The Speaking Voice

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. JOHN 1:1

Tozer loved the Bible and believed it without reservation to be the inspired Word of God. But he was troubled by the way many of his fellow believers handled it. They defended it, memorised it, outlined it and argued over it. What they rarely did, he thought, was listen to it. In The Pursuit of God he gave a chapter to the matter, and its title — The Speaking Voice — captures his whole approach to Scripture. God is not a God who once spoke and then fell silent. He is a God who speaks, and the Bible is the place where His voice is still to be heard.

A God who speaks

Tozer began with creation. The world did not come into being by accident, or by a slow unfolding from some impersonal force. It was spoken into existence.

By the word of the Lord were the heavens made; and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth. PSALM 33:6

The same Word by which the worlds were made became flesh and dwelt among us. God’s speech is not only something He did; it belongs to His nature. The eternal Son is the Word of God, the perfect expression of the Father. And so, Tozer argued, it is a mistake to think of the Word of God as a record of what He said long ago, preserved like a letter in a drawer. The Word of God is alive, because God is alive, and He goes on speaking through what He has spoken.

For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any twoedged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. HEBREWS 4:12

He pointed out the tense of that verse. The Word is living and powerful — not was. It still pierces, still divides, still discerns. The believer who opens his Bible is not visiting a museum. He is entering a conversation.

Reading to hear

This had a practical consequence for the way Tozer urged his readers to approach Scripture. They were not to read it merely as a textbook, still less as a collection of proof texts for their opinions. They were to read it expecting God to speak to them personally, and to read it slowly enough to let Him.

Speak; for thy servant heareth. 1 SAMUEL 3:10

Samuel’s prayer, Tozer believed, should be the posture of every believer who opens the Bible. The question is not only what the passage means, though that must be asked and answered. It is what God is saying to me through it, now. Tozer was sure that the ordinary Christian, reading the plain text with a humble heart, could hear the voice of God there as truly as any scholar — and often more truly, because the scholar is sometimes too busy with his apparatus to listen.

In a sermon in the Ochorus library, A Call to Return to God, he developed a related thought. One of the tasks of Scripture, he said, is to find us — to show us where we actually stand before God, what is wrong with us, and also, he insisted, what is right with us. He urged his hearers to set aside a longer time than their hurried morning devotions, to lay aside their commentaries and study notes for a while, to take a plain text of Scripture and simply let it speak to them on their knees. He added that the King James Version would serve them well. The Bible, so read, becomes a mirror in which a man sees himself as God sees him.

For if any be a hearer of the word, and not a doer, he is like unto a man beholding his natural face in a glass. JAMES 1:23

In returning and rest

The same sermon took its text from the thirtieth chapter of Isaiah, where God reproves a nation that trusted in alliances and counsellors instead of in Him. Tozer drew a parallel with his own country and his own church, busy with conferences, programmes and advisers, and unwilling to be still before God. The voice of God, he suggested, is rarely heard in the middle of that noise. It is heard by those who stop and turn.

For thus saith the Lord God, the Holy One of Israel; In returning and rest shall ye be saved; in quietness and in confidence shall be your strength: and ye would not. ISAIAH 30:15

The last three words of that verse are among the saddest in Scripture. God offered rest, and they would not. Tozer believed that a great part of the church’s weakness came from exactly this refusal to be quiet long enough to hear.

The Word and the will

Hearing God’s voice, for Tozer, was never an end in itself. The voice of God always carries His will, and to hear it truly is to be faced with the demand to obey. He was blunt about the man who attends every meeting and studies every text while living in known rebellion against what God has told him to do. Such a man, he said in the same sermon, is only whistling in the dark. The Scripture is not given to satisfy curiosity but to direct life.

And thine ears shall hear a word behind thee, saying, This is the way, walk ye in it, when ye turn to the right hand, and when ye turn to the left. ISAIAH 30:21

Weighing it

This teaching is sound and much needed. One safeguard should be kept firmly in view. When Tozer spoke of the living voice of God, he meant the voice of God speaking through Scripture, not a voice speaking beside it or beyond it. Some who have taken up his language have come to treat every inward impression as a word from God, and to set their impressions above the plain sense of the text. That is the opposite of what he intended. The Spirit who speaks is the Spirit who inspired the written Word, and He does not contradict Himself.

God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son. HEBREWS 1:1–2

The Son is God’s final Word, and the Scriptures are the sure record of Him. Listen for God there, and you will not be misled.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Before you read the Bible each day this week, pray Samuel’s prayer: Speak; for thy servant heareth.

2. Set aside one longer time this month — an hour or more — to read a book of the Bible slowly on your knees, with no commentary.

3. As you read, write down one sentence each day that you believe God is saying to you. Then write down what you will do about it.

4. Read Tozer’s sermon A Call to Return to God in the Ochorus library, and ask what Scripture shows you about where you stand.

5. Is there anything God has plainly told you in His Word that you are refusing to do? Name it, and obey.

A PRAYER

Lord, You spoke and the worlds were made. You spoke in Your Son, and You speak still through Your Word.

Forgive me for reading Your Book without listening to You, for studying it without hearing You, and for hearing without obeying.

Quiet my heart. Take away the noise within and around me, and let me hear the word behind me saying, This is the way.

Speak, Lord; Your servant hears. And give me grace to do what You say. Amen.