy Bible word to describe the simple art of listening. When it’s quiet and loud in life, we’ve been given the greatest gift: the opportunity to listen ….to God. Through prayer, Scripture, nature, other people, and countless other ways, He communicates with us as sure as the sun rises daily. Jesus died to give us a full life. Listen to Him. Surrender, silence, and still your heart. The best and fullest life on earth can be unlocked by listening to the One who Created it.
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