My 3-year-old was cuddling with me in bed the other morning, as she often does, when we heard my husband walk into the kitchen and start talking to one of her siblings.  Immediately, she popped upright.  “I hear my Daddy!”

I was struck by the parallel to John 10.  How readily she recognized her father’s voice — because it was familiar.

We, the Church, have a number of problems today that all share the same root cause.

For Instance…Weak Songs

I hear a lot of complaints from well-grounded Christians about how theologically poor our modern worship songs are.  They’re not totally wrong, but it’s not “modern” that’s the issue.

The songs that are most theologically rich — both old and new — all have one thing in common: they’re saturated with Scripture.  It’s a pretty safe bet that the songs are saturated with Scripture because their authors are (or were) saturated with Scripture.

When you’re “full up” with Scripture, it overflows.  You just can’t help it.  And while there were writers weak on Scripture in the past, and there are those strong on Scripture now, the overall trend has been a negative one.  Fewer Christians are biblically literate today than in ages past.

…Or Weak Worldview

This absence of biblical literacy reveals itself in other ways, as well.  Increasingly, we’re seeing believers drift into bad theology and worldly ideologies.  People don’t do this on purpose.  Nobody thinks, “Hmm, I could go for some bad theology today.”  No, people don’t adopt bad theology or worldly thinking because they want to think wrongly; they do it because they don’t recognize it as wrong.  And they don’t recognize it as bad theology because they don’t recognize good theology.

It’s a little like money.  People who work with money a lot — like bank tellers — aren’t trained to recognize counterfeit money by focusing on counterfeit money.  Primarily, they handle a lot of real money, until it becomes so familiar that counterfeit money stands out as “wrong” when they encounter it.

Kinda like recognizing, when someone’s speaking to you, that the voice you hear is not the voice of the one you know well.

Get to Know His Voice

See, many Christians can’t differentiate the voice of God from the voice of an imposter, because they aren’t familiar with the voice of God. 

Getting familiar with His Voice isn’t very complicated.  We just have to listen to Him speak…a lot.  And where do we hear Him speak?

Yep…the Bible.

Read it — all of it.  Saturate yourself in it.  Allow His character and His voice to become as familiar to you as as my little one’s daddy is to her.

“[H]e who enters by the door is the shepherd of the sheep…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…My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me.”  (Jn. 10:2-5, 27)

How well do you know the voice of your Father?  When He starts to speak, do you perk up and think, “that’s my Daddy!”?