The Spirit’s Motivating Voice

“The voice of the Lord is powerful;

the voice of the Lord is full of majesty.”

~Psalm 29:4 (NRSV)

The Spiritual Voice of the Lord: Otherwise a force that convicts us to act; any action besides the action convicted by the Spirit is probably forlorn because willpower without God’s Power promises much but in the end delivers little.

The Spirit’s motivating Voice is generally inaudible other than what might be heard as a canticle to our hearts.

All change for transformation’s sake is at the behest of this Voice, for, where the Voice may not be heard there is precious little life-engendering Power to sustain change. This is effort in trying; even trying too hard—and frustration and/or fatigue are typically the results.

Temptations to Putting The Cart Before The Horse

We all do it; take on some significant challenge, perhaps the adoption of a new habit or the breaking of an old one, and we leave Divine Power—the only way there—behind.

Maybe for every time we have heard the Voice and have prayed obediently for Divine help, and hence have then been given Power to achieve our goal, we have had numerous other occasions where we heard the voice of the flesh calling us to a goal empowered to no real power other than that which we can muster of ourselves (without God).

Remember that the Voice is connected with conviction. When we are convicted to do something, we can do no other thing but succeed.

Temptations to doing things under our own steam, however well-intentioned they are, have no true lasting conviction about them—this explains why there have been innumerable times of failure to change. And on the few times we have changed, we acceded to the Spirit’s Voice. Change was easy because conviction was there.

Truly Listening For The Voice

One of the troubles we have is we have grown accustomed to hearing the voices—the incessant voices of the flesh and the world, and the infrequent Voice of the Spirit. The True Voice is heard seldom compared with other noisy voices. The True Voice invokes within us the requirement for patience to wait on it and patience in these matters is difficult because it wrangles with the fleshly desire to have what we want when we want it.

The easy portion, however, is acting on the call of the Voice. It both convicts and empowers.

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Living the best life requires Power; to avail ourselves to conviction by the Holy Spirit. No change, on a personal level, can be sustainably maintained without collusion with the Spirit’s motivating Voice. Only that Voice is the voice of conviction; to do, miraculously it seems, what could never be done before.

© 2012 S. J. Wickham.