Follow the Voice of the Good Shepherd

In his book Heart of the Matter, President Nelson encouraged us to hear the voice of the Lord, just as he has taught multiple times in general conference. In words like those messages, he wrote, “It takes conscious and consistent effort to fill our daily lives with His words, His teachings, His truths. What can we do so we can hear Him?” One expected answer he gave was this: “We can go to the scriptures. Daily immersion in the word of God prepares our minds and hearts to receive revelation.” Of course, it makes sense that if we want to hear and understand the voice of the Lord to us, we need to study that voice as it is found and already written down for us in the scriptures. I love this declaration from the Lord to Oliver Cowdery: “These words are not of men nor of man, but of me; wherefore, you shall testify they are of me and not of man; For it is my voice which speaketh them unto you; for they are given by my Spirit unto you, and by my power you can read them one to another; and save it were by my power you could not have them; Wherefore, you can testify that you have heard my voice, and know my words” (Doctrine and Covenants 18:34-36). One of the reasons that we read the scriptures is to try to understand His voice and feel of the power of His words so that we can testify that we have indeed heard His voice. What matters most is not so much the specific vocabulary used but rather the Giver of those words. As we read the scriptures, we don’t generally hear a physical voice that speaks to us, but we can hear with our spirits that it is indeed His familiar voice we find therein.

               My family enjoys listening for a familiar voice as we watch videos produced by the Church. A member of our stake is a principal character in many films and even is the recorded voice for some of the scriptures on the Gospel Library app. His voice is very distinctive and so we usually recognize it immediately, and I loved listening to him (when he was in our stake presidency) teach us from the scriptures. The reason was that he generally never used a physical copy of the scriptures—he has so much of the scriptures memorized that he would just start telling stories from the New Testament without reading. He could quote long passages of narrative story about Jesus without ever opening his Bible, and the effect was powerful for me—he has clearly done “the spiritual work required to experience the whisperings of the Holy Ghost” (as President Nelson encouraged) and the words of holy writ are simply a part of him. And just as we can easily pick out his voice among many others because we have heard it so frequently, we should strive to be able to recognize the voice of the Lord in the same way. In mortality the Savior put it this way: “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me: And I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand” (John 10:27-28). In other words, to be His sheep we must being to hear and heed His voice. We must learn, as Alma taught the people of Zarahemla, to “follow the voice of the good shepherd,” both recognizing His voice and following His commandments (Alma 5:57).