God’s word doesn’t just inform you. It speaks, it summons, it saves—and it’s calling your name in the dark right now.
Burning Hearts Series
Speak, for your servant is listening. — 1 Samuel 3:10
In the previous chapter we stood at the beginning of a road to Emmaus and watched two heartbroken men walking away from Jerusalem in the fading light of the first Easter afternoon, and we asked a question: what kind of Book is it that can make a human heart burn the way theirs were burning? We gave three answers. This Book endures, it comforts, and it ignites. Now I want to walk that same road again, but with our eyes on a different part of the story. There we watched their hearts. Here I want you to watch their ears.
Because before anything was ever seen on that road, something was heard. A stranger came up alongside them, fell into step, and began to talk — and for the better part of seven miles, those two men listened. He asked them questions, and they answered Him. He drew their grief out of them into the open air. And then, Luke tells us, beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself (Luke 24:27). They walked, and they listened, and the words went into their ears, mile after mile after mile, the whole length of that road.
And there is something about that walk I cannot get over. For nearly the whole of it, those two men were listening to the actual, living voice of the risen Son of God — and they were convinced they were making conversation with a stranger. Luke tells us plainly that they were kept from recognizing him (Luke 24:16). So they heard God Himself, in person, at length, patiently opening the Scriptures to them on a dusty country road, and they had not the faintest idea who it was. They heard the voice and missed the speaker entirely.
And I wonder how often that is exactly what happens to us. We open this Book. We hear it read out in a service while our minds wander to lunch. We run our eyes down a chapter at the kitchen table before the day swallows us whole. And far too often we hear it as a stranger’s voice — old, dignified, perhaps even moving in places — without it ever once crossing our minds that the God who flung the stars across the sky is speaking to us, by name, this very minute. We hear about God in it, the way you might hear about some great man in a television documentary, watching from a comfortable distance. We do not hear God Himself.
So the question now is not the one we asked before. There we asked, what kind of Book is this? Here the question is sharper, and it is far more personal. Whose voice is this? When the Scriptures are opened, who exactly is it that speaks? I want to give you three answers — three things this living voice does, every single time it is truly heard. It speaks. It summons. And it saves.
It Speaks
Let us start with the most basic claim the Bible makes about itself, and it is a claim so enormous that if it is false the whole thing collapses into a pile of ancient religious literature, and if it is true then nothing in your life can ever again be quite the same. The claim is this: that when you read these words, you are not listening to what clever and devout men once thought about God. You are listening to God.
Every other religious book in the world is, at bottom, a record of man reaching up — man’s search, man’s speculation, man’s best guesses about the eternal. The Bible runs the other way. It is the record of God reaching down. It is not humanity’s search for the divine; it is the divine breaking the long silence and coming after humanity. And so it does not merely contain the word of God here and there, like flecks of gold you have to pan for in a riverbed of human opinion. It is the word of God.
Paul puts it in a single word:
All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness. — 2 Timothy 3:16
God-breathed. The word Paul uses there is one he seems to have minted for the purpose, and it means precisely what it says — breathed out by God. Now think about what breath does in the Bible. In the second chapter of Genesis, God forms the first man out of the dust of the ground — a lifeless figure of damp clay, lying there, going nowhere — and then God breathes into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man becomes a living being (Genesis 2:7). The clay did not stir until God breathed.
Paul takes up that very picture and lays it over the Scriptures. These words came out of the mouth of God the way the breath of life came out of the mouth of God in the garden. That is why the page in front of you is not inert. That is why it refuses to lie there quietly like every other old book on the shelf. It is carrying the breath of the living God, and the breath of the living God has a way of making dead things sit up.
And notice the little word all. All Scripture is God-breathed. Not merely the parts you have underlined. Not only the verses that comfort you on a hard night. All of it — the long genealogies your eyes slide over, the strange old laws that puzzle you, the hard sayings of Jesus you would rather He had never said. All of it breathed out by the same God, with the same authority, carrying the same weight.
You and I are forever trying to negotiate. We will take the love and leave the wrath; keep the promises and quietly shelve the commands; treasure the green pastures of the twenty-third Psalm and skip lightly over the parts that step on our toes. But you do not get to keep the breath and discard the bones. It is all one body, and it is all alive.
But how did that divine breath ever get onto the page, through ordinary human hands? Peter tells us:
Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet’s own interpretation of things. For prophecy never had its origin in the human will, but prophets, though human, spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. — 2 Peter 1:20–21
Now look hard at that phrase, carried along, because Peter has chosen it with great care. It is a sailor’s word. It is the very word Luke reaches for later, in the book of Acts, when he describes Paul’s ship caught in the great storm off Crete, when the crew could do nothing at last but lower the gear and let the gale take her — the ship, he says, was simply driven along. Now picture that. The ship is real. It is a genuine ship, with its own timbers and its own lines and its own name carved on the bow. The sailors are really aboard her, really at their stations, hauling on the ropes, hands raw. But it is the wind that decides where she finally goes.
And that, says Peter, is how this Book came to be written. The men were real men. Moses stayed Moses, with his desert upbringing and his stammering tongue. David stayed David, a shepherd with a harp and a hot temper and a long memory. Luke was really a doctor, and you can hear it in his careful, educated Greek; Amos was really a herdsman from the back country, and you can hear that too, in his blunt, open-air speech. Their personalities are all over these pages. God did not flatten them into machines taking dictation; He did not switch off their minds and move their hands. And yet the wind of the Spirit was in their sails the entire voyage, and the ship went exactly, precisely, where God meant it to go.
Forty human authors, fifteen centuries, one divine wind — and not one of them ever made landfall anywhere but the harbor God had charted. So when Peter says it never had its origin in the human will, he means the course was never theirs to set. They sailed; the Spirit steered.
And what are we to do with all of this? Paul thanks God for one small church that got it exactly right:
And we also thank God continually because, when you received the word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as a human word, but as it actually is, the word of God, which is indeed at work in you who believe. — 1 Thessalonians 2:13
That little church up in Thessalonica got something right that whole great congregations get wrong. When the word came to them, they did not file it away with the other interesting things they had heard that week, somewhere between the market gossip and the news from Rome. They received it for exactly what it actually is — the word of God. And do you see the result Paul fastens on at the very end of the verse? Because they took it as God’s word and not man’s, it went to work in them. That is the engine clause: which is indeed at work in you who believe. A human word can inform you. A clever human word can even impress you for an afternoon. But only the word of God goes to work in you, down underneath the floorboards where you actually live.
So why has this Book not changed us as deeply as it ought to have done by now? It is not that the breath has somehow gone out of it. The breath is still in it. It is that we keep on receiving it as a human word — one voice among the many, to be weighed in the balance against our own opinions and the mood of the age and whatever clever thing we read on our phones over breakfast — instead of receiving it as what it actually, gloriously, dangerously is.
So that is the first thing, and everything else stands on it. It speaks. It is the voice of God — breathed out by Him, carried down to us across the centuries through human hands by the wind of His Spirit, and waiting only, now, for someone who will receive it as His.
It Summons
But watch what follows the very moment you grant that the first thing is true. If this is God’s own voice, then it cannot come to you as a pamphlet you may read at your leisure and lay aside when something better is on. It comes as a summons.
There is a world of difference between the two. A human word leaves you sitting as the judge of it: you take your place on the bench, and the words are made to stand in the dock, and you decide, in your wisdom, whether to accept them, amend them, or throw them out. The word of God walks into that courtroom and turns it upside down. It does not come to the bar of your judgment. You come to the bar of its. It has the right — and this is the very heart of the whole matter — to address you, to command you, to summon you, and to wait for your answer.
The writer to the Hebrews sounds it as a matter of life and death:
So, as the Holy Spirit says: “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as you did in the rebellion, during the time of testing in the wilderness.” — Hebrews 3:7–8
Two things leap straight off that page. First, notice how the writer to the Hebrews introduces a quotation from the Old Testament. He does not say the psalmist once wrote long ago, or it stands recorded in the ninety-fifth Psalm. He writes it in the present tense: as the Holy Spirit says. Not said. Says. The Spirit who breathed those words out a thousand years before is not finished saying them; He is saying them now, this very minute.
The word of God is never quoted in the past tense by the people who really believe it, because to them it is never a dead letter being cited. It is a living voice still speaking. And second, hear the urgency that is hammered into that one little word: today. Not someday. Not when you finally have your life in better order. Not next year, when the season is more convenient and the children are grown and the pressure has eased. Today. The voice of God always comes with that word bolted onto it, because a summons that can be safely postponed until tomorrow is no summons at all.
And then comes the warning, and it is one we badly need: do not harden your hearts. The truly frightening thing about the human heart is what it does when it hears God’s voice and then does nothing whatever about it. It does not stay where it was. It does not hold neutral. It hardens. And the writer reminds them of the wilderness, where a whole generation heard God’s voice — heard it from the fire on the mountain, heard it day after day — and hardened against it anyway, until that hardness shut them out of the promised land.
Picture a footpath worn across a green field. The first season, the soil is soft, and when the rain falls it sinks in and does its quiet work. But year after year of feet tramping the very same line, and that path goes hard as fired brick, until the rain no longer soaks in at all; it just beads up, and runs off, and pools, and dries, and the ground beneath stays dust.
That is precisely what happens to a heart that hears the word and refuses it — hears it on Sunday and refuses it by Monday, hears it and refuses it, week upon week upon week. The result is not nothing. The result is something far worse than nothing. Every single time you hear God’s voice and give Him no answer, the ground packs down a fraction harder, and the next word that falls finds it harder still to enter.
Isaiah shows us the one kind of person God actually looks for. God has been surveying the whole vast universe that His own hands have made — the heavens, the earth, every created thing — and then He says something astonishing:
“These are the ones I look on with favor: those who are humble and contrite in spirit, and who tremble at my word.” — Isaiah 66:2
Out of all the people in the world God might single out for His favor — the powerful, the gifted, the brilliant, the impressive, the religiously decorated and accomplished — He passes over every one of them and rests His eye on the man who trembles at His word. Now hear me carefully, because I am not talking about being nervous of your Bible, or frightened of the dark bits. I am talking about a holy seriousness; a deep reverence; the abiding sense that when this Book is opened, Someone of unspeakable greatness has entered the room and must be reckoned with.
And I think we have very largely lost it. We have learned, almost without noticing, to handle the word of God the way we handle everything else in this hurried age — quickly, casually, with one eye on the clock and one ear already half-closed, skimming for the bit that applies to us. But the man God leans toward across the whole wide earth, the man whose company the Almighty actually seeks out, is the one who opens these pages and trembles — not because he is afraid of the Book, but because he knows, in his bones, exactly whose voice it is.
The prophet Samuel, as a young boy, is asleep in the house of the Lord at Shiloh, when in the dead of night a voice calls his name. Naturally, he thinks it must be old Eli the priest, and he springs up and runs to him — “Here I am; you called me.” Eli, half asleep, says he did no such thing, and sends the boy back to bed. The voice calls a second time; again the boy runs to Eli; again he is sent back. And then a third time.
Three times this child hears the very voice of the living God, and three times he is certain it must only be a man down the hall. At last old Eli, slow as he is, begins to understand what is actually happening in his house that night, and he tells the boy what to say if the voice should come again. So when it comes a fourth time — “Samuel! Samuel!” — the boy answers as Eli has taught him:
“Speak, for your servant is listening.” — 1 Samuel 3:10
There is the entire posture of a soul under the authority of God’s word, captured in six small words. Notice it is not Listen, Lord, for your servant is speaking — which, if we are honest enough to admit it, is rather closer to how most of our praying and a good deal of our Bible reading actually runs. We do most of the talking. We arrive with our agenda, our list, our requests, our complaints, our running commentary on the text, and we try to squeeze whatever God might want to say into the narrow gaps between our own words.
Samuel had it exactly the right way around. Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening. And do not miss this last thing, because it is full of comfort: the boy had already heard that voice three times over without once recognizing it for what it was. Sometimes the God of heaven has to call a man more than once — more than three times — before he finally stops running to Eli’s and starts, at long last, to listen to God.
So it speaks; and then it summons. It refuses to leave you a spectator in your seat. It calls your name in the night, and it waits in the dark for your answer.
It Saves
And now we come to the best of the three, and by far the most wonderful — because the living voice of God does not merely speak, and it does not merely summon. When that voice is truly heard, it goes on to do the one thing that no human word in all the world has ever been able to do, or ever will. It brings the dead to life. It creates the very faith that it calls for. The hearing of this voice is nothing less than the doorway into eternity.
Paul tells us the one thing every anxious soul most needs to know — where faith actually comes from:
Consequently, faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word about Christ. — Romans 10:17
Stop, and let that settle. Faith is not something you manufacture in yourself by gritting your teeth and straining to believe harder. Faith is not a mood you can somehow work yourself up into if only you try long enough. Faith is not a feeling you squeeze out by sheer effort of will. Faith comes — it arrives, it is given, it is born in a man — from hearing. You hear the word about Christ, and faith comes the way the daylight comes flooding into a room the moment the curtain is finally drawn back: not because you made the sun, but because you let in the light that was always there. And this is the very reason God has tied Himself so tightly, so deliberately, to this Book. He has appointed the hearing of His word as the ordinary, everyday means by which dead souls come alive.
Think of Augustine. Before he was ever Saint Augustine, he was just a brilliant, restless, deeply unhappy young man who had spent years running hard from God and exhausting every pleasure that promised to fill the hole and never did. One afternoon he was weeping in a garden, utterly at the end of himself, and he heard a child’s voice drifting over the wall, chanting in a little sing-song game, “Take up and read; take up and read.” So he took up the Scriptures that happened to be lying near him, and his eyes fell on a single sentence out of this very letter to the Romans — and that was it. The long war was over. The restless heart was finally still. Faith had come by hearing. It had come that way for him; it has been coming that way for two thousand years; and it can come that way for you, today.
The Lord Jesus describes His own people by one mark He sets above all the others:
“My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me.” — John 10:27
A few years ago, on a trip to the Holy Land, our bus pulled over beside a field where a flock of sheep was grazing, and the driver asked us all to get out and call them. So a busload of strangers stood at the fence and did everything we could think of to get their attention — calling, clapping, waving our arms — and not one sheep so much as lifted its head. Then, a little way off, their shepherd called out, once, in his own voice. And the whole flock turned together and went to him, as if we had not been there at all.
I have never forgotten it. And when I got home I discovered something I found even more remarkable still. What I had watched that day was one shepherd calling to his one flock. But in that country, in those days, when evening came on, several shepherds would often bring their separate flocks into one large communal sheepfold for the night — all the sheep mingled together in the dark, hundreds of them, packed in, utterly indistinguishable one flock from another. And you would think that in the morning it would be simply impossible to sort them all out again. But the shepherds never tried to sort them. Each shepherd simply walked to the gate and called — a particular call, his own call, in his own voice — and out of that great mingled, milling mass in the half-light, his own sheep, and only his own sheep, lifted their heads and threaded their way through the rest and came out to him. They would not do that for a stranger.
Elsewhere in the same chapter, Jesus says that a stranger’s voice will only scatter the sheep; “they will never follow a stranger” (John 10:5). But their own shepherd’s voice they knew — knew it the way you know your mother’s voice across a crowded, noisy room without ever needing to turn your head and look. And that, Jesus says, is the surest mark of one of His own: that in among the thousand competing, clamoring voices of this world, all of them shouting for his soul, a man has come to know His voice, and it is His voice that he follows. Which lays a quiet and searching question on every one of us. When you open this Book, whose voice is it that you are hearing? Is it the voice of a stranger — interesting, perhaps, but foreign, distant, other? Or has it become, over the years, the voice of your own Shepherd — the One you have come to know, and trust, and follow?
And Job draws the line I most want you to carry with you — the line between hearing about God and hearing God Himself. Job has been all the way through the furnace. He has lost his children, his wealth, his health, his good name; he has wrestled and argued with God across nearly forty chapters; and now, at the very last, after God has finally answered him out of the storm, Job says this:
“My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you.” — Job 42:5
My ears had heard of you. Understand: Job was no pagan, no ignorant man. Job knew his theology backward. He had heard about God all his long life — the right doctrines, the true things, the sound, orthodox religion handed down to him from his fathers. He had a head full of accurate information about God, and most of it was correct. And then God Himself actually spoke, and in one moment Job realized that everything he had held before had been, somehow, secondhand. Hearing of God. Hearing the report, the rumor, the careful description, the inherited account. It is the difference between holding a glossy travel brochure about a far country and standing at last on its soil with the wind off its hills in your face. It is the difference between reading the collected letters of a great man you have admired from afar all your life, and having that same man walk through your front door, unannounced, and sit down across the table from you.
And I can tell you plainly that there are people who have sat in church their whole lives long, faithfully, every Sunday, and who have only ever heard about God. They could take the examination and pass it with honors. They know the brochure by heart. And they have never, not once, heard Him speak. But the glory of this living Book — the whole reason God breathed it out and the whole reason He has put it into your hands — is that it was never, ever meant to leave you holding the brochure. It was meant to bring you face to face with the living God Himself, until the day comes when you too can say, with Job, my ears had heard of you — but now …
So it saves. The same voice that once breathed out the worlds, the same voice that summons you today by name, will — the very moment you truly hear it — do in you what no preacher and no book and no straining effort of your own could ever accomplish. It will give you faith. It will draw the curtain back. It will raise you from the dead.
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So hold all three together, and hear the one thing they were always saying.
When the Scriptures are opened, that is the voice of God Himself — breathed out by Him, carried down to us by His Spirit, every word of it His own. And because it is His, it speaks; it is no human word, and we dare not, must not, receive it as one. And because it speaks, it summons; it does not stand waiting at the bar of our judgment but calls us, today, by name, and the very worst thing a man can do with the voice of God is to hear it and harden his heart and do nothing at all. And because it summons, it saves; for faith comes by hearing, and the dead come alive at the sound of it, and the man who has only ever heard about God may, this very day, finally hear God.
Think once more of those two men on the road to Emmaus. They heard that voice for seven long miles and never knew it. But there came a moment — and we shall come to that very moment together in the next chapter — when something more than their ears was opened, and they saw, at last, who it was that had been walking beside them the whole way home. The hearing came first. It always does. The eyes were opened only after the ears had heard.
So I will leave you with the boy in the dark at Shiloh, and his six small words. The God who made you is not silent. He has spoken, and His word is in your hands, and He is speaking still. The only question left on the table is whether you will say what young Samuel finally learned to say in the dark.
Speak, Lord — for Your servant is listening.
