Dennis Tuuri

# The Voice of Jesus

It’s a delight to learn psalms, sung psalms that reflect the truth of the words of scripture more accurately. And that’s what we’ve done with Psalm 80. A psalm that’s very important both as showing God as our shepherd in the context of our sermon series in the Gospel of John and specifically chapter 10, but also a very important psalm to consider in light of our nation and what has happened here in our lifetimes.

Today’s sermon text is found in John chapter 10. We’re going to read verses 1-5 and then verses 16 and 27. And our sermon is on the voice of Jesus. “I heard the voice of Jesus say.” We’re going to sing that at the conclusion of our sermon. And what does it mean? So please stand as we read John 10:1-5, 16, and 27.

Most assuredly I say to you, he who does not enter the sheepfold by the door, but climbs up some other way, the same is a thief and a robber. But he who enters by the door is the shepherd of the sheep. To him the doorkeeper opens and the sheep hear his voice and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. And when he brings out his own sheep, he goes before them. And the sheep follow him, for they know his voice. Yet they will by no means follow a stranger, but will flee from him, for they do not know the voice of strangers.

Verse 16: “And other sheep I have which are not of this fold. Them also I must bring, and they will hear my voice, and there will be one flock and one shepherd.”

Verse 27: “My sheep hear my voice and I know them and they follow me.”

Let’s pray. Our Father, as our desire is to hear the voice of our Savior and these words of scripture today, we pray that to that end you would give us open ears to hear the voice of our Savior, bringing us to a further true understanding and submission to the truth of how you indeed communicate to us in the context of our everyday lives. We thank you, Father, for this text and for your blessing upon it and upon its preaching. In Christ’s name we ask it. Amen.

Please be seated.

I was watching an interview with Steven Spielberg. It’s probably a couple of years old, but I saw it recently, a week or two ago. The great movie director, one of the great directors of our time, so they say, and it was a show where he was being asked questions by other actors and directors called Inside the Actor Studio.

They asked Spielberg what he meant by something he had said earlier in the evening. He said that he thought one of the great marks of a director or an actor, a true man of art, is someone who can listen well. And so they asked Spielberg what he meant by that listening. You know, what does that mean? And he said, well, he was raised Jewish. And in the Jewish religion, he says, “The great Shema, or Deuteronomy 6, is essential. It’s kind of a synopsis of the faith.”

We’re familiar with Deuteronomy 6. We read in verse 4: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one God. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and with all your strength. These words which I command you today shall be in your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children and shall talk of them. When you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, when you rise up, you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.”

This is called the great Shema. Shema is Hebrew for “hear.” And verse 4 says, “Shema Israel”—”Hear, O Israel.” And so Spielberg was saying this is why he thought it was so important to hear or to listen.

So far so good. But then he immediately went on to say, we need to learn to listen to ourselves. We need to listen to the inner voice inside of ourselves. And what Spielberg did then was obliterate everything that the great Shema teaches.

It’s a very distinctive example. And it’s an example that unfortunately I think today really reflects evangelical Christianity in each of us raised in the context of evangelical Christianity. To all too many, that voice is like Steven Spielberg’s voice. It’s a little voice inside of ourselves.

But the great Shema is a statement that comes from outside of us. “Hear, O Israel.” And then words are spoken to Israel. “The Lord our God, the Lord is one. And you shall do thus, thus, and thus, and you shall teach these things to your children.”

Now, what that means is this voice comes from outside of us. It’s not an inner reflection on our own inner voice, the way Spielberg twisted it in the context of this interview. And all too often if I asked you today, “How does Jesus speak to you?” Many of us would say, “Well, we go off in our quiet time and Jesus speaks to us and we listen to our inner voice where Jesus is going to speak to us.”

I want to say something very simple today and I’m going to say it over and over and over. I’m going to let the scriptures say it over and over and over, but I think it is exceedingly important in the increasing transference of Christian culture in a reformed church always reforming.

I think we have lost something that the reformers gave us and we need to recover it and actually build upon it. And it’s quite important not just in terms of how Jesus speaks to us, which we’ll talk about directly today, but in terms of all kinds of other approaches to what true Christianity is as well.

I’m not going to tell you anything new today that you haven’t already heard me say. But what I am going to try to do is show you by reciting lots of scriptures here that this is true. This is what the scriptures teach. That Jesus speaks to us normally, not exclusively, but normally through audible things that we hear in the context of our ears—not through our hearts, not through our hearts primarily.

Now God obviously can lead and direct, and certainly does that. But normally, the scriptures say that Jesus speaks to us by means of hearing something coming from outside of us.

The gospel is the proclamation of what Jesus Christ has done and the implications of it for all of creation. The gospel is that Jesus is now king in a way in which he was not prior to his death and resurrection and ascension in terms of its manifestation of his reign on the earth. “Ask of me and I’ll give you the heathen for your inheritance.” That’s what happened 2,000 years ago. So things have radically changed.

This is gospel. The gospel does not come to us by us quietly reflecting upon our inner man. No amount of self-reflection, interior looking at oneself, thinking about our past and who we are in ourselves—this is not the gospel. The gospel, the reformers said, comes from outside of us to transform us. It has an effect interior to us obviously. But the word, the gospel is an external proclamation to us, coming from outside of ourselves. And it’s very important that we understand that.

Now, “Here, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one, and you shall teach these things to your children.”

Notice, by the way, just in passing that Israel as a covenantal nation is addressed here. We’re so used to taking Deuteronomy texts to say that parents are the ones responsible for the education of their children, and they are certainly primarily responsible. But the civil culture itself and the church, represented in this term “Israel,” the covenant community, also has an obligation to the children who comprise the covenant people. God mediates his oversight of children not just through parents, but the church has a responsibility and the civil state has a responsibility as well.

So we have this external state. We can either be like Steven Spielberg and say that Jesus speaks to us in the context of our private inner thoughts, or we can say, “What do the scriptures tell us? How does Jesus speak?” And we’ll see today that Jesus speaks to, usually normally, from outside of ourselves.

Now I’ve got in the introduction still a discussion of the Constitution here. One of the great problems that we’re trying to deal with in Christianity, or what we’re maturing out of, is the synthesis of Greek thought as well as biblical thought. The church was born in the context of Greek and Roman thought systems and political structures. And I’ve had a conversation the last couple of weeks with a man who’s pretty critical of statements that are overly supportive of the United States Constitution.

The United States Constitution is in the news a lot this last week, of course, because of the pledge of allegiance controversy and the Constitution. This man who I’m dialoguing with, I think he correctly says that if you look at the framers of the Constitution, they really had drunk pretty deeply of Greek systems of political thought and political models, and Roman ones as opposed to biblical ones. Certainly there was an intermingling of the two at least.

And so the Constitution is not an explicitly Christian document. And it seems like as culture moves ahead, that’s what we want. I don’t think that’s a need to see the Constitution as a bad thing. You know, my little grandson Levi says certain words and he doesn’t say others just because he’s immature. I don’t call him evil or twisted because of that. He’s just immature. He’s going to mature in his speech.

And I think that a Christian culture matures in its speech, and it’s time to mature and look forward to the presentation of alterations to the Constitution that’ll make it more explicitly a Christian or biblical document. The reason why it isn’t is because, as I said, this mixture. If you read the Federalist Papers and documents from the early framers of the Constitution, you’ll see that they really looked more to examples from Greece and Sparta, Athens, Carthage, etc., as opposed to looking at the Hebrew Republic of the Old Testament.

And this Greek mixture results in kind of a gnostic view of spiritual as opposed to material. You know, the invisible church as opposed to the visible church. The visible church is not really the church of Jesus Christ. You know, it’s kind of denigrated because of the physical reality. And there’s a view of piety that sort of says that true piety is a removal from the good things that God has given to us in the earth. Instead, it’s all spiritual. And so we have this problem.

I think that today’s sermon on the voice of Jesus will help us to get at some of the root of this in terms of how God actually communicates to us and the importance of actual speech. Sound waves coming through the atmosphere received by your ear are the way I think that Jesus normally speaks to us.

Now the Declaration of Independence—excuse me, the Constitution—is in the news today because of this pledge of allegiance. I actually said the pledge of allegiance Monday morning when I went to the dinner, or the breakfast rather, with the Vice President—a fundraiser for Gordon Smith.

Kind of an interesting event. You know, Senator Smith is of course a Mormon and the invocation at the event was given by a rabbi and then we had this pledge of allegiance, this supposed Christian pledge of allegiance that we all participated in. And it was kind of an interesting event that morning, and then to look at the great controversy that ensued in the next couple of days about the pledge of allegiance.

You know, this atheist of course brought civil suit and wants the pledge of allegiance changed, not said, not required to be said in public schools, not even to be observed by those kids who didn’t want to take it. And he, because of the phrase “under God,” you know, it’s almost like we can think of these atheists as what they really want us to do. They want us to use a socialist pledge of allegiance, a completely secular pledge of allegiance that would result in a completely statist perspective.

We can almost imagine such a man, such an atheist, demanding that the country adopt for his pledges of allegiance a statist, secularist, socialist document—maybe even penned in conjunction with the National Education Association, the great union of teachers that has done so much to damage our country. The NEA was the reason why Howard L., myself, and others named ourselves the Parents Education Association. It was in a direct attempt to say that the NEA is a big problem in the context of our culture.

So you can say that maybe this atheist or others might want us to replace the pledge of allegiance with a socialist secularist statist sort of document. But to do that all they have to do is to take out the two words “under God,” because the original pledge of allegiance was exactly that. It was a document, a statement written by a man who was a committed socialist—overtly, organizationally, a socialist. A man who wrote this specifically to give a statist idea to the pledge of allegiance.

You know, a man who wrote this in relationship to an NEA celebration that he was part of the organizing committee for—a celebration of public schools on Columbus Day. Okay. So this man was a member of the NEA, was head of the committee to plan the activities for an NEA event, was a Baptist minister who had been kicked out of his church because he was a socialist. The sound businessmen in the congregation said, “Enough of that. We’re not going to continue to fund the activities of this church as long as we’ve got a socialist pastor who gets up and gives sermons like ‘Jesus the Socialist.’” Which is what he did.

The man who wrote Bellamy, who wrote the pledge of allegiance, was a socialist. He was a statist. He was a participant in the NEA. And the pledge was written for an NEA event. And that’s the kind of document that we have today. That’s the kind that probably many of you have said over the course of your lifetime.

And we added in the early ’50s the phrase “under God” as if that somehow would make a Christian document or a Christian pledge out of what was externally a pledge to the state as opposed to God. Under what God? Under whose God? The breakfast that I went to—the God of the Mormons, God of the Jews, God of the Muslims, the supreme force of an atheist even, I suppose, could be all covered under “God.” It does not make a Christian pledge. It is explicitly not a Christian pledge. It is a universalistic pantheistic kind of view of the faith that pledge is.

So don’t get, you know, too involved in defending the things of the world. What the world has produced in its rebellion against the Lord Jesus Christ—what Bellamy produced in the late 1800s in rebellion against the Lord Jesus Christ by twisting the gospel into a socialist statist secularist message. And it was intended explicitly to be secularist. Don’t get all hung up and try to defend that. It’s not our thing. The pledge is not our thing. It’s not a Christian thing at all.

Now, we can insert one word and maybe it would be our thing. The word “triune.” “Under the triune God.” Then we explicitly state that it’s the God of the scriptures, and that would be different. But it’s not that now.

And so we have this difficulty coming down to us. God planted a vine in America. It grew true. It developed originally as a Christian set of colonies for the most part. It sent out roots to the sea. It went overseas proclaiming the gospel of Christ, but it’s being hacked down now. And when we see chickens coming home to roost, like we did last week in the saying that the pledge of allegiance is unconstitutional, be careful how you line up with those sort of documents.

Instead, be the voice of Jesus to this culture that says we want explicitly biblical and Christian involvement in the political process, not just some sort of secularist god who doesn’t really have anything to do with the God of the scriptures. And understand the history of these documents and how they form us.

It’s interesting, by the way, that the pledge of allegiance originally was not said like this but at that NEA celebration it was said like this. Kind of interesting, isn’t it? But you know, I’m going to turn that around here today and what I’m going to say is that by the end of looking at these scriptures, I think hopefully it seems to me that you could make a case that this is better than this—because this asserts obedience and submission to something outside of ourselves, ultimately to the Lord Jesus Christ. This talks about the inner devotional life being what we’re pledging allegiance to, our concept of who God is, our concept of what the state is.

Now, it doesn’t have to be that way. This is fine. But, you know, by way of a picture or an example: Spielberg is an example to us. “Listen to the inner voice.” God says, “Listen to the voice of my scriptures coming through my people,” and then submitting to the exterior gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. It certainly will transform us internally, but it is something that comes from outside as opposed to this inner meditation.

All right. Voice of Jesus outline. Point number one: John 10 draws our attention to the need to hear the voice of Jesus. Pretty obvious, but just in passing—we read in John 10:1-5 that this hearing of the voice of Jesus is the necessary precondition to the sheep following.

Verse 3: “The sheep hear his voice. He calls his own by name and leads them out.”

Verse 4: “When he brings out his own sheep, he goes before them and the sheep follow him because they know his voice.”

So if you want to be a follower of the Lord Jesus Christ, you have to hear his voice.

Secondly, verse 16 tells us that this hearing of the voice of Jesus is the means whereby the Gentiles and by extension the whole world shall be saved.

John 10:16: “I have other sheep which are not of this fold. Them also I must bring, and they will hear my voice.”

How does Jesus bring the Gentiles into the one fold? By them hearing his voice. Not hearing about his voice, but hearing his voice. How are we going to convert the nations of the world? By them hearing Jesus’s voice. That’s what it says.

Now, Jesus didn’t go to the Gentiles personally. He very explicitly did not. He very explicitly said that he had come to the Jews. So how did they hear his voice? How did he make them one flock? He sent men out—men like you and like me, as fallen and depraved and twisted as you and I—that the Gentiles might hear his voice.

This voice is necessary for evangelism.

Then in verse 27 we read that this hearing, or the lack thereof, of this voice is the test by which the sheep—or the election of the sheep—may be discerned.

I should have had verses 26 and 27. Verse 26: “You do not believe because you are not of my sheep.”

As I said to you, “My sheep hear my voice and I know them and they follow me.”

So he’s saying that there are two kinds of people, two and only two. Those that are his sheep and those that are not his sheep. And the determining factor he says is whether people hear his voice.

So if you’re here today and you want to know if you’re a sheep or a goat, if you want to know what the test is according to this particular verse—verse 26 and 27 of John chapter 10—the test is whether you hear Jesus’s voice.

So I hope that you see the great importance of understanding the need to hear the voice of Jesus. It’s not something optional in the Christian life. It’s how you know Christ to follow him. It’s how the Gentiles and the nations of the world will be converted. And it’s the test to determine whether you’re an elect sheep or not.

And as I said the last couple of weeks, the context indicates that it’s the voice of Jesus sounding through under-shepherds who speak in accordance with his word that is being referred to here. I’m not going to go back over this, but the last two weeks this is what we’ve said. If you look at the passage, what it actually says about shepherds, it’s talking about under-shepherds, good and bad ones.

And so when we read the voice of Jesus in its immediate context, the context is that it is the under-shepherds of Christ, his pastors, who are speaking his voice—that produces discipleship and following, that produces evangelism and the salvation of the nations, and that produces a sense of assurance on the part of the sheep that they are part of the elect community of the Lord Jesus Christ.

John says that we must hear Jesus’s voice if we’re to follow him. Whose voice did Jesus use to lead his sheep? He uses the voice of pastors. Pastors. That’s what John 10 seems to say.

So it’s very important we understand the voice of Jesus.

Roman numeral 2: The witness of the Bible is that the Spirit normally uses audible articulate speech to communicate.

Okay. Now a couple of caveats. I said at the summation of point one—and I’ve got a reference there to Joshua’s use of the councils of God in Numbers 27:21—Joshua was to lead the people in and out with his voice, but his voice was to be submissive to the oracles of God as they were translated to him. So the word of God, the standard of God’s word, is the measure by which the voice of the pastor, the voice of the parishioner, if it is conforming to that word, then it is the voice of Jesus. The voice apart from that word is a deceptive voice.

So the voice must be submissive to the word of God. And the Spirit normally uses audible voices. I say normally because we do not want to shorten the arm of God. He certainly uses other means. But see, by going through this overview of scriptural text on how the Spirit works, people hear things. They hear words in their ears. That’s how God normally communicates by the Spirit to mankind.

And I’m going to, the end result of this is to try to get you to make application in terms of the importance of attending to sermons, the importance of attending to family time together—okay?—the importance of listening for the voice of Jesus speaking through friends, wives, husbands, etc. I want to make application of that. But I am not denigrating here the personal reading of scripture. I want to add to what is this good emphasis we have put here at RCC for nearly two decades on knowing the word of God.

I don’t want to take anything away from that. You know, I want you to learn the word of God. I want you to expose yourself to the word of God. I want you to read your Bibles every day. But I want to add to that: the way Jesus normally communicates to you is through the voice of others as it’s consistent with his word.

And so if you know the word of God, then you’re a vehicle to speak to other people on the basis of the authority of God’s word. So I’m not taking away anything. I’m trying to layer on another set of emphasis in hearing the voice of Jesus.

“I heard the voice of Jesus say” as you listen to speech from other people.

Okay, let’s go through this quickly.

Genesis 3:6 and following. We don’t have to turn there. We know that this is the garden and we know that Adam and Eve heard voices. God spoke to them. The speech is recorded for us. And so the Spirit of God comes to Adam and Eve. Specific words are heard by them. Audible words are heard by them.

In Deuteronomy 34:9. Do turn to that one. I will as well. I printed out the wrong verse on my notes.

Deuteronomy 34:9.

See, you’re supposed to know your Bibles real well. This is story drill time. We’re going to go through a bunch of scriptures today. We’ll see how quick you can keep up.

Verse 9: “Joshua the son of Nun was full of the spirit of wisdom for Moses had laid his hands upon him and the children of Israel hearkened unto him and did as the Lord commanded Moses.”

Okay? So Joshua is filled with the Spirit of God, the spirit of wisdom. And the end result of that spirit of wisdom is commands spoken to Israel because Israel hearkens unto Joshua. They heard him. They heard the voice of Jesus. They heard the voice of the Spirit of God. Joshua, being filled with the Spirit, is immediately identified as ushering forth words that were listened to by the people of God.

Job 32:18. Turn there quickly.

Job 32:18. Job is right before Psalms.

You know, I read a actually I was at a graves refresher a year and a half ago and Doug Wilson spoke on the same topic of the voice of Christ, the importance of preaching. And he said that you know what you really want to do is keep one eye on the sermon and one eye on the text as it’s being preached. So the text must be consistent with the sermon. The sermon must be preached in accordance with God’s word. So it’s good for us to look up these scriptures as we go along.

Verse 18: “For I am full of words. The spirit within me compels me.”

Okay? So the Spirit within Job compels him, forces him to do something. What is it? He speaks. He speaks words. He’s full of words because of the Spirit of God being upon him.

Isaiah 59:21. Quickly, Isaiah 59:21.

Isaiah 59:21: “As for me, says the Lord, this is my covenant with them. What is it? My spirit who is upon you, and my words which I have put in your mouth shall not depart from your mouth, nor from the mouth of your descendants, nor from the mouth of your descendants’ children’s children.”

So the very identification of the covenant is that God has given you and filled you with his Spirit. And specifically what the Spirit does is gives you words to speak, audible declarations. The voice of God comes through you empowered by the Holy Spirit. And not just you, but your children are supposed to speak these words filled by the Spirit.

And their children, your children’s children, your grandchildren are also to see their speech as the medium through which the Spirit of God empowers them to proclaim forth his voice—the voice of Jesus.

The Spirit results in specific words being spoken.

Micah 2:7.

Micah 2:7: “You who are named the house of Jacob, is the Spirit of the Lord restricted? Are these his doings? Do not my words do good to him who walks uprightly?”

You see the relationship again between the Spirit of God and then the words of God doing good to those who walk uprightly. The Spirit of God speaks through words, things that are heard.

Micah 3:8: “Truly I am full of power by the Spirit of the Lord and of justice and of might to declare to Jacob his transgression and to Israel his sin.”

Okay, so here a person says, “The Spirit of God has filled me.” And the end result of this filling is that he speaks words that you can listen to, that your ears will hear if you were there at the time. And this declaration specifically in this particular time is in terms of calling people to repentance.

But again, the Spirit of God empowers men to speak words, and the word of God is then heard as men speak forth truths in conformity to that word, filled by the power of the Spirit to communicate to people.

Okay. What part of the body did Adam and Eve use to hear God? Well, clearly they used the part of their body which we use—ears. They heard words coming by means of their ears. When God’s Spirit was on Job, what did Job do? He spoke. He spoke.

What did he do? He spoke.

Isaiah said that God’s Spirit being in us would result in words. The Spirit of God being in us would result in words.

Luke 1:41 and 42. Look there, please.

This is the story of Elizabeth and Mary. And we always think of John being filled with the Spirit here, leaping in the womb. But we also want to attend to what’s going on with Elizabeth.

“It happened when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary that the babe leaped in her womb and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit. Then she spoke out with a loud voice and said, ‘Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb.’”

Again, the filling of the Spirit results in audible words spoken by Elizabeth to another member of the covenant community. The Spirit uses human voice received by a human ear to communicate.

Matthew 3:16 and 17.

This is where Jesus is baptized.

“He had been baptized. Jesus came up immediately from the water. You know that. Well, okay. And behold, the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting upon him. And suddenly, okay, so in conjunction with the Spirit of God coming on Jesus, a voice came from heaven. But it’s a voice, not an inner prompting. It is a voice from heaven saying these specific words that were heard by the ears of those who heard God speak.

‘This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.’”

So, again, God speaks by audible, articulate words.

John 3:34: “He whom God has sent speaks the words of God.”

Now remember, we said that the whole point of John chapter nine, the healing of the blind man, is that Jesus is the Sent One, but he then sends his people to do his work as well. We are the sent ones under him, the great Sent One.

“He whom God has sent speaks the words of God. For God does not give his Spirit by measure.”

See the relationship again? The Spirit of God communicates to mankind specifically through the words that God has empowered us to speak. Speaking the words of God, given the Spirit by measure.

John 6:63: “It is the Spirit who gives life. The flesh profits nothing. The words that I speak to you are spirit and they are life.”

So again, when Jesus here is speaking of himself and his specific words, again the Spirit of God relates to the speaking forth. He communicates by means of articulate speech, audible speech.

Acts 2:4: “They were all filled with the Holy Spirit.”

You know this text.

“They were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak with other tongues.”

Now, this is articulate audible speech. Still, people hear words. It’s not inner prompting. It’s coming from outside of themselves. They hear the gospel preached by means of words. Now, it’s in their own language. It’s a different sort of speech than what we’re normally used to listening to. But still, the point is that the Spirit of God empowers them, fills them, and the result immediately—just like in all these other scriptures we’ve seen—the result immediately is the speaking forth of words, like I’m speaking to you now. Audible, articulate words are spoken, words that are understood and received not by the heart ultimately, you know, but by the ears immediately. I should say: ultimately, I suppose yes, the heart is affected by these words, but it comes by means of a message from outside of ourselves to our ears.

Acts 4:8 and 31.

Verse 8 in Acts 4: “Peter filled with the Holy Spirit said.”

Peter was filled with the Holy Spirit and what? Said words. Okay, so the Spirit of God is going to move through Peter to speak to the rulers of the people and elders of Israel.

Verse 31: “When they had prayed, the place where they were assembled together was shaken. They were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and they spoke the word of God with boldness.”

How does the Spirit of God communicate? Through the speaking forth of words.

Acts 8:26: Even when God doesn’t use other people, he uses an angel. Here in Acts 8:26, Philip still hears audible words spoken by a messenger of God.

Verse 26: “An angel of the Lord spoke to Philip saying, ‘Rise and go toward the south along the road.’”

So again, here God speaks through audible words received by Philip’s eardrums.

See, why is this, you know, maybe this is nothing to you, maybe you understand all this and I’m just, you know, repeating things you already know. But to some of you at least, you’re starting to say, “What? What’s going on here? It sure seems wrong somehow what Tuuri is kind of headed toward.”

Because somehow, you see, I think that part of the reason for that is we have this kind of view of things: that the Spirit of God is spiritual and words are these audible things that are received by mechanical devices, organic devices. And somehow we don’t want to draw too great a line between those two things—the Spirit of God’s communication and tongues and mouths that form things and spit comes out, as I speak. It always does matter who’s talking, whether you know it or not. Ears pick up sound vibrations, and this is a very physical mechanism. And somehow it just kind of bothers us.

But this is the way God says it works. This is what God says.

Acts chapter 10, verse 44: “And now while Peter is still speaking certain words in verse 44 of Acts 10, the Holy Spirit fell upon all those who heard the word.”

Okay. Now, the reception of the Holy Spirit is also tied to them hearing the word. That, you know, it’s not—I guess one way to think of this is: you’ve got the Spirit of God here and you’re here. How does the Spirit of God work on you?

Some people would want to say it works immediately—immediate, no mediation. Spirit of God works immediately on the soul of man. But what I’ve shown you, verse after verse after verse, is that the Spirit of God normally works immediately through something—words specifically—to reach you. And here words are spoken, they hear these words, and then the Spirit comes upon them.

See, so is it—does the Spirit of God work immediately upon mankind or immediately? And if we can show here and demonstrate to ourselves the scriptures tell us in quite clear terms, over and over and over, that there is this mediation of human voice for the way the Spirit of God normally speaks to us—that’s going to change everything, right? That’s going to, or maybe I should say, that’s going to make everything else that we’ve talked about for the last 20 years here, it’s going to give a good foundation for all of that.

So that when we say that God uses grapes turned into wine, uses bread to confer grace, to build you up, to empower you by the Holy Spirit, that’s not going to seem so weird anymore. And when we baptize kids and say that God works through physical mechanisms, the Spirit of God doing something to a child or an adult through baptism, that’s not going to seem so odd either.

Now, what he does—we can talk about that. Obviously, we’re not making the case that this child is now eternally going to heaven and he’s saved. It’s not what we’re saying. But we are saying that the Spirit of God moves through works of physical mechanisms to affect change in people’s lives.

When we do infant baptisms here, it’s not a wet dedication. Okay? It’s a sign and seal of the covenant. It’s not a wet dedication. It’s not a dedication of a child with a little water thrown on to picture something. No, it’s a sign and seal of the covenant. God wants us to see that the Spirit works not immediately, but immediately through things, and specifically here through human voices.

Let’s see again. Acts 13:52-14:1.

“The disciples were filled to join with the Holy Spirit” in verse 52.

Too bad that there’s a chapter break. But verse one of chapter 14 says, “Now it happened in Iconium that they went together to the synagogue of the Jews and so spoke that a great multitude both of the Jews and of the Greeks believed.”

They’re filled with the Spirit. They speak. People hear audible words spoken by these guys. And they then are brought to belief in the work of the Lord Jesus Christ. The Gentiles. This is what Jesus said. “Other sheep have I. They’ll hear my voice. They won’t hear a voice about me.” He said they’ll hear my voice and they’ll be gathered in. And here these men, these men are gathered in.

And putting that together, we read in John 10, they heard the voice of Jesus saying things to them. They didn’t hear the voice of the apostles. I mean, they did hear their voice, but it’s the voice of Jesus speaking through his people.

Ephesians 5:18 and 19.

See, now, okay, the apostles—special case, special case. But look at Ephesians 5:18-19.

“Don’t be drunk with wine.”

By the way, that guy that wrote the pledge of allegiance, he was also a prohibitionist. Wouldn’t you know it?

Okay. “So do not be drunk with wine in which is dissipation, but be filled with the Spirit. What’s he going to say next?

“Speaking filled with the Spirit, not contemplating and praying for someone that they might be filled with the Spirit, too.”

Filled with the Spirit, immediately then speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing making merry in your heart to the Lord.

Spirit through audible voices encourages one another. This is the normal mechanism by which we’re encouraged and developed in our faith. It’s through other people. Your wife, your husband, your children, your parents, your friends, your relatives speaking to you.

People that are filled with the Spirit speak the Spirit’s words that you hear. The voice of Jesus talking to you through them as they encourage you in accordance with God’s word. And you hear the voice of Christ. Christ, and you’re matured.

Ephesians 6:17 says that “the helmet of salvation, take up the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit which is the word of God.”

Revelation 1:10.

John hears the voice of Jesus, but it is a voice as if it was the trumpet speaking articulate words to him. And John then is given a message in the book of Revelation to give to preachers or angels to give to the church. And as Jesus concludes each of those letters to the seven churches, he says, you know, “Let those who have ears hear what the Spirit says to the churches.”

The Spirit of God is speaking to the churches through the voice, the audible proclamation of that word by angels or pastors, not immediately, but immediately through the voice of men.

God normally talks to us by means of words heard by our ears. These words come from people. That’s what I’m just trying to demonstrate. Scripture after scripture after scripture, God normally speaks to us through words. Words that are heard by our ears. Words that are spoken by people, not phantoms. Okay.

Okay. Now, let’s look at a couple of specific texts here in the New Testament that are relevant to this as well. And this is a very important one.

Romans 10:12-18.

These New Testament texts assert that preaching is the sounding forth of the voice of Jesus. And unfortunately here in Romans 10, we’ve got a bad translation. But you know, if you read any good exegetical commentary, they’ll agree with what I’m going to tell you here about what this text actually says.

Romans 10, verse 12: “No distinction between Jew and Greek.”

Verse 13: “Whoever calls the name of the Lord will be saved.”

Verse 14: “How then shall they call on him in whom they have not believed?”

And then in the King James, it says, “How shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard?” But that’s a bad translation. And if you’ve got a more modern translation, a more accurate one, the New American Standard for instance, gives this:

“How shall they believe in him whom they have not heard?”

Not “about whom they have not heard,” but “whom they have not heard.”

This is confirmation of what Jesus says in John 10:16. He says that they will hear my voice. That’s how they’ll be brought into the flock. That’s how evangelism occurs.

Romans 10 says that as people come to faith in Jesus, they do so because the voice of Jesus Christ has sounded forth to them—through people, through words that are received by human ears. This is the way Jesus speaks to people according to Romans chapter 10. And how is this accomplished?

“How shall they preach unless they”—well, let’s see, I left out, yeah, verse 14: “How shall they call on him in whom they have not believed? Who they have not believed. How shall they believe in him whom they have not heard? How shall they hear without a preacher? Then how do they hear the voice of Jesus? By means of a preacher. By means of I standing up there in the pulpit.”

See, this is how the voice of Jesus comes to you today. Nothing short of that is what this text seems to affirm.

“How shall they preach and the accent,” etc., etc. You know the text.

So, here it seems like we’re very clearly being told that the Spirit of God, the voice of Jesus sounds through the faithful proclamation of his word. We never want to leave that out. But as the word of God is preached forth, you hear Jesus.

So, you know, you want to hear Jesus’s voice today? You don’t get into some sort of rapturous transportation of yourself into some kind of mystical state. Come to church. Come to church at 11:00. Jesus starts speaking immediately to you at 11:00. You’ve been hearing the voice of Jesus ever since.

That’s what I think these texts tell us. Word of God is read. Word of God is preached. It’s preaching here. The Lutherans understood this. That’s why the preaching pulpit is bigger, more prominent, and more ordained than the reading of the scripture pulpit.

Remember when the Lutherans were here, they had a little pulpit over there? The scripture was read. And that offends us the first time I saw it in a church. I thought, “Well, that’s messed up. We’ve got to have the word of God read here. I’m going to go over there to that little pulpit to preach.”

So I thought for years. But see, this text says why the pulpit is ordained. Luther understood that the preacher and the power of the Holy Spirit—the Spirit of God comes upon him. He takes that word of God and makes it real to you. Makes application to your life, and is used by the Spirit of God to be the voice of Jesus sounding forth to you in a way that the simple reading of the word by yourself with no audible reception is not. Something different happens in the preaching of the gospel according to Romans 10.

This is the voice of Jesus. Romans 10 says that God sends preachers so that his people can hear Jesus.

Now, that’s what it says.

And this is not something new. I have a quotation here from Herman Hoeksema. Many of you know Herman Hoeksema, the great father of the Protestant Reformed Churches, a great man of a century or so ago.

He wrote this in his book Reformed Dogmatics:

“Through preaching, you do not hear about Christ, but you hear him. The difference is easily understood. When you hear about someone, he is not present. You do not hear his own voice but the voice of someone else who tells you something about him. But when you hear someone, you hear his own voice. He is present with you. He is addressing you personally. Personally. That’s a witness of, you know, Herman Hoeksema in our particular period of history from about the last century.”

Let me read another quote. However, this is from the Second Helvetic Confession, or the Swiss Confession, 1566. I could read quote after quote after quote of the Reformation documents themselves that understood this and taught this.

Second Helvetic Confession says this:

“The preaching of the word of God is the word of God. Read that again. The preaching of the word of God is the word of God. Wherefore, when the word of God is now preached in the church by preachers lawfully called, we believe that the very word of God is proclaimed and received by the faithful. And that, rather, neither any other word is to be invented nor is to be expected from heaven. Rather, now the word itself which is preached is to be regarded, not the minister that preaches. For even if he be evil and a sinner, nevertheless, the word of God remains still true and good.”

The word of God remains true and good. God has chosen—he didn’t have to do it this way, but God has chosen—to use preachers to speak forth the very voice of Jesus Christ to proclaim his word. And when they do that faithfully, consonant with the word of God, Joshua had to be in accordance with what the German theologians taught, had to be in accordance with the word of God—the inspired word of God.

My preaching is not inspired, but it is the declaration of the voice of Jesus as it is consonant with God’s inspired word.

As I said, what this helps us to understand is it drives out this kind of gnostic idea that somehow the Spirit of God works immediately upon people, normally without the use of intervening intermediate agencies of men speaking, bread and wine, water of baptism, whatever else it is.

Okay.

1 Peter 1:23-25.

Peter seems to say the same thing. Paul says it. Now Peter, the other great apostle, says it.

1 Peter 1, verses 23 and following:

“For you have been born again not of seed which perishes, not of seed which is perishable but imperishable, that is through the living and abiding word of God.”

You’re born again through the living and abiding word of God. We all would believe that, of course.

Verse 24: “All flesh is like grass. All its glory like the flower of grass. The grass withers. Flower fell falls away but the Word of the Lord abides forever.”

And in our evangelical mindset, we tend to stop there. So we’re talking just about the Bible. But it goes on to say:

“And this is the word which was preached to you, proclaimed, sermon preached.”

You see, the word of God is exposited, taught forth from the pulpit. That’s what causes people to be born again. Not a perishable seed, but imperishable. It’s the Spirit again coming upon men, filling them with the Spirit so that they speak words. Those words are the vehicle the Spirit uses in faithful proclamation to the scripture—the inscriptured word of God—to actually be the voice of God to you and causing you to be born again.

First Peter says that God saves people by his word being spoken by men. By men. By the image-bearers of God. Saved by man. When we hear biblical preaching, we hear Jesus.

Point number 13. Now you kids, 13. I’m on to there. I think I’ve covered most of them.

13. When we hear biblical preaching, we hear Jesus. That’s what it seems to be telling us, these verses.

Okay. A few other scriptures.

Colossians 2:6 and 7.

Paul says to Timothy: “You have therefore received Christ Jesus the Lord. So walk in him rooted, not Timothy—I’m sorry, the church at Colossae—rooted and built up in him and established in the faith as you have been taught, abounding in it with thanksgiving.”

So the sanctification of the church, the members of the church at Colossae, is also tied here to the teaching that they’ve received. Men’s voices, not just for being born again, but for now sanctifying and maturing the people of God. God has chosen fit for the Spirit of God to speak the voice of Jesus through the teaching of the church to cause people to come to maturation.

2 Timothy 3:16-4:2.

“All scriptures inspired by God, profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness.”

Okay, so there’s a description of what the word of God can do.

How is it accomplished?

Verse 17: “That the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work.”

You know, I don’t think—I think that we think of this a little bit wrong. If we go on to read verse one of the next chapter:

“I solemnly charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus who is to judge the living and the dead by his appearing in his kingdom: Preach the word.”

I think what’s going on in 2 Timothy 3 is that the word of God is there and it’s able to have an effect upon the congregation. But the word of God is there so that the man of God—Timothy in this case, the preacher of God, the man who speaks Christ’s voice—has that word so that he can then go about doing these things and equipping the saints for every good work.

You see, so it’s the man of God again, seems to be here. Timothy is explicitly seems to be the man of God who’s going to preach that word. And through the preaching of that word, he therefore encourages the people and moves them along in sanctification by the Spirit of God.

Okay. And our last group of scriptures before we get to some specific application points or ways to sum this up.

Last set of scriptures.

Luke 10:16. Turn there, please.

Luke 10:16: “The one who listens to you listens to me. The one who rejects you rejects me. He who rejects me rejects the one who sent me.”

Yeah, it’s quite clear, isn’t it?

Jesus says an astonishing thing really, to most of our hearing. But it’s there, and it’s in scripture.

“The one who listens to you”—the apostles, the sent ones, and then men that they would train, that they would transmit these things to other men. Paul to Timothy, Timothy to other men, the men that listen to the preachers of God’s word, proclaimers of God’s word as are consonant with scripture.

When they listen to who—if you listen to me, if you listen to the preaching of the word, you’re listening to Jesus Christ. The one who rejects the preaching of God’s word when it’s consonant—doesn’t reject that sermon. Jesus says he rejects me.

John 20:22.

Jesus takes his disciples, breathes them, says: “Receive the Holy Spirit.”

“If you forgive the sins of any, their sins have been forgiven them. And if you retain the sins of any, they have been retained.”

How are they going to forgive and retain? They’re going to do it by proclamation of their words. They’re going to do just what I did when we came into worship today when I assured you as an under-shepherd of Jesus that the voice of Jesus came to you and said, “Believe it, Christian, your sins are forgiven.”

This is not the imposition by God of some kind of, you know, hierarchy that’s going to be bad for you. This is the gracious, loving gift of God who knows that your ears are important. He knows your ears are more important than you realize that they are. And he realizes my voice is more important than I think it is. And he uses the articulate speech of people in the context of worship to assure you of the forgiveness of your sins. And then he ties this assurance, what I’ve said to you at the beginning of our service, to his very declaration from heaven.

Now, of course, the clear implication is what I say has to be consonant with the heavenly word. But as it is, you haven’t heard about it. You’ve heard something like it. You have heard the voice of Jesus assuring you of your forgiveness.

And as I said in 2 Timothy 2, this doesn’t apply just to the apostles. It’s to Timothy, then, who’s going to do this. Timothy entrusts these things to other faithful men who will teach others also.

John Calvin said in his commentary on this passage from John chapter 20, and it’s a parallel text in Luke:

He said that in essence God calls the ministers of the word “organs of the Holy Spirit.” And Calvin says this: “We now see the reason why Christ employs such magnificent terms to commend and adorn that ministry which he bestows and enjoins on the apostles. It is that believers may be fully convinced that what they hear concerning the forgiveness of sins is ratified and may not less highly value the reconciliation which is offered by the voice of men than if God himself stretched out his hand from heaven.

“And the church daily receives the most abundant benefit from this doctrine when it perceives that her pastors are divinely ordained to be the vehicles for eternal salvation. And it must not go to a distance to seek the forgiveness of sins which is committed to their trust.”

How do you know your sins are forgiven today?

See, if it’s just an interior voice, God says, “No.” God says, “I want you to know as you came into worship today that your sins are forgiven.”

And how I’m going to do that is: you’re going to hear the voice of Jesus say, “Uh, sinner, your sins are forgiven. You’re part of the flock of Jesus Christ.” And he’s going to use audible words from a pastor to assure you of that very thing because your hearts can tend to doubt that very thing. Some of you doubt it all the time. And part of the implication of this truth—if I’m teaching in concert with biblical teaching here, the word of God—is that you can rest now when I say those words on Sunday. You don’t have to think maybe Tuuri is right, maybe he’s wrong.

It’s the voice of Jesus telling you these things, and you can rest in that sure knowledge.

You see, God says that “if they listen to you, they’ve listened to Jesus.”

Okay.

Ephesians 2:17. Look at that one.

Ephesians 2:17: “He came preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near.”

Who came? Who came here? Jesus is the immediate reference here. Jesus comes and preaches peace to you. Well, when did Jesus come and preach peace to you?

Well, if you don’t understand what I’m saying today, you can say, “Well, gee, maybe never did. I never had a vision. I know people that peg their whole Christian basis—whether they’re a Christian or not—upon a vision they had of Jesus coming to them and speaking to them. But the scriptures say that most of you have never had that. And that’s not how you’re supposed to understand it.”

Jesus came to you through the voice of another, through this gospel which comes from outside of you. Maybe through preaching, maybe through your parents, maybe through a friend, maybe through a Bible study. I don’t know. But Jesus came to you and preached peace. And he comes to you every Lord’s day and preaches peace to you.

Ephesians 4:20 and 21: “You didn’t learn Christ in this way. If indeed you have heard him and have been taught in him just as truth is in Jesus.”

You know, it doesn’t say “if indeed you have heard about him.” It says “if you’ve heard him.” The assumption is that everybody who reads this epistle would have heard Jesus. The voice of Jesus comes through the speech of men who have taught you, consistent with the word of God.

Paul preached at Galatia. They treated his words as Jesus’s words. We read that in Galatians.

Galatians 4:13-14. Turn to Galatians 4:13 and 14.

And ask yourself as we read this: you know, where are you in relationship to what’s said?

Galatians 4:13: “You know that it was because of a bodily illness that I preached the gospel to you the first time.”

So he’s talking about his preaching. “And that which was a trial to you in my bodily condition, you did not despise or low, but you received me.”

The text goes on to say: “As an angel of God, as Christ Jesus himself.”

Jesus came to the church at Galatia and he preached to them, and he did that through Paul. And Paul said that he was not received just as a messenger. He was received as they would receive Jesus Christ himself.

Now do you understand why that is now? Because Jesus spoke to them through the apostle Paul. The Spirit of God—Jesus speaks through the preaching of the word.

Going on.

1 Thessalonians 2:13. Turn there.

“For this reason, we also constantly thank God that when you received from us the word of God’s message, you accepted it not as the word of men, but for what it really is.”

For what is it really? What’s the sermon really? What’s the proclamation of the word of God really?

“For what it really is, the word of God which also performs its work in you which believe.”

When you come to hear the preaching and proclamation of God’s word, you understand that it’s not something about Jesus. It is the declaration of God’s word to you. It is the voice of Jesus. You hear the voice of Jesus saying things to you through the mediation of the proclamation of the word.

Well, we could go on, and I have other scriptures you can look at.

Hebrews 12:22-24. We’ve heard this. We’ve read this scripture many times over the course of our church’s history. It talks about what happens during Lord’s Day worship services.

“You have come to Mount Zion, to the city of the living God, to heavenly Jerusalem, to myriads of angels, to the general assembly and church of the firstborn, who are enrolled in heaven, and to God the judge of all, to the spirits of righteous men made perfect, and to Jesus the mediator of the new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood which speaks better than the blood of Abel.”

When you come to worship, when you come into the throne room of God, you come not to hear about Jesus, but you come to Jesus to have Jesus speak to you through the faithful preaching of his word.

Indeed, Hebrews 2:12. We read that he says: “I will proclaim thy name to my brethren in the midst of the congregation. I will sing thy praise.”

Now that immediate reference is to the Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus comes into the assembly of the saints and sings the Father’s praise.

Not only is the preaching of the word the voice of Jesus, but as we sing songs that are consistent with the word of God, we also then are the voice of Jesus being lifted up to praise the heavenly Father.

Jesus is with us in the context of worship. Who sings praises to the Father at our church every Sunday? Jesus Christ does. That’s who he does. He says, “And I will sing praises to you in the midst of the assembly.”

Here we are in the assembly and Jesus speaks through the congregation and sings along with us, leads us in our singing as it were, praising God the Father.

Now, what’s more important? I ask on the children’s outlines: Our ears hearing or our hearts feeling? What our ears hear or what our hearts feel? What’s more important?

Well, what our hearts feel is important. I’m not trying to denigrate that. What I’m trying to say is that over and over and over in the scriptures, God says, “What’s most important is that word coming from outside of ourselves.”

Our hearts are deceptive. We’re going to turn to that now.

Why do we need this external word? Why is it more important what our ears hear as opposed to what our heart feels?

Because Jeremiah 17:9 and 10 says: “The heart is more deceitful than all else and is desperately wicked. Who can understand it? I, the Lord, search the heart. I test the mind.”

How does he do it? External words. Your pastors, your deacons, your fellow parishioners, your wives, your husbands, your parents. Many times your children. That’s the way he tests your heart and brings you to correction. You can’t do it yourselves because your heart is bad.

Jeremiah 16:12 talks about the stubbornness of your own evil heart, the twistedness of our heart. That’s why we need an external word from God.

Proverbs 28 says: “An arrogant man stirs up strife, but he who trusts in the Lord will prosper. He who trusts in his own heart is a fool.”

That’s why it’s more important we hear our ears. If we trust in our own heart, Proverbs 28:26 says, “We’re a fool. If you walk wisely, you’ll be established.”

What’s wisdom in the Proverbs? It’s hearing people. It’s hearing your parents. It’s hearing the word of God as it comes to you. It’s hearing the voice of Jesus through your parents and through others.

Proverbs 18 says: “He who separates himself seeks his own desire. He quarrels against all sound wisdom.”

Why? Because he’s cut himself off from the voice of Jesus. He separates himself and thinks in his isolation he’ll get the clear voice from Jesus. But Jesus says, “No. What you’re going to get when you separate yourself is the speaking of your heart which is twisted and depraved.”

God says that both at your establishment as a Christian—your being born again, your believing—you must believe through the voice of Jesus coming to you. And that as you are matured and sanctified, that sanctification happens not through isolation from voices, but through going into hearing voices, audible voices spoken by members of the covenant community, by members of your family.

Isolation is against all sound wisdom. And verse two of that says: “A fool does not delight in understanding but only in revealing his own mind.”

See, if we focus on our own heart, our own mind, we’re wrong. But if we encourage one another, then we are truly doing what God says to do.

Hebrews 3:12 and 13: “Take care, brethren, lest any one of you have found in you an evil unbelieving heart and falling away from the living God. Well, how do we do that? How do we avoid that sin? But encourage one another day after day, as long as it is still called today, lest any one of you be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.”

How do we avoid deceitfulness of sin, choking off the voice of Jesus?

I was in my yard yesterday, and we were in the backyard, and I heard some kind of equipment off in the field off in a distance. And it sounded pretty loud. Sound like it was right next to the fence. So I went out to the front yard, and the piece of equipment actually was quite far away on the field, and I couldn’t hear it as good in the front yard even though that was closer to the equipment as I could hear it in the backyard.

Okay. Why is that?

Well, because my yard has all kinds of big trees. And the sound that comes from far away—those trees apparently serve as kind of an amplifier, collecting it above our heads and pushing it back down at us.

Now, if I want to hear the voice of the equipment yesterday, if I really wanted to hear what it was really sounding like, well, I had to move further away from it, but under trees that would amplify the sound down to me.

See, we think we hear the voice of Jesus, or we can fall into this thinking by not being with trees, but by being in the open away from authority, away from other people that are going to really amplify the voice of Jesus to us. And the voice of Jesus gets dimmer to us. That’s what Hebrews says. If you’re not encouraged by one another, if you’re not staying in the context of community, your own heart—your own deceitful heart—starts to choke out, drown the words.

Little Levi runs around, and he goes like this a lot of times, you know, little kids do that. He’s a year and a half now. And he sticks his fingers in his ears, you know. Well, if you think that the voice of Jesus comes from isolation, from getting away from everybody so you don’t hear the voice of people to get you confused—but it’s just you, me, in the Bible, or you in the Bible, rather, and then God will speak to you that way—it’s like putting a finger in your ear. The sound goes down, not up.

You children, you teens, this is so important. This is why Proverbs says over and over and over: Listen to your parents. Listen to your parents. Listen to your parents. Don’t isolate yourself because God wants you to hear Jesus’s voice. And the way you do that is by listening hard.

Now, you know, it’s judging the words that are spoken to you according to the words of God. Certainly. But that’s the way the Spirit of God will communicate to you.

The trees in my illustration are your parents. They’re godly friends who will speak to you and make the voice of Jesus clear to your understanding. That’s what the trees are.

This talks, you know, one of the implications: the importance of preaching. You know, I’m not going to belabor this point, but you know, we often wonder why it is that at Calvin’s Geneva and in the time of the Reformation, people actually wanted more preaching of the word. They wanted to get together other than just Sunday morning and hear the word preached.

Well, it’s because they were receiving good teaching that told them that was the voice of Jesus talking to them. And if you had the opportunity to come out and hear the voice of Jesus—if I put out flyers to the community here and said, “Wednesday Jesus is going to be here and he’s going to give you a talk”—well, you know, if you really believe the flyer, you’d be out here in drones.

But we don’t believe the flyer because we don’t think Jesus is really showing up. It’s just Hurrey or Sandlin or Sproul, whoever it might be. He’s the one there. But I might hear Jesus somewhat. But you see, at Geneva, they understood how the Spirit works through the words of men in concert with the word of God to bring about changes in our lives. And as a result of that, the people wanted to hear Jesus speak more and more and more.

How well do you prepare for the preaching of the word? We’ve talked about this before. How much anticipation and prayer do you give to the reception of the voice of Jesus in the context of preaching? It’s important.

Community is important. As I’ve said, the importance of community is an essential part of the image of God.

In Genesis 1:27: “God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created them. Male and female, he created them.”

We’re created in community. Isolation is bad. Community is good. Community brings the voice of Jesus to us, and we then hear his sound.

John 3:8. When Jesus was talking to Nicodemus: “The wind blows where it wishes and you hear the sound of it. But you cannot tell where it comes from and where it goes. So is everyone who is born of the Spirit.”

Now that’s interesting. Still awake? I know it’s been a long sermon, but what is he saying?

We hear that stuff about the wind and the way it’s explained is: well, the wind has an effect. You can see the wind in the trees, right? So it has an effect on the world, and so believers have an effect on the world which is discerned. Well, that’s certainly true.

But what the text says in the first place is that you hear the sound of the wind. And everyone who is born of the Spirit has a sound to them. And it seems like what’s being talked about here are our words. The articulation of speech and sound from our tongues to one another is what moves us along in sanctification as we’re consonant with the word of God.

You know, you guys, you young people here—you’re friends to each other. And if you’re friends, you’re going to be responsible to help mature each other in the faith of the Lord Jesus Christ and obedience.

I’ve talked for a couple of weeks about the importance of the formal worship of the church. It’s Jesus who’s speaking. You ought to dress up just like I dressed up to see Vice President Cheney last week. I’m not saying you’ve got to wear a tie, but I’m saying you ought to wear something nice. Ought to be more nice than what you normally do each week to hear Jesus, right?

Well, you young people, you look around and you know, some of you aren’t doing that. You think, “Well, I shouldn’t say anything. I don’t want to be a, you know, holy Joe or whatever it is. I don’t want to appear more self-righteous.”

And that would be bad if you said it righteously to one another. But you see, without you saying things to each other, without me saying things to you, we’re not going to rely upon the Holy Spirit coming to you in your private time and saying, “Gee, I should have worn a suit last Sunday.”

No. The Spirit normally works through audible speech received by your ears. And if that’s true, then we want to listen to what each other are saying. And we want to open our mouths to speak to one another words of encouragement—if necessary, rebuke and exhortation.

My 9-year-old daughter rebuked me the other day. Now, I don’t want to, you know, get little kids walking around rebuking adults all the time. But she was right. I’d sinned with my speech, and she was right for reminding me of that sin.

See, it’s important. It’s vitally important that we do that because if we don’t, then we’re a congregation walking around, me