June 3, 2012
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
Most of us are familiar with Roger Ebert. On PBS, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert partnered together to review movies that could mean the difference between early award consideration and early release video. In the mid-1980s, Roger Ebert at the Chicago Sun-Times and Gene Siskel at the Chicago Tribune once rivals teamed up for At the Movies television show.
Amid a career that was “two thumbs way up,” tragedy struck in 2006. Ebert had already lost his colleague and friend, Siskel, to cancer. And now cancer paid him a visit. Thyroid cancer left Ebert without a lower jawbone and unable to speak—apparently a deathblow to his television career.
Five years and 10 surgeries later, Ebert wears a turtleneck to cover his surgical scarring and holds up his boneless lower jaw but he was back on TV. What happened in those five years is the point of this story. At first, Ebert was reduced to scribbling notes on Post-Its or on a writing board. He wasn’t happy with that. He turned toward computer text-to-speech reading voices.
Since Ebert had over 30 years of voice recordings from his television career, a Scottish company was able to piece together his vocabulary into a voice now known as Roger 2.0. But it still lacks the natural qualities that most of us never think about when speaking. Dramatic pauses on big words. Upward inflection before question marks. The ability to selectively emphasize words for effect.
These types of qualities are what help us recognize a person’s voice as uniquely that person. The act of speaking is indelibly tied to a person’s identity. How does our voice affect how we view ourselves? What value do others place on our voice as our personality? When people hear Roger 2.0, why does it create an impersonal disconnect with others?
You can’t believe how difficult it was for me to communicate when I came in 1975. I had such a heavy Bostonian accent coupled with a Toisan Chinese-American twang that whenever I was speaking, some of you actually laughed! Initially, you thought it was cute or at least unique. But I was acutely aware of how I sounded. While I was proud of my heritage, I also noticed that everyone who was reporting the 11:00 late news was speaking without a regional or ethnic accent. Whether they were in Boston or in Philadelphia or in San Francisco, they all sounded alike. You can say, “It was generic!” Oh, how I wished I could speak like that.
Our voices represent our relational connection with others. Roger Ebert’s lost voice prevented him from a relational connection with his viewers. His voice isn’t about what Ebert can and can’t do as much as how he can’t connect with people anymore. Our voices are personal, relational, and in those cases, very powerful.
In Psalm 29, we have David, the shepherd who will become king writing about the voice of God. The voice of God wasn’t just a powerful symbol for David. It wasn’t just an allusion. It wasn’t just a temple song praising God through nature. David heard God! He was singing about a reality that he knew. God’s voice was as personal as it was powerful, and it was all around him like a thrashing storm.
The voice of the Lord is powerful and majestic. It’s like a storm that crashes in from the sea upon the land. Whipping up the waves. Ripping the skies apart with thunder. The voice of God was like felling trees and stripping branches.
Everyone knows when the Lord speaks—just as everyone knows that a storm is thrashing around them.
Psalm 29 is a battle hymn—a praise to God as an all-powerful conqueror, but doing so with imagery that the Canaanites ascribed to their fertility god Baal. This psalm is like David trash-talking against a neighboring false god.
How Does God Speak?
I think it’s safe to say that the vast majority of you are scratching your heads over the idea of God’s voice. You can still remember what Roger Ebert sounds like. You know what I sound like right now. But do we know what God’s voice sounds like? I just heard from a student in one of our adult Sunday school classes asks—“how do we know it’s God’s voice and not one of our own?”
Sure we would say that David might have heard God’s voice—along with a lot of other people in the Scriptures—but God doesn’t speak to normal people like us today…or at least not to me! So, we’d nod with the preacher about the powerful voice of God, but if we pause to be truly honest, we’re left with a ton of questions as to how to know the voice of God today.
In Scripture, we read that God regularly speaks to people—Abraham, Moses, and Aaron, Gideon, David, and Samuel. And God doesn’t just speak to important people, he speaks to normal people like Hagar (Gen. 16) and Ananias (Acts 9)… and us? Does God speak to us today?
Each of us has to make a decision at this point in our faith journey. Is the Bible a collection of examples of life with God, or is it a collection of exceptions to normal life with God? I believe it’s a collection of examples of people hearing the voice of God because God is speaking to us today.
In Revelations 3:20, Jesus said, “Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me.” Christ describes our coming to faith as hearing his voice and for us responding to his voice. Last week, our daughter Lauren’s birthday gift to me was to go out to dinner together just the two of us—no kids, no distractions and at an all-vegetarian restaurant too. We actually heard each other’s voices.
Jesus said, “I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me.” The result is an intimate picture of communing together over a meal. In our most intimate and enjoyable meals that we have together is when we speak to and hear from the other.
How does God speak? The primary means is through the Scriptures. We call the Bible the “Word of God,” and believe it to be God-breathed (2 Tim. 3:16). This means that when we read the Bible, we engage the Scripture as a practical theology of inspiration. The Bible is not just conceptual—words that we read for information. The Scriptures are words spoken and inspired by God, and thus reading them is listening to God speaking still to us. Bible reading is relational first and informational second. It’s Roger Ebert’s natural voice rather than Roger 2.0.
But beyond the words of Scripture, people may be led by God’s Spirit in some specific ways. We say, it’s an internal voice or a sense of conviction. It’s an inspired reflection or the sage words of another. These are experiences that undoubtedly defy coincidence.
People often describe these experiences as “God speaking” or “hearing God’s voice.” In order to discern what this may all be about when someone says, “God is speaking to me,” there are four criteria that can be applied: Is what is happening consistent with the primary source Scripture? Is it supported by the Tradition of church history? Is the thinking and interpreting compatible with our Reasoning? And finally, is this being lived out in Experience—the most personal of all forms of support.
In other words, we could say that someone’s Experience—hearing God’s leading—should be in harmony with what is confirmed by Reason, demonstrated in Tradition and primarily revealed in Scripture.
God’s Voice
In Psalm 29, God’s voice is powerful and awe-inspiring. God’s voice flashes forth flames of fire and causes us to skip and jump like young animals. But God’s voice can also be like a still and small voice like that when Elijah heard God. So what would God’s voice be like for us? How would we differentiate God’s voice from our own thoughts, messages of culture, or the voices from our legalistic or liberal upbringing?
We might not be crazy, but we do have a lot of voices in our heads! Which of these is God’s?
The theologian Dallas Willard offers three qualities by which we can know God’s voice from others.
Quality. God’s voice carries substance and weight. It makes an impact—bringing peace, inclining us toward ascent and inspiring compliance.
Spirit. It is rarely loud, flashy or dramatic. It doesn’t argue, but calmly assures us of itself.
Content. Words from God will always conform to God’s nature, God’s Scripture, and his heart as revealed in Christ. God’s voice will never tell you that you’re worthless, encourage you to lie or mislead you about God’s character.
In essence, when a voice consoles us—brings peace, calm assurance, worship—it’s more likely from God because it draws us toward him. When a voice leaves us desolate—confused, chaotic, anxious—it’s rarely from God because it pulls us away from God.
Listening to God’s Voice
How do we listen for God’s voice today?
You don’t just sit down to the piano and bang out Beethoven—you first play the scales and chopsticks. You don’t wake up and decide to run Bay to Breakers to come in first—you walk and jog for the first two miles and build from there.
Someone said, “Practice does not make perfect; it just makes things permanent.” Without practice, things can be neither perfect nor permanent. You don’t want to practice mistakes, or they become permanent mistakes, but making a practice of listening to the voice of God can lead, if not to perfection, to something that approaches it.
Listening well to the voice of God must be understood similarly. Living in wisdom, knowing the Scriptures, trusting in this community known as FCBC church, even making some mistakes—these are all part of learning to listen for God’s voice over time.
You can practice silence, solitude, journaling, having a mentor or a spiritual guide can all create the space to listen to God. But it all takes practice.
As Jesus left his disciples behind, he told them he had much more to say to them. But he left that speaking to the work of the Holy Spirit (John 16). God still wants us to hear from him today—through Scriptures and through his internal leading voice.
Just like how Roger Ebert’s voice connected with his audience or my rather plain, ordinary voice with all kinds of regional and ethnic accents hopefully has developed a meaningful relationship with you, God’s voice is speaking to you to know him, trust him and love him more intimately.
Jesus said, “Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me.”
Let us pray.
Gracious God, may you speak to us so that we may hear your plan and wish for us. Teach us to listen to you when we hear you in our hearts. Open our eyes to your teachings when we read and study the Bible. And call us closer to you so that we may have a loving and intimate relationship with you to become a vital part of your kingdom work on earth. We pray these things in the name of Jesus Christ who spoke to us as your Son and our Savior. Amen.