Whisper: How to Hear the Voice of God

by Mark Batterson

The best way to get people to listen to us is for us to listen to God.

If you aren’t willing to listen to everything God has to say, you eventually won’t hear anything He has to say. If you want to hear His comforting voice, you have to listen to His convicting voice.

On the morning of August 27, 1883, ranchers in Alice Springs, Australia, heard what sounded like gunshots.1 The same mysterious sound was reported in fifty geographical locations spanning one-thirteenth of the globe. What those Aussies heard was the eruption of a volcano on the remote Indonesian island of Krakatoa 2,233 miles away! That volcanic eruption, possibly the loudest sound ever measured, was so loud that the 310-decibel sound waves circumnavigated the globe at least four times. It generated three-thousand-foot tidal waves, threw rocks a distance of thirty-four miles, and cracked one-foot-thick concrete three hundred miles away!2 If you were to drill a hole directly through the center of the earth, opposite of Krakatoa you would find Colombia, South America. Although the sound of the eruption wasn’t audible in Colombia, there was a measurable spike in atmospheric pressure because of infrasonic sound waves that caused the air to tense. The sound may not have been heard, but it was felt, all the way around the world. According to science journalist and New York Times columnist Maggie Koerth-Baker, “Just because you can’t hear a sound doesn’t mean it isn’t there.”3 At low levels sound is imperceptible. At high levels it’s unignorable. If sound exceeds 110 decibels, we experience a change in blood pressure. At 141 decibels we become nauseous. At 145 decibels our vision blurs because our eyeballs vibrate. At 195 decibels our eardrums are in danger of rupturing. And deat...

“The voice of the Spirit is as gentle as a zephyr,” said Oswald Chambers. “So gentle that unless you are living in perfect communion with God, you never hear it.”

Chambers continued, “The checks of the Spirit come in the most extraordinarily gentle ways, and if you are not sensitive enough to detect His voice you will quench it, and your personal spiritual life will be impaired. His checks always come as a still small voice, so small that no one but the saint notices them.”

Those who dance are thought mad by those who hear not the music. That old adage is certainly true of those who walk to the beat of God’s drum. When you take your cues from the Holy Spirit, you’ll do some things that will make people think you’re crazy. So be it. Obey the whisper and see what God does.

Nothing has the potential to change your life like the whisper of God. Nothing will determine your destiny more than your ability to hear His still small voice.

For the past thirty-plus years, an acoustic ecologist named Gordon Hempton has compiled what he calls “The List of the Last Great Quiet Places.” It consists of places with at least fifteen minutes of uninterrupted quiet during daylight hours. At last count there were only twelve quiet places in the entire United States!16 And we wonder why the soul suffers. As Hempton noted, “Quiet is a think tank of the soul.”17 Simply put, God often speaks loudest when we’re quietest.

Seventeenth-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal once observed, “The sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.”18

In a study of elementary-age students at a grade school in Manhattan, psychologist Arlene Bronzaft found that children assigned to classrooms on the side of the school facing the elevated train tracks were eleven months behind their counterparts on the quieter side of the building. After New York City Transit installed noise-abatement equipment on the tracks, a follow-up study found no difference between the groups.

The quietest room in the world is the anechoic chamber at Orfield Laboratories in Minneapolis. One-foot-thick concrete walls and three-foot-thick fiberglass acoustic wedges absorb 99.99 percent of sound. Background noise measures −9.4 decibels.24 All you hear in an anechoic chamber is the sound of your heart beating, blood circulating, and lungs breathing. That’s the sound of silence, and it reminds us that it’s in God that “we live and move and have our being.”25

According to interruption science, we’re interrupted every three minutes.31 And the very fact that we have a field of science dedicated to interruption is evidence of how bad it’s gotten.

You are on a planet that is spinning around its axis at a speed of approximately 1,000 miles per hour. And you don’t even get a little bit dizzy! Plus, planet Earth is speeding through space at approximately 67,000 miles per hour. So even on a day when you feel as if you didn’t get much done, you traveled 1,608,000,000 miles through space!

In order to fully appreciate the power of God’s voice, we have to go all the way back to the beginning. He speaks the universe into existence with, count them, four words: God said, “Let there be light.”1 Here’s a paraphrase: Let there be electromagnetic radiation with varying wavelengths traveling at 186,282 miles per second. Let there be radio waves, microwaves, and X-rays. Let there be photosynthesis and fiber optics. Let there be LASIK surgery, satellite communication, and suntans. Oh, and let there be rainbows after rainstorms. “Let there be light.” These are God’s first recorded words. This is God’s first recorded miracle.

Light is the source of vision; without it we can’t see a thing. Light is the key to technology; it’s how we can talk to someone halfway around the world without so much as a second’s delay because light can circle the globe seven and a half times a second.2 Light is the first link in the food chain; no photosynthesis equals no food. Light is the basis of health; the absence of light causes everything from vitamin D deficiency to depression. Light is the origin of energy; in Einstein’s equation E = MC2, energy (E) is defined as mass (M) times the speed of light (C) squared. The speed of light is the constant. And light is the measuring stick for space-time; a meter is defined as the distance traveled by light in a vacuum during a time interval of 1/299,792,458 of a second. Light is the alpha and omega of everything, and that includes you.3

Did you know that embryologists have recently captured the moment of conception via fluorescence microscopy? What they discovered is that at the exact moment a sperm penetrates an egg, the egg releases billions of zinc atoms that emit light.4 Sparks fly, literally! That m...

On January 1, 1925, Edwin Hubble gave a presentation to the American Astronomical Society that proved to be a cosmological paradigm shift.5 At the time, the prevailing opinion was that the Milky Way galaxy might be the sum total of the cosmos. Hubble, a pioneer in extragalactic astronomy, argued otherwise. His key piece of evidence was the degree of redshift observed in light coming from distant stars that increased in proportion to their distance from planet Earth. In one fell swoop the size of the known universe was increased by a factor of one hundred thousand. Even more significant was this simple fact: the universe is still expanding. Nearly a century later the Hubble telescope has spied an estimated two hundred billion galaxies, and recent research indicates that this estimate may be at least ten times too low.6

How did God create? With His voice! The universe is His way of saying, “Look at what I can do with four words.” The voice that spoke the universe into existence is the same voice that parted the Red Sea and made the sun stand still. His voice can heal a withered hand or wither a barren fig tree. His voice can turn water into wine, install synaptic connections between the optic nerve and visual cortex in a blind man’s brain, and resurrect a man four days dead.8 There is nothing God’s voice cannot say, cannot do. And, frankly, He can do it however He pleases! He can speak through burning bushes, Balaam’s donkey, or Bethlehem’s star. His voice can write on palace walls or shut the mouths of lions. It can quench the flames of a fiery furnace or stop a storm on the Sea of Galilee.9

According to rabbinic tradition, when God spoke to the Israelites at Mount Sinai, they were so scared that they felt as though their souls left them.

The famed composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein believed that “the best translation of the Hebrew in Genesis 1 was not ‘and God said’ but ‘and God sang.’ ”16 Although there might be a musical prejudice at play, I quite like his interpretation. Creation is God’s symphony, and science provides plenty of corroborating evidence.

Did you know that the electron shell of the carbon atom produces the same harmonic scale as the Gregorian chant?17 Makes you go hmmm. According to the science of bioacoustics, millions of songs are being sung all the time. Of course, the vast majority of those songs are infrasonic and ultrasonic. “If we had better hearing,” said physician and researcher Lewis Thomas, “and could discern the descants of sea birds, the rhythmic timpani of schools of mollusks, or even the distant harmonics of midges hanging over meadows in the sun, the combined sound might lift us off our feet.”18 Juxtapose that with this. Then I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea. They sang: “Blessing and honor and glory and power belong to the one sitting on the throne and to the Lamb forever and ever.”19

One footnote. Remember Dr. Alfred Tomatis? He said, “The ear has a poor physiological response to pure sounds.” Instead, “It loves complexity.” What kind of complexity? “In order for the ear to respond tangibly, a minimum of three frequencies must be put into simultaneous play.”20

Scientifically speaking, the human voice is made up of sound waves traveling through space at 1,125 feet per second. The average male speaks at a frequency of 100 hertz, while the average female speaks in a higher-pitched voice, around 150 hertz. There are the Barry Whites and Céline Dions, who push vocal boundaries, but our vocal range is between 55 and 880 hertz. We also have a range of hearing, and it’s limited to sound waves between 20 and 20,000 hertz. Anything below 20 hertz is infrasonic. Anything above 20,000 hertz is ultrasonic.22 And it’s when we get outside our range of hearing that the miracle of sound is really revealed.

Below our range of hearing, infrasound has the capacity to cause headaches and earthquakes. According to zoologists, using infrasound is the way elephants predict changes in weather. It also helps birds navigate as they migrate. And infrasound can also be used to locate underground oil or predict volcanic eruptions. Above our range of hearing, ultrasound has the capacity to kill insects, track submarines, break glass, perform noninvasive surgery, topple buildings, clean jewelry, catalyze chemical reactions, heal damaged tissues, pasteurize milk, break up kidney stones, drill through steel, and give you a glimpse of your unborn baby via sonogram.

“How much happier you would be,” said G. K. Chesterton, “how much more of you there would be, if the hammer of a higher God could smash your small cosmos!”24

God’s love is meteoric, his loyalty astronomic, His purpose titanic, his verdicts oceanic. Yet in his largeness nothing gets lost.25

God is great not just because nothing is too big; God is great because nothing is too small. God doesn’t just know you by name; He has a unique name for you.

The twenty-ninth psalm is a powerful yet poetic depiction of God’s outside voice. I often think of that psalm during thunderstorms because in it the voice of the Lord is depicted as peals of thunder and flashes of lightning. Then there is this statement, which seems to be an understatement: “The voice of the LORD is powerful.”27 One translation says, “The voice of the Lord is fitted to the strength.”28 In other words, it is custom fitted to the unique strength of each and every person. Translation: God speaks your language!

There is a theory in organizational development called appreciative inquiry that I subscribe to as a leader and a parent. Instead of exclusively focusing on what’s wrong and trying to fix it, you identify what’s right and try to replicate it. Appreciative inquiry is playing to people’s strengths. It’s catching people doing things right. It’s celebrating what you want to see more of. And it’s bragging about people behind their backs.

Did you know that citizens of different countries actually hear differently? It’s called a basic-frequency band. The French ear, for example, hears best between 1,000 and 2,000 hertz. The British bandwidth is much larger, between 2,000 and 12,000 hertz. And the American ear hears between 750 and 3,000 hertz.31

In his book A Mile Wide, Brandon Hatmaker shares the story of his first trip to Ethiopia, when he went to work with his friend Steve Fitch, the founder of Eden Projects. Deforestation has devastated parts of Ethiopia as generation after generation has stripped the forests bare, leaving the land barren. Eden is a reforestation effort, with a vision to plant a hundred million trees. By the time Brandon boarded the plane, he was having second thoughts about the trip. He had a fear of flying, he was leaving his family behind, and he wondered what difference his going would make. Brandon was feeling bad about his attitude, so he closed his eyes and prayed, “God, I’m sorry. I’m trying, but I just don’t get it. I don’t want to be on this plane. I feel like I’m wasting time and money. If this is important to you, will you please overcome my ignorance, doubt, and blindness? Will you connect the dots and show me what I’m missing? Amen.”32 No sooner had Brandon opened his eyes than the thirtysomething Ethiopian man sitting next to him asked why he was going to Ethiopia. Brandon could have given a few different answers, ranging from community development to ministry. For some reason he simply said he was going to plant trees. That’s when the elderly woman sitting next to the Ethiopian man asked him a question in Amharic. When he responded in Amharic, she literally began to wail. In fact, she stood up and starting waving her hands in the air like she really did care. “What’s going on?”...

A. W. Tozer pictured paniym this way: “God is above, but He’s not pushed up. He’s beneath, but He’s not pressed down. He’s outside, but He’s not excluded. He’s inside, but He’s not confined. God is above all things presiding, beneath all things sustaining, outside of all things embracing and inside of all things filling.”36

Some Hebrew scholars believe that the name of God, Yahweh—or without the vowels, YHWH—is synonymous with the sound of a breath. On one hand, the name is too sacred to pronounce. On the other hand, it’s whispered with each and every breath we take. It’s our first word, our last word, and every word in between. God is as close as the breath we breathe.

Catholic priest Desiderius Erasmus coined the Latin phrase vocatus atque non vocatus, Deus aderit. Translation: “Bidden or not bidden, God is here.” The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung engraved those words above the door of his home.40 Not unlike the Jewish custom of engraving the words of the Shema on the doorposts of one’s home, that simple statement served as a constant reminder of God’s presence: omnipresence.

In 1940 Dr. J. Edwin Orr took a group of Wheaton College students to study abroad in England. One of their stops included the Epworth Rectory. The rectory now serves as a Methodist museum, but it was the home of John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement. In one of the bedrooms, there are two impressions where it is believed that John Wesley regularly knelt in prayer. As the students were getting back on the bus, Dr. Orr noticed that one student was missing. Going back upstairs, Dr. Orr found a young Billy Graham kneeling in those kneeholes and praying, “O Lord, do it again!”21

When Jesus declared, “Whoever has ears, let them hear,” the Jewish ear would have heard hints of Psalm 40:6: “My ears you have opened.” The Hebrew word for “opened” is archaeological, meaning “to excavate” or “dig through dense material.” I believe the way we do that is by listening with our inner ears. But the word for “opened” can also be translated “to pierce,” which has led many Bible scholars to believe that David was tipping his hat to an ancient ritual outlined at Mount Sinai. After serving a six-year term, a Hebrew servant was set free in the seventh year.28 However, if a servant loved his master so much that he did not want to opt out of his servanthood, he was given the option of pledging allegiance to his master for a lifetime. How? By a sacred ritual that involved a pierced ear: “He shall take him to the door or the doorpost and pierce his ear with an awl. Then he will be his servant for life.”29

“Tell me to what you pay attention,” said the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, “and I will tell you who are you.”31 You will eventually be shaped in the image of the loudest voice in your life—the voice you listen to most.

More than three decades ago, a Harvard professor named Dr. Howard Gardner wrote a groundbreaking book called Frames of Mind.

If we don’t listen to everything God has to say, we eventually won’t hear anything He has to say. And

On April 14, 1755, General Edward Braddock sailed up the Potomac River to Georgetown, a sleepy little town on the banks of the river. The British army anchored long enough to pick up a new recruit, a twenty-three-year-old Virginia planter named George Washington. Washington served as Braddock’s aide-de-camp during the ill-fated Battle of the Monongahela, and it’s a miracle he survived. Two horses were shot out from under him, and four musket balls passed through his coat. Washington didn’t just hear musket balls whistling past his ears; he heard the still small voice whispering. “Death was leveling my Companions on every side of me,” wrote Washington in a letter to his brother. “But, by the All-powerful Dispensations of Providence, I have been protected.”1 Now let’s go back to the place where Braddock anchored his ship. In the city named after Washington, just past the place where Constitution Avenue turns into the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge, there is a nondescript stone well with a small historical marker beside it. There is a manhole cover on top of it and a ladder inside of it. Sixteen feet below the surface is a rock: Braddock’s Rock. It marks the place where General Braddock first landed, and it’s the oldest landmark in the nation’s capital. According to legend some of that rock was used as foundation stone for the White House and Capitol. But the true significance of that stone is that it served as the starting point for the earliest surveys of Washington, DC. On old ...

Grace means I’ll love you no matter what. Truth means I’ll be honest with you no matter what.

I have a twenty-five-year addiction that started with the eight-hundred-page biography of Albert Einstein I read in college.

Around that time I heard that the average author invests approximately two years of life experience into every book he or she writes, so I figured I was gaining two years of life experience with every book I read. In my twenties I averaged reading more than two hundred books a year, so I was gaining four hundred years of life experience each year! To date, I’ve read at least thirty-five hundred books, so I’m at least seven thousand years old in book years!

According to rabbinic tradition, every word of Scripture has seventy faces and six hundred thousand meanings.7 In other words, it’s kaleidoscopic. No matter how many times we read the Bible, it never gets old, because it’s timeless and timely.

Charles Spurgeon said: “A Bible that’s falling apart usually belongs to someone who isn’t.”9

Theologian J. I. Packer went so far as to say, “Every Christian worth his salt ought to read the Bible from cover to cover every year.”

the goal isn’t getting through the Bible; the goal is getting the Bible through us.

If we don’t rightly divide the Word of God, we divide the body of Christ. And that’s the opposite of holiness, which means “wholeness.”

I have a little formula that I share quite frequently: the Holy Spirit + caffeine = awesome.

C. S. Lewis said: “Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable. How many hours are there in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask—half our great theological and metaphysical problems—are like that.”