To Hear His Voice
In 2016, a group of behavioral scientists conducted an experiment that deepened our knowledge surrounding the connection between a mother and her child. For years, scientists recognized that children would respond when hearing their own biological mother’s unique voice compared to the voice of other women. With the help of MRI scanning technology, we can now understand how the “circuitry” of the brain relates to this response. The accuracy and immediacy of recognition is amazing: “Even from very short clips, less than a second long, the children could identify their own mothers’ voices with greater than 97 percent accuracy.”
The scientists also found that it wasn’t just the parts of the child’s brain that relate to sound that would react to their mother’s voice. “Brain regions that respond more strongly to the mother’s voice extend beyond auditory areas to include those involved in emotion and reward processing, social functions, detection of what is personally relevant and face recognition.” These findings help show why a mother’s voice can bring comfort to a child and can even may even suggest how strong social communication skills will be in the future. One of the scientists concluded: ““Voice is one of the most important social communication cues...It’s exciting to see that the echo of one’s mother’s voice lives on in so many brain systems.”
It is amazing to see that the relationship between a mother and her child is not simply due to some kind of socialization that occurs after birth. Our brains develop in such a way that shows the “wiring” is configured for familiarity and intimacy with the one who gave birth to us. In other words, we are made for relationship.
Our capacity for relationship goes deeper than the cellular level when we look at the bigger story of which we are part. We see at the very beginning of time, when the scriptures describe the creation of everything that we see, “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” Both men and women were created in God’s own image, in His own likeness. As our Triune God is a communion of persons, by our very existence we too possess that capacity and drive to be in relationship with others and with our God.
When this passage is read, we may find ourselves getting lost in an abstract reading of the creation of humanity. Love, however, is never abstract. In order to understand the intimacy of how each of us was particularly created, we need to look at this passage from Genesis in light of a few other parts of scripture.
If we look to the first chapter of Jeremiah, we begin to see a deeper intimacy through which God sees our coming into this world:
“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,
and before you were born I consecrated you;
I appointed you a prophet to the nations.” (Jer 1:5)
While a child comes to know and reacts to his or her mother’s voice during their development, we see that before our formation in the womb began, our God knows us. The God of all that we see and do not see has intimate knowledge of me… of you… well before our tiny existence in our mother’s womb on this earth began.
With this full knowledge of who we are, our personal God continues to propel our existence forward:
“For you formed my inward parts;
you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Wonderful are your works;
my soul knows it very well.
My frame was not hidden from you,
when I was being made in secret,
intricately woven in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes saw my unformed substance;
in your book were written, every one of them,
the days that were formed for me,
when as yet there was none of them.” (Psalm 139: 13-16)
Not only does our God know us before we were in the womb, but even in the midst of our development from the point of conception, we hear the Psalmist recognizing the intimate care that our God takes in “knitting” together every part of who I am… who you are.
Our Father is clearly seen in every part of our creation - not just the abstract creation of humanity, but the particular creation of each of us. If we can see such a strong connection between a mother and the child that she bears in her womb, shouldn’t we also be able to see an even deeper intimacy between each of us and our Father in heaven?
Do we respond to the voice of our Father?
Are we moved by his voice?
While humanity may have resonated and reacted to the voice of their Father in a beautiful way before the Fall, after Genesis 3 we obviously live in a broken world that can deafen the ears of our hearts and distort His voice in such a way that it becomes unrecognizable.
Countless experiences can manipulate our hearts to the point that the voice of our Father no longer resonates within us. Abusive, negligent or absentee parents can lead us to believe that that voice of our Father is no different than the voice we hear from those that surround us in our youth - the voices that convince us that we aren’t good enough, that we are too much to handle, or that we are simply not worth it.
Not only can our Father’s voice be drowned out or distorted through the natural relationships that we have with our family or friends, we also face a supernatural threat if we listen to the voice of a false father, the father of lies (Jn 8:44). The voice of the devil may try to lull us into living a complacent and mediocre existence, convinced that his lies tell the whole story of our being. What do these lies sound like?
You are completely alone.
You may as well give up - there is no hope for you.
Keep making yourself your only priority.
Keep trying to control everything.
Never stop trying to fill yourself with pleasure after pleasure.
You are worthless.
You aren’t good enough.
You are the sum of your failures and mistakes.
These lies can play over and over again in our heads, especially when we find that we are at our lowest point. The father of lies is cunning and these phrases (and many more like it) can slowly worm their way into how we speak about ourselves or how we allow others to speak ourselves.
The distortions, noise, and wounds that can obscure the real voice of our Father are many. If we can learn to listen anew for His voice...if we can open the ears of our hearts to recognize what he is saying to each one of us specifically, then our lives will be changed forever.
How do we cut through all of the noise and distortions and learn to listen for His voice?
Know your Father
We cannot hope to hear the voice of our Father if we do not know who He is. The failures and weaknesses of those who ought to love us best can often have a distorted image of God that may look more like our earthly father rather than the Father revealed to us in scripture.
Part of recovering our ability to hear the Father’s voice is to thoroughly familiarize ourselves with who our Father has revealed himself to be. It means that we need to confront any lies we believe about our Father that we have accumulated over years of disappointment, shame, or sin.
If we find ourselves believing that the Father is anyone other than who His Son describes Him as, it is important that we reject these lies and focus on the qualities that He shares with us throughout both the Old and New Testaments.
He has shown Himself to be: loving, kind, compassionate, giver of good gifts, faithful, merciful, strong, forgiving, good, righteous, caring, sovereign, ever-present, a refuge, gracious, a healer, a helper, one who saves, and the one who makes all things new.
It is incredibly helpful to examine the image of God we have in light of how He has revealed Himself. If we find that we are carrying within ourselves anything that is contrary or distorted to how He has shown Himself to be, it can be great to reflect and meditate as to why we have an incomplete or disfigured image of the Father. In the same vein, it can be easier to shut down any lies that may come up about our true Father if we are able to immerse ourselves in the reality of who He has revealed Himself to be.
2. Live as the Father Lives
A second step of recovering our ability to hear our Father’s voice is to see what Jesus has to say on the topic. He is, after all, His Son.
Unsurprisingly, Jesus has a lot to say on the topic. On one occasion, he said:
John 8:47: “Whoever is of God hears the words of God. The reason why you do not hear them is that you are not of God.”
So, in order to hear the words of God, Christ explains that we must be “of God.” In other words, our very identity must be completely united with who our God is. This means that everything that we do, everything that we don’t do, everything that we say, and even everything that we think needs to be directed towards being “of God.” If we live in such a way that betrays the words and model given to us by Christ, it is no wonder that we have trouble hearing the words spoken to us by our Father.
In order to hear God, it is necessary to live lives that are consistent with the language that he speaks - that is, love. This means that we need to spend time learning His language. We can’t expect to have hatred in our hearts, minds, and actions and then find ourselves surprised when we are unable to hear the words of our loving God being spoken into our lives.
Rather, we are called to “keep” (Luke 11:28) the words we “hear” from Christ the good shepherd and “follow” him along the way (John 10: 27). In other words, if we find ourselves struggling to hear the voice of our Father speaking to us, it is important that we reflect on our lives and examine our hearts to see if there is anything that is not of God - not of love - and turn away from it.
3. Exist in your Unique Love
Ultimately, we are called to make a choice. Will we choose to see ourselves through the eyes of our Heavenly Father or will see ourselves through the eyes of the father of lies?
Not only our image of God, but also our image of our own self can be distorted by lies that do nothing but try to convince or mislead us into thinking that we are something other than a beloved child of God the Father.
How does our Father see you?
Does he only see your failures or weaknesses? John Paul II didn’t think so. In a homily during the 2002 World Youth Day, he said, “We are not the sum of our weaknesses and failures; we are the sum of the Father's love for us and our real capacity to become the image of his Son.” The father of lies wants nothing more than to break us down and convince us that we are our mistakes. Our true Father does not ignore our insufficiencies, but loves us even more through them.
In learning to see ourselves as our Father does, we can learn to hear his voice in new ways. Sometimes this happens through the voice of someone who genuinely cares for us and recognizes the beauty with us, even if we have a hard time doing so ourselves. Hearing someone point out what they find lovable can be jarring if we have only allowed ourselves to listen to the lies up to this point, but this can be the voice of God speaking his language of love into the midst of our brokenness and pain as He seeks to recover what was lost - our own self.
God does not love in the abstract - he loves the person. He loves you.
No one can give love like you. No one can receive love like you. Your very person is a gift to the rest of the world as it is a unique expression of our God’s love. The way that you love is unrepeatable. Don’t squander this opportunity to give and receive love in a way that is unique entirely to you.
In our journey to re-learn how to hear the voice of our Father we find that we always return to His Son. We see that throughout Jesus’ earthly ministry that he was giving a voice to his Father. As adopted sons and daughters of God the Father we have a share in this same mission.
We have the opportunity to give a voice to our Father every time we choose to reject any lies or distortions we may be tempted to speak about ourselves or those around us.
We can give a voice to our Father as we speak truth into someone’s life by recognizing how lovable they truly are.
We can give a voice to our Father by loving as only we can love.
The Father is speaking. His language of love never ceases to call out our name. Are we listening?