Well, last Sunday we started a brand new series called By Faith. We want to be people that live by faith. 2 Corinthians 5.7 says, For we live by faith and not by sight. We talked about this last week. Sometimes faith and sight, they're in conflict with one another. We want to live by faith, not by sight, but we might think, hey, I need to see to believe. Or maybe we've seen some things that make it hard for us to believe. And faith and sight are working against one another. The Bible speaks of this tension often. It's called the tension, the conflict between spirit and flesh, many times in Scripture. So faith versus sight, spirit versus flesh. Our spirit is that part of us that comes to life when we know Jesus. The Bible says that when we begin a relationship with Jesus, that God's actual spirit, the Holy Spirit, joins with our spirit. There's a union that exists. And his spirit becomes part of us, and he begins to remake us, to change us from the inside out. Many of us have experienced that. But we still have our flesh. And our flesh is that part of us that's just naturally selfish. It wants what it wants, and it will seek out anything that it feels it needs to be satisfied. The problem with the flesh, though, is that it is never satisfied. Ever. There's never a moment where it says, hey, I've had enough. And our flesh has this amazing knack to seek out counterfeit versions of what we really need. God offers our spirit faith and hope and love and life and joy and peace. And our flesh seeks out counterfeit versions of that, and there is so much counterfeit out there that it has plenty to choose from. In fact, our world is sometimes so full of counterfeit versions of those things that it loses sight of what the real thing actually is. That's why movies like Fifty Shades of Grey open on Valentine's Day, right? Because it's a celebration of love, and that's what that's all about. It's just counterfeit. And God does not want us to settle for counterfeit. God does not want you to have anything less than what is real. He wants real life for you. He wants real love. He wants real peace, real joy. And that comes from the Spirit of God. In fact, in Galatians chapter 5, the Bible says the Holy Spirit produces this kind of fruit in our lives: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against these things. In other words, you can have as much of that as you can handle. Can we look at our lives and say, yeah, I'm good on all that? I don't need any more of that. No more joy, no more peace. I've got plenty of that. And absolutely not. But see, those aren't things that we strive for. That's not something we gain when we work hard enough. The Holy Spirit produces that in our lives. It's God's Spirit working within us. So what we're gonna do over the next several months as we go through this series by faith, we're gonna feed our spirit. Religion is all about denying your flesh. You measure how spiritual you are by all the things you don't do. We're not gonna worry about denying our flesh. Denying our flesh, it's a fool's errand. It doesn't work very well. We're just not that good at that as human beings. We're gonna feed our spirit. We're gonna feed our spirit so well that our spirit becomes stronger than our flesh, and all those fears that we have, all those anxieties, all those addictions, all those things that hold us back because of our flesh, those things will not stand a chance when our spirit is well fed and our spirit is strong. So every week we're gonna feed our spirit, and faith is like oxygen for the spirit. So as we go through the first part of Hebrews chapter 11, this chapter in the Bible that's all about faith, each week we're gonna learn something new that we can seek out, something we can ask God for as we grow in our spirit. The very first statement in Hebrews chapter 11 that begins with the words by faith is Hebrews 11, 3. It says, By faith we understand that the entire universe was formed at God's command. What we see now did not come from anything that can be seen. By faith, we believe that God made everything. And he made everything by speaking it into existence. It was by command. God spoke and it happened. We're gonna talk a little bit today about God's voice and the power of God speaking. Because if God can speak the world into existence, if that is true, then what happens when that voice speaks into our hearts? What happens when we hear that voice? When we listen and respond to that voice. Now you don't have to have been a human being for very long to know that not everyone agrees with that statement. That God created everything by command. You don't have to search scripture very long to find that claim. Genesis 1.1, very first verse in the Bible, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And there's a lot packed in there, right? What happened? The universe. When did it happen? In the beginning. Who made it happen? God. How did it happen? Well, just a few verses later, Genesis 1.3, God said, let there be light, and there was light. He just said it, he just spoke it. And there's a lot of debate about that. In fact, this is probably the most debated concept of the last 200 years. How did everything get started? You can find people that are on all different sides of this debate. Some people think that's foolish. It's naive, it's a fairy tale. That anyone with a brain would not believe that God spoke the world into existence. Some people believe it, but it's kind of a shaky belief. There's almost a fear that one day that's going to be proven to be untrue. And what does that mean for our faith? Some people just don't care. They're like, hey, I'm here now. So I don't I don't really care what happened however many billion years ago or however many thousands, I don't care. I'm here now. How is that relevant to my life? And the answer is that it is relevant to our life if that God still speaks. And if we can hear his voice. Science will will argue against this in certain times and say that the Bible doesn't really hold the hold water. It doesn't stand up. But but the thing I love about the Bible, one of the things I love about Scripture is that it was not written to be a scientific textbook. It was not. The main question God is answering in Scripture is not how but why, but the Bible gets it right scientifically in some amazing ways. And I love this kind of stuff. I'm not someone that's really into science. I'm not that smart. I need people to explain things for me in a way that really makes sense. I have a good friend that talks to me about IT problems that we have here at the church because our internet's it's awful. We have really bad internet. So if you have a solution for that, by all means. And he'll explain things to me. And one time he was talking to me, I was like, so what's the problem? He said, Well, Justin, here's the thing. The internet's kind of like a train. And it's chugging along on its track, but sometimes, sometimes something blocks that track. We've got to remove that block. And I'm kind of nodding my head and then realizing, whoa, whoa, whoa, this sounds like me talking to my four-year-old son right now. And I'm realizing how how intelligent you think I really am, but then I appreciate it. I appreciate it. And so I start using it, and I'm going talking to my friends. You know, the internet's kind of like a train. And you know, you gotta you gotta make sure that track is clear, because otherwise, I don't know what I'm talking about. So so I appreciate this, and I actually love science. I love discussions about science, I love the debate, because I love how often scripture shows up in this amazingly powerful way. For example, Hebrews 11, 3 that we just looked at. By faith, we understand that God created the world by command. Another translation says that he made what we see from what is invisible. Now, we know in our culture today that we're made up of invisible things, things you cannot see with the naked eye. You have molecules, you have atoms, you have subatomic particles inside of you. Science believes that there are particles we haven't even seen yet because we haven't found a microscope or built a microscope good enough to see them. But no one knew that 2,000 years ago. No one knew that there were all these invisible things that make us up. If you would have been someone 2,000 years ago that says, you know, I think I've got all these invisible things in my body that kind of come together and form specific patterns and shapes, and that's what makes me who I am. People would have locked you away. They thought you were nuts. So maybe the Bible just got lucky. In Isaiah, the Bible says that God sits above the circle of the earth, and the actual Hebrew word used for circle meant sphere, and that was 2,000 years before it was discovered that the earth was in fact a sphere. So the Bible gets lucky pretty often. If you go and you search Big Bang Theory, the first thing that pops up on Google is the television show, Big Bang Theory. And that makes sense, right? Because that show is on all the time. If you hit guide on your television, the Big Bang Theory is on. It's what Law and Order was ten years ago. Remember ten years ago when Law and Order was always on? On like four different channels, you're like Law and Order, another law and order. Is there a law that says law and order must be on at all times? But then you'd watch it. And I used to believe I could be a pretty good detective or a pretty good attorney because I've seen so much law and order, I think I could just fake it. Because that's gotta be, it seems like it's pretty accurate, right? That's the Big Bang Theory now. But if you go a few more results down on Google, you'll find a scientific theory called the Big Bang Theory. Now, who has heard of the Big Bang Theory? Anyone in the room? Okay, yeah, pretty much all of us. It's pretty well known. Well, it's actually a pretty new scientific theory. In the grand scheme of things, it did not show up until the 40s, if you can believe that. The 40s. It's not something that's that's ancient. See, in 1929, a man named Edwin Hubble made an amazing discovery. It's called Hubble's Law. Hubble loved telescopes. He spent a lot of time with telescopes. We would name a very, very large telescope after him one day. And Hubble observed that the universe is moving. In fact, it's it's expanding, and it's expanding at an exponential rate. And it seems to be expanding from a central point of origin, like an explosion. And this was a big deal. In fact, it met with a lot of opposition, not from not from people of faith, but from the scientific community. Because, see, the predominant theory at that time for the origin of the universe was something called solid state theory. Now, almost all of us raised our hands for the Big Bang Theory. I'm guessing not many of us would raise our hands for solid state theory, because no one really knows much about it anymore. It's become obsolete. But in the 1920s and the 1930s, any scientist with any credibility whatsoever believed in solid state theory. And so Genesis 1.1 says that in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And we'll leave that up for a few minutes. Solid state theory stood in stark contrast with this. It said, there is no beginning. The universe has always been here, it has always existed, it is eternal. The Sea Hubble's law changed that. Because if everything's expanding from a central point and you rewind time, eventually you get to that origin point, and another name for origin is beginning. And so scientists started to have crises, and they began to convert from solid state theory to the theory we now call the Big Bang Theory. And great scientists like Einstein made that conversion. Einstein was passionate about solid state theory, and he changed his mind. He saw the evidence, he said, okay, I now see the need for a beginning. He would go on later to say, if there's a beginning, I believe there must be a beginner. But scientists everywhere started abandoning the old for the new. See, I love, I love it when we discover things in this world that actually add credibility to Scripture. That give us more faith that God said what he said for a reason and we can stand with God's word. I love it when that common ground exists. But even though we live in a world where most people will say, Yeah, I believe in a beginning, do I believe that it started because God said something? Because some words were spoken? Am I supposed to believe that? I mean, how naive do I look? That's that's crazy. Do we believe that God could just speak the world into existence? That the sound of his voice could create everything that we see. Sound is pretty powerful if you think about it. Sound can cause a lot of things to happen. Sound can cause you to have a reaction that you're not even conscious of. I was talking to a friend of mine the other day. We're just having a conversation, and all of a sudden his phone rang, and he has the same ringtone that I have. So I reached in my pocket automatically to grab my phone, only to find my phone was not there, it wasn't in my pocket, and I remembered, oh yeah, it's back at my desk. That's his phone. Well, that's probably happened to many of us several times. You're in a store, you hear a phone ring, you think it's yours, but see, it happened again about two minutes later. And again, my hand went into my pocket. And I'm like, I I just I just did this. I have just established that my phone is not here. I even think I know where my phone is. And then it happened again. And the third time, I did not put my hand in my pocket, but I wanted to. I really did. It was like, it was like all I could do not to, because I am programmed to respond to that sound. Sound can cause emotional reactions in us. Young people that live with your parents, you have probably heard your parents say, I do not like the sound of your voice. Right? In other words, you said the right words, you just got the tone wrong. And we hear things like that all the time. If you're married, you probably have heard that at least twice today, right? I don't appreciate the sound of your voice. Sound can cause joy. There are sounds that bring about joy. If you're a parent of a small child like me, that sound is silence. That is the most beautiful sound on earth, right? If you have kids, you fight to keep silence. When you have silence, you will do anything. If anyone comes and disturbs the silence of your home, I mean you could order a pizza, but if that pizza man shows up and brings you your food at the moment your children have fallen asleep and become silent, you're like, what is wrong with you? What are you doing? I'm bringing you your pizza. Yeah. What you're not getting a tip. That's just how it goes. Because you love you love silence. Before we had kids, we hated silence. We wanted, we wanted to do stuff. Silence meant boredom. Now, when we have silence, we want to hold on to it for as long as possible. Silence brings me joy. Certain sounds can cause anger in people. I have this thing, and I'm being honest, I'm being serious. If you have, if you have someone that you know that knows me, they can back this up. If I hear the sound of food being eaten, just people chewing food, it causes a reaction in me that makes no sense. It is irrational. It is it is a deep anger. And it's a deep anger that I can't seem to control, and it's been like this for as long as I can remember. I remember this even as a teenager, sitting at lunch at school. If I heard food sounds, it drove me crazy. I'm really good friends with Nathan, who leads our worship team. Many of you know Nathan, he's out of town today, so I can talk about him. So uh I'll just be honest, Nathan is a slurper, okay? He's a slurper, and and he loves coffee, like he loves coffee. He roasts his own coffee beans or whatever they are, and and if you say Starbucks to Nathan, he'll like he'll correct you, he'll like, no, no, no, that's not real coffee. Come with me, I'll show you real coffee. And Nathan, he slurps his coffee every day in the office. And see, there's two ways to drink a bread, a beverage. One way is to use gravity to tilt the cup so that the liquid goes into your mouth, right? You just go like this. It's not hard. It's not hard. If you have carpal tunnel, maybe, but it's pretty easy. But that's not what Nathan does. Nathan gets the liquid right to his mouth and then he just goes and sucks it up, and it makes this noise, and guys, oh my goodness. If I could just, if I could just describe to you what goes through my mind. And there have been moments we've been talking, I'll hear it, I'll go, Nathan, Nathan, you gotta stop. I can't handle this. And he'll say, No, this is how you're supposed to drink coffee. This is how you experience it. And I say, just experience it somewhere else, please. See, the worst though, the worst is, and I'll keep going because he's out of town. Did I say that? So the worst is that he drinks soup in the office, and he drinks soup, and this is just odd. He opens the top of the can and just puts a spoon in. He doesn't heat it up. And you know, I have that reaction too. Like, that's gross. And then I'm like, well, you don't really do anything magical to soup when you warm it up. It's all in there, it's all pre-cooked, but it's just, if you're camping, that makes sense. But we have the means to heat it up five feet away, we have bowls, but not Nathan. He just takes a spoon, puts it in there, and and it's the worst. Because, see, first there's the sound of a metal spoon hitting the inside of a metal can, and that's just an annoying sound. It's just annoying. But it doesn't drive me crazy. What it does is it gets my attention, and so I just kind of look up. And I look up just in time to see the spoon near his mouth, and he he eats the soup the same way he drinks his coffee. He just puts it here and slurps it, and I want to punch him in the face. That's all I want to do. And I love him. I love him with everything I have, but I I can't, I cannot stand it. What it does to me. I was telling a friend about this, about this anger that I experience when I hear food sounds. Two years ago I was talking about this, and my friend sent me an article from the New York Times. And it it was life-changing. This is the article. This is the very first paragraph of an article in the New York Times says for people with a condition, a condition, okay? That some scientists call misophonia, mealtime can be torture. The sounds of other people eating, chewing, chomping, slurping, gurgling can send them into an instantaneous blood-boiling rage. As one scientist put it, it is panic, rage, fear, terror, and anger all mixed together. And when I read this, I said, that's it. That's me. All these years I thought I was crazy, and it turns out I am crazy. It's a it's a neurological disorder. I have this, but now there's a name for it, and maybe one day there'll be a cure, but for now, just pray for me, right? Two years ago, two years ago, my wife, our marriage almost ended two years ago, because I was laying in bed. I was about to fall asleep, my eyes were closed, and I felt my wife get into bed. She pulled the covers over, and as my eyes are closed, completely unsuspecting, I hear this noise. And that same, that same feeling came over me. All those emotions, that rage just started to boil inside of me. And I opened my eyes, and there's my wife, six inches from my ear, eating a pickle. Okay? And there are certain foods that are louder than other foods, but but pickles are up there, and pickles are weird because they're both crunchy and squishy at the same time. So when someone bites into it, like you hear the crunch, but then you hear the squish, and it's awful, it's terrible. And my wife knows I have this problem. She knows this about me, and she's eating a pickle six inches from my ears. It's all I can do when that happens. To not do something, not say something, because it it causes that emotion in me. It's just the sound that bothers me that much. Sound is powerful. Sound can be destructive. You can burst an eardrum with sound, you can break glass with sound. But but can sound create? Because think about what happens in creation. Something that is chaotic has to take shape, it has to be formed. Can you create something with sound? They've done these experiments with sound that are really, really cool. I want to show you a couple of them this morning. There's one experiment where they take water, and this water is just coming out of a hose, and they hit it with a very specific frequency of sound, and it's awesome. In fact, go ahead and take a look at this. This is not special effects, this is just sound's effects on water. And it causes the whole structure of the water to change. In fact, some of the water is even floating in the air, and that's just sound. That's all that's causing that. Isn't that cool? They've done other experiments with sand, or they've taken sand and they've sprinkled it onto this metal plate. And then they hit that metal plate with these very specific frequencies of sound. And what happens is awesome. So I want to show you one. It's really short. Go ahead and show that first one. Isn't that cool? Isn't that amazing? It takes shape, it takes form. Here's one more just to keep this going, to give you an idea. And I love that. I love that. I'm gonna show you one more, but we're gonna take the sound out because your ears will thank me. Uh the frequencies get a little intense. But as this is playing, as you're watching this, I want you to think about God saying that He He created the world by speaking. Guys, go ahead and show that video. That He spoke and everything came into existence. That God spoke, and the sound of His voice caused this whole world to take form, caused this whole world to take shape. I mean, everything you're seeing, it's all being formed just by sound. That's it. And if if scientists can hook up a metal plate to a machine that makes sound, and they can cause that sound to create something. To create a pattern, to create beauty out of something that's just chaos. I look at that and I ask myself do I believe that the sound of my God's voice could shape this world? And I do. Those experiments are experiments with something called resonance. This is the definition for resonance. Resonance means a sound or vibration produced in one object that is caused by the sound or the vibration produced in another. It also means the quality of a sound that stays loud, clear, and deep for a long time. So, what would happen if the sound of God's voice was the sound that had resonance in our heart? What if it was the voice of God that stayed long, deep, and clear in our hearts? If who we are, if how we're shaped, if how we think, if how we behave, if all of that was influenced by the voice of God in our lives. We say that we want to live by faith and not by sight. There's a verse in Romans, Romans 10, 17, and it says, faith comes from hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ. So faith actually develops as we hear the voice of God, as we hear God speak. There's this idea that's taken hold in our faith, and it's very sad. And the idea is that God doesn't really speak that much anymore. You can't really hear God talk. He used to speak, and he spoke so much a long time ago that people actually wrote his words down. But now he's content just to let us read what he said a long time ago, but he's not speaking to us. Or maybe we believe he can speak, but he only speaks to very rare people who are super spiritual, but he never speak to me. That is not consistent with Jesus at all. Jesus is the exact representation of God. The Bible says that he is the mirror image of God. That does not line up with Jesus. In fact, Jesus would often say, He who has ears, let him hear. And that's a pretty inclusive statement. He who has ears. That's most people. He says, let him hear. In other words, Jesus is saying, I want you to hear my voice. I want to speak to you and I want you to hear it. If God wants us to live by faith and faith comes from hearing, would God be silent? What would it look like if it was the sound of his voice that had the most resonance in our life? That formed us, that shaped us. Hearing God speak is not some strange phenomenon that's meant for a very specific group of people that just so happen to be really close with God. Hearing God speak is something you are meant to do. You are meant to hear the voice of God. You're meant for it. All of us can hear God speak. Every single one of us can hear his voice. It's challenging at times. If we want our faith to grow and faith comes from hearing, we need to be people that hear God speak. And you might be here and say, I've never heard him speak. I don't know what that means, I don't know what that looks like, but I want to hear him speak. Maybe you hear other people talk about how God said this and God said that, and you either think they're crazy, some of them are. But you go, I I've never experienced that. They're talking about God speaking as if it just happens, and I want that, but I don't know what that looks like. How can I hear God speak? You can. You absolutely can. You will hear God speak to your heart. One of the things we have to do if we want to hear God speak is learn to identify the voices that are not God. Because he is not the only one speaking. There are so many other voices out there in Genesis. We see the very first instance of people placing their trust in someone else's voice. Satan tells us that God does not have our best interest at heart, that he's not really looking out for us, and we need to make a different choice. And so we we chose that. We chose to know about God instead of to know God. And everything sort of fell apart at that moment. The Bible says Adam and Eve were naked, and they were unashamed. And that was not the result of a paleo diet and CrossFit, right? It was just innocence. It's just them like children not having insecurity. Can you imagine a life with no insecurity, with none? That's how they were. But the moment they chose something other than God, insecurity, fear, shame came into their hearts, and the Bible says they were afraid. There's actually a television show that I've heard about called Naked and Afraid. Have you heard about this? People volunteer for this. I don't think they get paid. They volunteer to be dropped off in some foreign country in the wilderness, in a jungle or in a desert, naked, and they have to survive. And that's it. Like, all right, you're naked, you're afraid, have fun. And I don't know who would sign up for that. If there was a show called Half Naked and Startled, I would still not sign up for it. Right? I'm okay with like, how about fully clothed and having a really good time? Yes, that's my show. I'll be on that show. But Adam and Eve, they're the first ones. They were naked and afraid. So the Bible says they ran off and they found leaves to cover their body. They made underwear out of leaves. That's how afraid they were. Adam's leaves didn't match at all. He picked it out himself. It was kind of a mess. Eve, Eve took a lot longer to find her leaves, but it's okay because she got an amazing deal. Like it was incredible. It was, she saved money by buying those leaves. Like it was amazing. Clearance. So they got their leaves, they put it on, and God shows up. And the Bible says they hear the footsteps of God. How amazing is it that they were so close to God they could identify him not by his voice, but by the sound of his footsteps? They hear God coming and so they hide. God finds them. And Adam has this conversation with God. He said, I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid myself. And here's what God says: Who told you that you were naked? Who told you that? Whose voice have you been listening to? Because it certainly has not been mine. See, that voice diminished Adam and Eve. That voice told them they were less than who they were. That's what Satan's voice always does. It diminishes us. And he's so clever. He's so good with words. We hear those voices in our culture all the time. If we can learn to recognize them, the Bible says that apart from God, we can do nothing. It says that apart from the Spirit of God in us, we are actually a slave to our sin nature. That doesn't mean we can't do good things. That doesn't mean there aren't good people. It just means that apart from God, we will do what our flesh desires. We can't help it. And you will not find people walking around going, I'm a slave to my nature. In fact, if you said that to someone, they'd probably be offended. But you'll find people all the time defending decisions they've made by saying, I can't change the way I feel. I can't help how I feel. Is there much difference between saying I'm a slave to my nature and I can't help how I feel? Satan's just really good with words. See, if we looked at God and we said, God, I can't help how I feel, God would look at us, and just like Adam and Eve, he would say, Who told you that? Whose voice have you been listening to? And then he'd tell us the truth. He'd see, say, I made you. I created you. In fact, I made you special. When I created this world, I spoke it into existence. But when I made humanity, I did it differently. If you read Genesis, we're the only thing he makes by hand. Not only did I make you, I had faith in you. I believe in you. And I put you in charge of this whole earth. I said, you have dominion of this earth, rule over it. I gave you this earth to rule over. Do you think that I would have believed in you so strongly that you could rule over the earth if I didn't think you were capable of ruling over your own feelings? Do you think I would have had that much belief in you that you could rule over this world that I created if I didn't think you could rule over your own emotions? Who has told you that you are powerless? Who has told you that you're a slave? The voice of God never diminishes us. It never makes us settle for being less than who we are, and who we are is the children of God. We are the sons and the daughters of God. And those voices that say, you can't, you'll never, those voices are not God. When you think about yourself and you hear that voice, maybe you think it's you. That's your voice. Maybe it is, maybe it was someone else's voice, but they said it so much to you that you believed it for yourself. Or whoever said it had a lot of resonance in your heart. That is not the voice of God. And if we're gonna hear God speak, we've got to say no to the other voices. We've got to reject those. We have to say yes only to God's voice or to any voice that echoes his voice, because there are those voices too. Danny Worfel spoke here a little over a year ago. Danny won the Heisman Trophy at Florida, which might be a bad thing to say here in Georgia, but he did. Then he played in the NFL for a long time. He did a great job when he spoke here. I don't know Danny very well. I've met him a few times. I'm really good friends with someone that's really good friends with him, so that's cool, I guess. Um, and this guy told me a story about Danny that I thought was so cool. He said, When Danny was growing up, when he was playing football, anytime he'd encounter something hard and he'd feel like giving up, he would hear a voice. And this voice would be urging him on. It would be saying, Danny, you can do this. Don't quit. Keep going. You're gonna be successful, you're smart, you're capable, you can do it. And so Danny would power through, and he thought that voice was just his own drive. Then he had children, and one day he sees his mom holding his newborn child, and his mom is speaking into this child and saying, You can do anything. You're gonna succeed. You're capable, you're smart, you're strong. And he realized that voice he'd been hearing his whole life. It was the voice of his mom, that it had gained resonance in his soul because that voice echoed the voice of God. One of the most amazing things I get to watch is my wife with my daughter. I have this beautiful daughter, and my wife will hold her, and she'll do this thing with Lily, who's a year old, and she'll hold Lily's arms and she'll say, I am beautiful, I am smart, and I am strong. And Lily's old enough now that she'll start to do it with us. I am beautiful, I am smart, I am strong. And I know that Lily will have no memory, no memory of this happening, but I believe that voice will be inside of her because that voice echoes the voice of God. God's voice pushes us forward, God's voice gives us courage. Listen to that voice. But we gotta listen. We have to listen. And that sounds like basic knowledge, but if we want to hear God speak, we gotta listen. The very first time I heard God speak to me, I was brushing my teeth. Wasn't a very spiritual moment. I wasn't praying, I was brushing my teeth. I look now and I go, oh, that's because I talked so much that God knew he had a very small window of opportunity. And he's like, I gotta wait for a moment where Justin has something lodged into his mouth to speak to him, because otherwise he's gonna be talking, he can't hear me over himself. And that would have been accurate. And when God spoke to me, it was something that was really personal, and I just kind of went, huh, that's weird. That didn't sound like my voice, and I'm gonna think about that. And what he said ended up proving true years later. But it's in a moment of silence that I heard God speak. There's a story in the Bible of Elijah, this great prophet, and he's afraid for his life, he's running away from his problems, and he's on this mountain, and he hears, he wants to hear God speak, and so all of a sudden there's this earthquake, and he's like, oh, maybe God's speaking in the earthquake, and God's not speaking in the earthquake. And then there's lightning and a fire, and he's like, oh, maybe God is speaking in the fire, but no, God's not in the fire either. And then there's this whisper. It's a gentle whisper. And that was God. Now, why on earth would God whisper? If you're God and you're gonna talk, I mean, if I'm God and I'm gonna talk, I'm going loud. I'm gonna do something big, but whisper, why would God whisper? And the only thing I can think of is that maybe he wants the people that hear him to be the people who listen. If you want to hear God speak to you, listen. Find some time, some quiet time. Pray and don't just pray and talk, pray and listen. Say, God, I want you to speak. I believe you want to speak to me. I just need to learn how to hear you. So speak. And if that is the posture of your heart that you want to hear from God, and you're you're making a space in your life to hear from God, you will hear from God. And it'll change everything. We just have to listen. In John chapter 10, Jesus said, My sheep listen to my voice. I know them and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one can snatch them away from me, for my father has given them to me, and he is more powerful than anyone else. No one can snatch them from the Father's hand. The Father and I are one. And I want to read this again, but I want to replace the thems with us, because this is God speaking to you. He says, You listen to my voice. I know you, and you follow me. I give you eternal life, and you will never perish. No one can snatch you away from me, for my father has given you to me, and he is more powerful than anyone else. No one can snatch you from the Father's hand, that the Father and I are one. Jesus uses this example of a sheep and a shepherd. He used that a lot. My wife told me the story that she heard about how ancient shepherds would train young sheep to hear their voice, because it was imperative that shepherds could speak to their sheep, and the sheep knew their voice. And when these sheep would be newborn, the shepherds would carry the sheep. And they would they would hold the sheep over their shoulders and they would walk and they would speak to all the other sheep, but they'd have that newborn sheep right at their ear. Because their voice was so close to the ear of the sheep. And the sheep would hear the sound of their voice over everything else, and that sheep would become tuned in to the sound of the shepherd's voice, just because the shepherd carried them. Could it be that we learn how to hear the voice of God when we let him carry us? If you don't know Jesus, this is what he wants for you. He wants life, he wants abundant life. He wants to hold you, he wants to carry you. He says, Stop trying and striving on your own. Stop trying to do all this yourself. You don't have to do that. I would like to actually physically pick you up and carry you. I'd like to carry your burdens. I'd like to take all your hurts, all your fears, all your worries, and I would like to take those upon myself. So let me carry you. But so often we're the ones that say, no, no, Jesus, I don't want you to have to do that. I can do this, I can do this. Give me the strength, Jesus, just give me the strength to do it myself. And Jesus is saying, okay, but you don't have to have that strength. Because I have that strength. See, if we let Jesus carry us, if we put all of our hope and all of our faith in Jesus, and we allow him to carry us in our lives, we will learn to hear his voice. You will hear the voice of God. Learn to discern the other voices. Listen, let him carry you, and you will hear him speak. I want us to be a church that hears God. I want us to be a family of people that hear God's voice, and it's his voice that moves us. It's his voice that causes us to take whatever shape he wants us to take. In our own lives, we want his voice to be the one that resonates within us. We want him to speak into us because when he speaks into us, we are filled, and our faith grows. Faith comes by hearing and by hearing the voice of God. So if we want to grow in our faith, if we want to get filled up, if we want to feed our spirit, then we walk out of here today saying, God, speak. We're going to worship with one more song. And it could not be a better song with this message because the song was already chosen, the set list was already done. And I actually wasn't going to talk about this this morning. I was going to talk about the next verse in Hebrews. And I actually sat down on Thursday to start writing this, and I saw that verse three, and I went, ooh, I don't want to skip that. I had a little moment of panic. But then I saw the set list, and I saw this last song we're going to sing, and I'm like, okay, God, you you actually know what you're doing. I'll give you that. And this song is all about hearing God and Him speaking into us and speaking what is true. So we're going to pray. We're going to close with this song. And I just, I always want the last song to be an opportunity for us to immediately engage with God after we've reflected and thought about Him. And this is a chance for all of us to say to God, okay, I want you to speak. Speak into me, speak truth into my life. Because I am listening. I want to hear you speak. Please pray with me. Jesus, thank you so much for this church. Thank you so much for this family of people that are hungry for more of you. We love you, Lord. We love one another. Help us to serve you this week. Help us to hear you, to hear your words, to hear your voice. We want to settle for it for nothing less than your voice in our lives. We want to reject the voices that diminish us, the voices that lessen us, and we ask that you would speak to us. We ask all this in your name, Jesus, with faith that you're going to do it. We love you. We love you, Jesus. Amen.