“Whisper” Sermon Series Sermon Notes: 1/2 “The Bravest Prayer”
• For additional church resources visit MarkBatterson.com/Whisper • To inquire about bulk book order discounts on Whisper visit the Multnomah Purchasing Page here.
Half a century ago, Dr. Alfred Tomatis was confronted with the most curious case of his fifty-year career as an otolar- yngologist. A renowned opera singer had mysteriously lost his ability to hit certain notes even though those notes were well within his vocal range. He had been to other specialists, all of whom thought it was a vocal problem. Dr. Tomatis thought otherwise. Using a sonometer, Dr. Tomatis determined that this opera singer was producing 140-decibel sound waves at a meter’s distance. That’s louder than a military jet taking off from an aircraft carrier! That discovery led to this diagnosis: the opera singer had been deafened by the sound of his own voice. And because he couldn’t hear the note, he could no longer sing the note. In Dr. Tomatis’s words, “The voice can only reproduce what the ear can hear.” The French Academy of Medicine dubbed it the Tomatis effect. And it’s ramifications go way beyond opera. Listen, here’s my theory. All of us have problems—relational problems, emotional problems, spiritual problems. We think those problems are the problem, but I think they’re symptoms. The root cause of our problems is a spiritual Tomatis effect—ears that have been deafened to the voice of God.
It’s our own negative self-talk. God can’t get a word in edgewise! It’s the voice of criticism—you’ve heard that voice so often for so long that you can’t believe anything else about yourself. It’s the voice of conformity, the voice of culture! It’s the voice of condemnation. Listen, the enemy is called the accuser of the brethren. He’s also called the father of lies. If you listen to those lies, it’ll deafen you to the voice of God. And if you can’t hear His voice, you can’t sing His song. And your life is going to be off-key!
Let me give you a prescription for those problems: learning to discern the still small voice of God is the solution to a thousand problems! And it’s the key to discovering your identity and your destiny.
His voice is joy. His voice is wisdom. His voice is healing. His voice is peace. His voice is power. His voice is grace. His voice is truth.
In the beginning, God said, “Let there be light.” Those four words are still creating galaxies at the outer edges of the universe! How did God do it? He did it with His voice! The universe is God’s way of saying, “Look at what I can with four words!” And if God can create the universe with four words, what we worried about?
The voice that spoke the universe into existence is the same that parted the Red Sea and made the Sun Stand Still. His voice can heal a withered arm or wither a barren fig tree. His voice can turn water into wine, install synaptic con- nections between the optic nerve and visual cortex of a blind man’s brain, and resurrect a man who was four days dead—Lazarus, come forth!
There is nothing God’s voice cannot say, cannot do. And, frankly, He can do it however He pleases! He can speak through a burning bush or Balaam’s donkey! His voice can stop a storm on the Sea of Galilee with three words— “Whisper” Sermon Series • “The Bravest Prayer” • Page 2
“Peace, be still.” And that’s tough for us to even comprehend because we use our voices to basically do one thing—to speak or shout or sing. That’s it.
We think phonics, but sound waves are physics.
Most people I know would say that they’ve never heard the voice of God. And if you’re talking about the audible voice of God between 20 and 20,000 hertz, me neither. But God’s voice isn’t limited to our range of hearing. The reality is this: it’s when you get outside that range of hearing that sound waves do some strange and mysterious things. I don’t have time to talk about infrasound and ultrasound. But suffice it say, God’s ability to speak is not limited to our ability to hear audibly! God uses His voice to create and convict, to heal and reveal, to guide and to grace.
Here’s what I know for sure: God is speaking! The question: are we listening? And is God the loudest voice in our lives? If He’s not, that’s the problem. The solution is tuning in and turning up that still small voice. It’s learning these seven languages. And like any language, it takes time and effort to acquire. It took three and a half years of Spanish for me to say, “Yo hablo un poco espanol.” It’s not easy learning a language. It gonna take time. And it’s gonna take relationship. And that’s what God wants.
A few years ago, I wrote a book about prayer titled The Circle Maker. It’s about talking to God. But that’s half the equa- tion. Prayer isn’t about outlining our agenda to God, it’s about getting into God’s Word and God’s presence and letting Him outline His agenda for us! So let me flip the coin. Whisper is about listening to God. And if you asked me which side of the prayer coin was more important, I’d say listening to God seven days a week and twice on Sunday. It turns a monologue into a dialogue. And at the end of the day, I need to hear what God has to say more than God needs to hear what I have to say.
Now let me say a few things up front.
First, if you aren’t willing to listen to everything God has to say, eventually you won’t hear anything He has to say. If you want to hear His comforting voice, you’ve got to listen to His convicting voice. I think sometimes we’re afraid of what God is going to say. Listen, you want to hear what He has to say. In fact, what you want to least is probably what you need to hear most. And I want to say this up front. These seven languages are love languages! If its not love, it’s not God. Now, it might be tough love. And it might not be what you want to hear. But you know what I’ve found. It’s what I want to hear least that sometimes I need to hear most.
The second thing I want to say is this. We live in a culture where everyone wants to be heard, but has so little to say. Listen, I hope you find your voice. But finding your voice starts with hearing the voice of God. If you want people to listen to you, listen God. Because then you’ll have something to say worth listening to. May God give you a prophetic voice, but starts with a prophetic ear!
I Kings 19:11-12
The Lord said, “Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.” Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper. “Whisper” Sermon Series • “The Bravest Prayer” • Page 3
The ESV calls it “a low whisper.” The NASB calls it “a gentle blowing.” The KJV calls it “a still small voice.”
By definition, a whisper is speaking with one’s breath rather than one’s vocal chords. And the theological significance of that is pretty profound. God breathed into the dust and formed Adam. In other words, Adam was once a whisper. So were you. So was everything else. II Timothy 3:16 says, “All Scripture is God-breathed.” The Bible is God whispering!
Hold that thought.
On the morning of August 27, 1883, ranchers in Alice Springs, Australia, heard what sounded like gunshots. The same mysterious sound was reported in fifty geographical locations spanning one-thirteenth of the globe. What those Aus- sies heard was the eruption of a volcano on the remote Indonesian island of Krakatoa 2,233 miles away!
That volcanic eruption, possibly the loudest sound ever measured, sent sound waves measuring 310-decibels all the way around the globe four times! It generated three-thousand-foot tidal waves, threw rocks a distance of thirty-four miles, and cracked one-foot-thick concrete three hundred miles away!
That’s the power of sound waves.
If you were to drill a hole directly through the center of the earth, opposite of Krakatoa you would find Colombia, South America. Although the sound of the eruption wasn’t audible in Colombia, there was a measurable spike in atmo- spheric pressure because of infrasonic sound waves that caused the air to tense. The sound may not have been heard, but it was felt, all the way around the world. According to science journalist and New York Times columnist Maggie Koerth-Baker, “Just because you can’t hear a sound doesn’t mean it isn’t there.” At low levels, sound is imperceptible. At high levels, it’s unignorable.
If sound exceeds 110 decibels, we experience a change in blood pressure. At 141 decibels, we become nauseous. At 145 decibels, our vision blurs because our eyeballs vibrate. At 195 decibels, our eardrums are in danger of rupturing. And death by sound waves can happen at 202 decibels.
On the opposite end of the sound spectrum, just above the absolute threshold of hearing, is a whisper. It measures 15db.
Now let me double back to I Kings 19.
We tend to dismiss the natural phenomena that precede the whisper as insignificant because it says God was not in them, but I bet they got Elijah’s attention! God has an outside voice, and He’s not afraid to use it. But when God wants to be heard, when what He has to say is too important to miss, He often speaks in a whisper just above the absolute threshold of hearing. The question is why. And how. And when and where. And I can’t answer all of those questions in this message. I touch on them in the book. But let take a stab at why.
When someone speaks in a whisper, you have to get very close to hear them—you have to put your ear right next to their mouth. We lean into a whisper, and that’s what God wants. We think the goal of hearing the Heavenly Father’s voice is hearing His voice. But that isn’t God’s goal. God’s goal is intimacy with us! So He speaks in a whisper. So we have to draw close to Him.
“Whisper” Sermon Series • “The Bravest Prayer” • Page 4
When our children were young, I’d speak in a whisper so they had to get close to me to hear me. That’s when I’d grab them and hug them. God plays the same trick on us. Yes, He wants us to hear what He has to say. But more than that, God wants us to hear His heart. To know how much He loves you.
Oswald Chambers said, “The voice of the Spirit is as gentle as a zephyr.” Aren’t you grateful for a gentle God? The Almighty could intimidate us with His outside voice, but He woos us with a whisper. And His whisper is the very breath of life.
Over the span of forty years, I prayed hundreds of times that God would heal my asthma. I honestly don’t know why He waited until July 2, 2016. That’s past my pay grade. But I want to tell you why I kept praying. It’s because of whisper.
Right before my freshman year of high school, I was hospitalized for a severe asthma attack that landed me in the in- tensive care unit. It was one of a dozen such hospitalizations during my younger years. In fact, I was code blue. When I was released from Edward’s Hospital a week later, Pastor Paul McGarvey and a prayer team from Calvary Church in Naperville, Illinois, came over to our house, laid hands on me, and prayed that God would heal my asthma. God an- swered that prayer for healing but not in the way I expected. When I woke up the next morning, I still had asthma, but all the warts on my feet had mysteriously disappeared. I’m not kidding! At first, I wondered if God had made a mistake. A little confusion between here and heaven! I couldn’t help but wonder if someone somewhere was breathing great but still had warts on their feet. I was a little confused, but that’s when I heard the still small voice of the Holy Spirit, maybe for the first time in my life. It wasn’t an audible voice; it was Spirit to spirit. But it was loud and clear. The Spirit said, “Mark, I just wanted you to know that I’m able!”
And He’s not just able; He’s “able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us.” It was that whisper that kept me praying. And for what’s worth, I dedicated Whisper to Paul McGarvey. The dedication says, “You prayed a prayer in August of 1984 that God answered on July 2, 2016.”
My healing was once a whisper! And that’s true of every miracle.
As I survey my life, I realize that the genesis of every blessing, every breakthrough is a whisper—the breath of God.
Ebenezers, our coffeehouse on Capitol Hill, is a perfect example. When people walk by Ebenezers, they see a cof- feehouse. I hear a whisper. That’s all it was two decades ago. It was a graffiti-covered building with cinder blocks in the doorframes. But I felt like the Spirit of God said: This crack house would make a great coffeehouse.That thought came out of nowhere, which sometimes indicates something supernatural. I call it a God idea, and I’d rather have one God idea than a thousand good ideas. Good ideas are good, but God ideas change the course of history.
That God idea turned into a brave prayer, which turned into a coffeehouse which has served a million customers and given a million dollars in net profits to kingdom causes! But every shot of espresso that we pull was once a whisper.
Remember the definition of a whisper? It’s speaking using one’s breath, rather one’s vocal chords.
After God healed my asthma, I made the decision to run a marathon. I felt like it was the best way to celebrate and validate that healing miracle in my life. But I also began to research respiration. And I made a discovery that somehow managed to elude me despite three seminary degrees. “Whisper” Sermon Series • “The Bravest Prayer” • Page 5
I knew that according to Jewish tradition, the name for God, Yahweh, was too sacred to pronounce. But there is an- other tradition within Judaism, that believes that the name for God, Yahweh without the vowels—Yod, Hei, Vav, Hei—is synonymous with the sound of breathing. So on one hand, the name is too sacred to pronounce. On the other hand, it’s whispered with each and every breath we take. It’s our first word, our last word, and every word in between. We speak the name of God about 23,000 times every day! It’s in Him that we live and move and have our being. He is the breath of life!
Let me close with a challenge.
In I Samuel 3, there is a seven-word prayer that I believe can change your life. It’s like the bravest prayer that I chal- lenged us to pray. Let me give you the context. There was a woman named Hannah who could not conceive. She begged God for a child, and God answered. She actually had five children, but the first child, Samuel, she gave back to the Lord. He basically lived at the Temple and interned under the High Priest, Eli. Scripture says he “grew up in the presence of God.” It says he “grew in favor with God and with people.” But it also says in I Samuel 3:1: “In those days the word of the Lord was rare; there were not many visions.”
Well, one night, the Lord spoke to Samuel. But Samuel had not yet learned to discern the voice of God. In fact, he mistook it for the voice of Eli. And I think we often make the same mistake. God speaks through desires and dreams and doors and people and promptings and pain. But we often misinterpret those messages. Or we ignore them alto- gether. Verse 7 says, “Samuel did not yet know the Lord: The word of the Lord had not yet been revealed to him.” In other words, he had not learned to discern the voice of God. I think this is where some of us find ourselves. Listen, I hope you get something out of the messages we preach. But you don’t need another sermon. You need a word from God. Relying on someone else for your spiritual growth is spiritual codependency. God wants to speak to you.
This happened three times, and the wise old Eli finally figured out what was going on. God was trying to get his atten- tion. So Eli gives him a little piece of advice. And I think it changes the trajectory of Samuel’s life. It’s a defining mo- ment. It’s a brave prayer. Eli says to Samuel, “Go and lie down, and if he calls you, say, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.”
God speaks and Samuel hears the voice of God for the first time. And it ends with this fascinating descriptor: “The Lord was with Samuel as he grew up, and he let none of his words fall to the ground.”
God gave Samuel a prophetic voice, but it starts with a prophetic ear. It starts with an ear that has been pierced by God. It’s starts with learning to discern the voice of God. Why? Because the voice can only reproduce what the ear can hear.
So here’s the challenge at the beginning of this series. Try praying the same prayer that Samuel prayed: “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.”
“Whisper” Sermon Series Sermon Notes: 2/2 “A Pierced Ear”
• For additional church resources visit MarkBatterson.com/Whisper • To inquire about bulk book order discounts on Whisper visit the Multnomah Purchasing Page here.
On December 26, 2004, the largest ever recorded by seismograph erupted 19 miles beneath the Indian Ocean. It registered 19.1 magnitude on the Richter Scale. It generated the energy equivalent of 23,000 atomic bombs and the shock waves produce tsunami waves measuring over 100 feet in height traveling 500 miles an hour, reaching a radius of 3,000 miles. That earthquake tragically claimed the lives of 227,898 people. There was one people group living right in the path of the tsunami who somehow survived without a single casualty. The Moken are an Austronesian ethnic group. They live their lives on the open seas from birth to death. They’re sea based nomads. Their boats, called Kabangs, are their homes. Their children learn to swim before they learn to walk. They see twice as well underwater, as we do. As you would imagine, they have an intimacy with the ocean. They read ocean waves the way that we read books. On the day that the Indian Ocean earthquake hit, an amateur photographer from Bangkok was taking pictures of the Moken. There was a moment when the sea began to recede and the Moken began to cry. They knew what was about to happen. The birds had stopped chirping. The elephants headed toward high ground and the dolphins were swimming farther out to sea. The Moken, who were near the coast of Thailand, beached their boats and hiked to the highest elevation. Those who were out to sea, went farther out to sea to deep ocean where they knew that the tsunami crest would be minimized as it passed them. The Moken survived because they knew how to look, they knew how to listen. They knew a language that others did not. Six times in the Gospels, eight times in the book of Revelation, Jesus says something. Six words and there’s an urgency to the exhortation and I think the implications are exponential. He says, “Whoever has ears, let them hear.” He’s not just talking about the audible voice of God within the human range of hearing. This weekend, we continue the series, Whisper, how to hear the voice of God. The first language is Scripture and it’s in a category by itself. Timothy II 3:16 says that all scripture is God breathe. When we open the Bible, God opens his mouth and he whis- pers to us through his word. There are six secondary languages that God speaks through in Scripture. Let me tell you what they are. The first language is the language of desire. Psalm 37:4 says, “Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart.” The word give, in Hebrew, means to conceive. In other words, God will birth new desires within you. I think we have this mistaken notion that if we do what God wants, he’s going to send us somewhere we don’t want to go to do what we don’t want to do and we’re going to be miserable. All right. Listen. That is not the heart of God. That’s not the way that God works. Now, we got to be careful. There are sinful desires, there are selfish desires but, when we delight ourself in the Lord, when we seek first his Kingdom, “Whisper” Sermon Series • “A Pierced Ear” • Page 2 what happens is, God sanctifies our desires, he gives us new desires so that those desires actually become compass needles that point us towards God’s good, pleasing and perfect will. The second language is the language of dreams. It’s the Lingua Franka. Acts 2:17 says, “I will pour out my spirit on all people. Your sons and your daughters will propheci. Your young man will see visions. Your old men will dream dreams when God fills you with his spirit.” Dreams are the supernatural byproduct. God wants to anoint your right brain imagination. He wants to give you what I call God ideas and I’d rather have a God idea than a thousand good ideas. Listen, God whispers, God works in those synapses, in those 86 billion neurons that chris cross the human mind. The third language is the language of yours. One of my most prayed promises is Revelation 3:7-8: what he opens, no one can shut. What he shuts, no one can open. See, I have placed before you, an open door.” Let me say this, we love open doors. Closed doors, not so much. It’s a package deal. The older I get, the more I real- ize that some day, we will probably thank God even more for the closed doors than the open doors. The fourth language is the language of people. God used a prophet named Nathan to rebuke a King named David. He used an uncle named Mordecai, to [exort 00:06:28] a queen named Ester and he used a spiritual father named Paul, to encourage Timothy. Numbers 11:29 says, “I wish all the Lord’s people were prophets.” Listen, God wants to speak to you, through others and he wants to speak to others through you. It’s the language of people. The fifth language is a language of prompting. Isaiah 30:21 says, “Whether you turn to the right or to the left, your ears will hear a voice behind you saying, ‘This is the way, walk in it.’” Scripture is our map but the Holy Spirit is our guide. Listen, God is ordering your footsteps. He is preparing good works in advance but we’ve got to discern the prompt- ings of the Holy Spirit if we want to get where God wants us to go. Finally, the sixth secondary language is the language of pain. C. S. Lewis said that God whispers to us in our pleasures but he shouts in our pain. You know what? You can ignore the Bible. You can leave it on the shelf. You can leave it on your bedside table. You know what you can’t ignore? Pain. Now listen, pain is a byproduct of the curse, Genesis 3. The day is com- ing where there will be no more death or morning or crying or pain. Revelation 20. In the meantime, we better listen to pain. Pain is a marriage counselor. Pain is a life coach. Pain is a professor of theology. Pain teaches us some of the toughest lessons but some of the most important lessons we can learn. Now, let me go back to this phrase. “Whoever has ears, let them hear.” Jesus is not talking just about physical ears. This isn’t about the audible voice of God and the human range of hearing, this is about learning to discern god’s voice in these different ways. It’s discerning desires and dreams and doors. It’s reading people and promptings and pain. It’s easier said than done but that’s what this series, that’s what the book you got last week is about. Author Diane Ackerman tells a funny story about traveling from her home in Waukegen, Illinois to Fayetteville, Arkansas. She had heard about the hot springs. When she got there, she asked her host in a Midwestern accent if there “Whisper” Sermon Series • “A Pierced Ear” • Page 3 was a spa. She immediately knew that something got lost in translation. With a confused look on her face and a pretty thick Southern accent, the host said, “Spa? You mean Russian spas?” Might have gotten lost in translation again. Right now spa and spy, potato potato. We generally hear what we want to hear. We don’t actually hear what’s being said. Is that not the problem with most relationships? It’s true in a relationship with God too. Sometimes, it’s what we want to hear least that we need to hear most. If we aren’t willing to listen to everything God has to say, eventually, we won’t hear anything he has to say. Let me zoom out for a moment. Studies have found that different countries hear differently. The French ear hears best between a thousand and 2,000 hertz. The British bandwidth, a little bit larger, between 2,000 and 12,000 hertz. The American ear hears best between 750 hertz and 3,000 hertz. In other words, there’s a French ear, there’s a Brit- ish ear, there’s an American ear. Can I suggest that there is a Catholic ear, a Baptist ear, a Pentacostal ear. There is a Democratic ear, there is a Republican ear. There is a male ear. There is a female ear. Some would suggest that one words and the other doesn’t. We listen through the filter. We listen through the filter of our history. Our personality, our theology and that sometimes makes it very difficult to actually hear what God is saying. When Jesus said, “Whoever has ears, let them hear.” Here’s what the Jewish ear would have heard, they would have heard, an echo of Psalm 40:6. Here’s what it says, “Sacrifice an of- fering you did not desire. But my ears, you have opened.” The Hebrew word for open is archeological. It means to excavate. It means to dig through dense material but it also means to pierce, which has lead many Bible scholars to believe that David was tipping his cap to an ancient ritual that was outlined in Mt. Cyanide. After serving for six years, Hebrew servants would be set free in the 7th year. If that servant loved that master so much that he did not want his freedom, he was given the option of becoming a servant for life. The physical symbol of that ancient ritual was a pierced ear. Exodus 21:6 says, “He shall take into the door post and pierce his ear with an awl. Then, he will be his servant for life.” The Latin word for obey is obedire and it means to give ear. It’s literally giving God your ear. It’s saying, “God, you get the first word and the last word.” It’s saying, “God, you’re going to be the loudest voice in my life.” It’s listening to God’s whisper even if a thousand people are screaming something different. Why? Because you have a pierced ear. You have an ear that has been con- secrated to the Lord Jesus Christ. Surrendering yourself to his Lordship, it starts with a pierced ear. Over the past decade, I’ve recorded about a dozen audio books with the same sound engineer. We’ve become friends. Brad Smiley. Good at what he does. One day, we’re having lunch in the middle of one of those recordings and he shared something with me I didn’t know. He said that standard operating procedure for sound mixers in the sound and music industries, before going into the studio, they let their ears relax and recalibrate through absolute silence. Acoustic ecologists called the process “Whisper” Sermon Series • “A Pierced Ear” • Page 4 ear cleaning. By definition, white noise is a sound that contains every frequency the human ear can hear. Because it contains every frequency, it’s very difficult to hear any frequency, especially the still, small voice of God. Listen, chronic noise is one of the greatest impediments to our spiritual growth and here’s what I know for sure; your life is too loud and your schedule is too busy and that’s how and why and when we forget that God is God. In the words of John Dawn, the English poet and clergyman, he said, “I neglect God and his Angels for the noise of a fly.” We are so easily distracted. I fully appreciate what Jesus said. I think a little ear anatomy might help. When sound waves hit our ears, they travel through a labyrinth. Diane Ackerman describes as a menial, miniature golf course. The outer ear functions like a funnel. It catches the sound travels through the ear canal, hits the ear drum and those vibrations bump into three of the tiniest bones in the human body, the hammer, the anvil and the stirrup. From there, those vibrations spiral through a snail shaped tube called the cochlea and it contains thousands of microscopic hair cells that amplify sound along the way. From there, the 8th cranial nerve transmits impulses almost like Morris code, to the auditory cortex and that’s where pitch and volume and tone and distance and direction and meaning are translated into actionable information. Can I just pause right here and say we’re fearfully and wonderfully made? We read verses like Proverbs 20:12, “Ears that hear and eyes that see, the Lord has made them both.” We don’t even stop to think about it. What a miracle. When I played basketball in college, no matter how many people were yelling and screaming, I could somehow always hear my dad’s voice. Few weeks ago, when I ran the Chicago Marathon, a million people there to cheer for me and the 45,000 other runners in that race. You know who I heard? Laura and Summer and Josiah. One of the most mysterious capabilities of the human ear is the ability to tune out certain sounds while turning others in and the reason is because we actually hear things twice. Audiologically, there’s a short time delay between sound waves hitting the outer ear and then reaching the inner ear. I go back to what Jesus said. It makes me think, how often are we guilty of listening to God with our outer ear and it’s in one ear and it’s out the other and God is saying, “I’m speaking to you. I’m giving you this desire. I’m closing that door. This dream is from me. No, I’m using this person to speak it. No, that prompting is from me. Would you listen to the pain?” God is speaking but so often, it’s just the outer ear and I think part of what Jesus is saying is, “You’ve got to listen with the inner ear. You’ve got to listen twice.” If you’re anything like me, it’s usually the critical remarks that seem to get to the inner ear and that’s how they get in our spirit and they echo don’t they? Sometimes it’s our own negative self talk and we beat ourselves up over and over and God is saying, “Hey, by the way, your sins’ forgiven and forgotten. Now, if you could just forgive yourself and maybe forget for a minute, then we can get about our business.” I think sometimes, we let the wrong thing get in our spirits and it starts with an ear that is pierced and that means tuning some things out so that we can tune in the voice of God. Let me switch gears a little bit. This is tough to talk “Whisper” Sermon Series • “A Pierced Ear” • Page 5 about because it’s hard for me to even know how to define it for you and what it might look like in your life. Henry Nowlin says, “Silence is an act of war against the competing voices within us and around us.” Some of you need to go to war with those competing voices. I love what else he said. “Every time you listen with great attentiveness to the voice that calls you the beloved, you will discover within yourself, a desire to hear that voice longer and more deeply.” Here’s my prayer for you, it’s Psalm 46:10, “Be still. Be still and know. Be still and know that I am God.” There’s a story told about European missionaries who went to Africa and they hired some of the locals to porter some of their supplies and to guide them to where they wanted to go. Well, those guides went at a slower pace than what the mis- sionaries wanted and so, after the first two days, they pushed the pace. On day three, they went twice as fast and went twice as far as day two. The missionaries we thrilled with the prog- ress but on day four, their guides refused to break camp. The missionaries asked them what was wrong and the guide simply said, “We went so quickly yesterday that we must wait here for our souls to catch up with us.” I need my soul to catch up with me. If there’s anything I learned from running that marathon, it’s that you better run at a sustainable pace if you want to finish the race. I also know how driven I am. This is a tough sermon to preach because I’m not sure I’m great at this but I’m trying. I went too fast to get to here and I’m guessing some of you feel the same way. Isn’t it interesting how often we try to just manufacture the miracle and our default setting is ASAP as soon as pos- sible. We want God to do what God does, yesterday. The process is so hard for us but sometimes, less is more. Some- times, slower is faster and sometimes, quieter is louder. For the past 30 years, an acoustic ecologist named Gordon Hempton has compiled what he calls the list of the last great quiet places. Consists of places with at least 15 minutes of uninterrupted quiet during daylight hours. At last count, there were 12 quiet places in the entire United States and we wonder why the soul suffers. As Hemp- ton noted, “Quiet is a think tank of the soul.” Simply put, God speaks loudest when we’re quietest. Let me close with this, one of the most played pieces of classical music is Beethoven’s Symphony 5 in C Minor. Immediately recogniz- able because of that four note motif, the iconic opening. Did you know that it actually begins with an eighth rest? Beethoven put it right at the beginning of the symphony and listen, I don’t know exactly what Beethoven was thinking. I know it was very unique when he did it but I do know this, that that eighth rest was a sonic buffer. If you’ve been to a concert you know that there’s some ambient noise at the beginning. There’s conversation between concert goers. There are a few stragglers who always try to find their seat, usually in the middle of the row. There’s the rustling of programs. I wonder if he wanted a bit of silence at the beginning of the symphony as a form of ear clearing. All I know is this, we probably need more eighth rests, don’t we? I don’t know exactly what that looks like for you. Social media’s white noise and if it’s the first thing we check every morning and the last thing we check every night, “Whisper” Sermon Series • “A Pierced Ear” • Page 6 as is the case for many of us, many mornings and many nights. Then I wonder if that’s one way we’re actually deafening ourselves to the voice of God. Whatever you listen to most, the volume is going to get turned up. I don’t know if you can afford to do this but man, maybe a two day silent retreat wouldn’t hurt. Even if you can’t do that, somehow finding a way to put an eighth rest at the beginning of your day, I bet it’ll be more of a symphony. Putting an eighth rest at the end of your day might help you go to sleep a little bit better. All right, I have three conclusions, here’s the second one, there are really two ways to read the Bible. Reading the Bible for breadth is called Electeo Continua. I think back to our long story short series, 13 weeks through the books of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation. It’s reading for breadth. The goal is to get the big picture. Listen, that’s important. There’s this thing called Herman Newtics, it’s the sci- ence of interpreting Scripture and the most basic principle of Herman Newtics is this: let Scripture interpret Scripture. You’ve got to let the Old and New Testament do a little dance. You’ve got to let different principals and different pas- sages juxtapose with one another. Why? Because text without context is pretext. Lecteo Continua is important. You’ve got to have the big picture. There’s a second kind of reading and I think it’s more of an inner ear kind of reading. It’s lecteo devina. The Bible was not meant to be read. Reading without meditating is like eating without digesting. I think the bible was meant to be meditated on and prayed through and contemplated on. Lecteo Devina’s been likened to a meal. There are four steps or four stages and you can jot these down if you want but it’s been likened to a meal and I rather like that analogy. Can I tell you what I did on Tuesday night? When a book releases, we have a little habit that we do a dinner celebration and I felt like it had been a little too long since I had been to fogata chow. Can I just say this, any restaurant that hands you a green card that says, “Yes please,” that comes to the table with 13 cuts of meat and it serves these cheese rolls, 16 of which, I ate. Don’t judge me, I ran a marathon three weeks ago. I am still in the grace period. That meal was electeo devina. There was this one lady, bless her heart. She came around, one of our servers, she came around bottom sirloin wrapped in bacon. I feel like crying right now. She would come to the table. I eventually would started clapping every time she came by and eventually, every time she came by, I would just clap for her. I didn’t know what else to do. Do we enjoy the Bible like that? In fact, let me take one step back and you tell me how much you enjoy God and I’ll tell you how spiritually mature you are. Many of us I think, still relate to God out of this place of fear. The perfect love casts out all fear. Listen, these “Whisper” Sermon Series • “A Pierced Ear” • Page 7 languages are love letters. You don’t need to be afraid of what God’s going to say. He loves you. When you succeed, he says, “I love you.” When you fail he says, “I love you.” When you have faith, “I love you.” When you die, “I love you. I love you.” That’s who he is. That’s what he does. All right, electeo devina, reading is taking the first bite but let’s not stop there. Meditating is chewing on God’s word. It’s not just reading the Bible, it’s letting the Bible read you. It judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart but here’s what I found, just like pace of life, the pace with which you read the bible is a good indicator. You know what I found, just confession. When I get to parts of the Bible that I find convicting or confusing, my tendency is to speed read. I’mma just read right past them. Let’s get to the good parts, right? No, that’s when we need to slow down and actually let that get into the inner ear so that we really hear what God’s saying. The third step is prayer and I think this is huge. As you pray through the word of God, what happens is ... in fact, 11 times in Psalm 1:19 it says, that the word quicken is repeated. In the Psalm is says, “Quicken thou me according to thy word.” The word quicken is the word that means physical resurrection. It’s one of the jobs of the Holy Spirit. As we read the word, and you have to hide it in your heart first, but as you read the word, the Holy Spirit begins to quicken it. Every time you read the bible, there ought to be a littler resurrection. He wants to bring faith and hope and love back to life. You can’t just read it, meditate it and pray it, I think you have to contemplate on it. This is where we absorb the word and we absorb its nutrients. It’s how the word gets from our head into our heart. It’s how the word gets from the outer ear, to the inner ear. Reading, meditating, praying, contemplating. Electeo devina. It’s drilling down on Scripture. James 1:22 says, “Do not merely listen to the word and so to save yourselves, do what it says.” Let me close with this. I know we focus more on the first language, on Scripture but I think that’s a good starting point. If you want to learn to discern the voice of God, it starts with Scripture. Peter Marshall, former Chaplin of the Senate said, “I wonder what would happen if we all agreed to read one of the Gospels until we came to a place that told us to do something then went out to do it and only after we had done it, began reading again.” I’ll tell you exactly what would happen, his Kingdom would come and his will would be done on Earth as it is in Heaven because that’s what happens when hearers of the word become doers of it. “Whoever has ears, let them hear.” Let’s pray. Father help us. We want to hear your voice. We need to hear your voice. Lord, there’s a lot of white noise, there are a lot of competing voices. There’s a lot of self talk. I pray that you would help us to experience an ear cleaning. God, I pray that you would pierce our ears this week- end. That we would give ear to you and really begin to hear and discern. Not just your voice but God, your heart. In Jesus’ name, amen.