My sheep hear my voice, I know them, and they follow Me.  I give them eternal life, and they will never perish-ever!  No one will snatch them out of My hand.  My Father, who has given them to Me, is greater than all.  No one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand.  The Father and I are one.  John 10:27:30  HCSB

I am horrible with names.  I am pretty good with faces, but I am really good with voices.  Often times I know I have met someone as soon as I hear their voice.  There is one voice that we should all be able to recognize and that is the voice of our Lord and Savior.   The reason that it is so important that we know His voice, is that the devil will try to convince us that God is okay with our sin.  He will tell us lies. So we must be sure that we can discern the voice of God and not fall prey to the devil’s schemes.

There is a reason that God uses sheep to describe His children.  You see sheep, while they may be really cute and adorable little animals, are really dumb.  Without the shepherd, they are apt to get into serious trouble.  They need a shepherd to guide them.  They need a shepherd to keep them safe so that they don’t fall prey to predators. They are apt to fall into a pit and need the shepherd to pull them out. We are just like sheep.  Without God we are really dumb too.  We need the wisdom, guidance, and protection that only God can provide.  This is why it is so important that we recognize His voice.

The only way to truly know God’s voice is to be in a close relationship with Him.  There is so much noise in our world today.  People saying this and that. There is television, the internet, social media.  We must be able to tune all of this out and hear God’s voice.  This is the only way to truly follow Him.  We do this by turning to God, confessing our sins to Him, repenting or telling Him we are sorry and asking Him to help us not to commit these sins again.  We need to ask God to fill us with His Holy Spirit.  We need to trust in Him to lead us in the way that we should go.  Now there is one very important thing that you must understand, while you are doing all this, the devil will try to distract you.  He will try to pull you away from the Shepherd, but once you belong to God, you are His.

There is a controversial concept that says, “once saved, always saved.”  Our scripture passage today says that no one can snatch us from God’s hand when we become His sheep and He is our shepherd.  Many people question how this can be when they know people that were saved but fell out of church and seemed to stray away from God. One explanation could be that the person was never really saved, but simply made a public profession of faith for other reasons.  I can tell you that I was baptized at the age of 11, but I truly gave my life to Christ only 8 and 1/2 years ago.  I believed in God and loved Him but I was not living for Him.  I hope that I would have gone to heaven during that time, but in all honesty I am not so sure.  There were even times that the devil called me to do things and I blindly followed.  I rationalized that God loved me and wanted me to be happy and my sin would make me happy.  Boy, was I wrong.  Sin never makes us happy for very long.

Today I am asking you to be sure.  With every passing day we draw closer to the time that we will go before the Great White Throne of Judgement.  I pray that you are ready.  I pray that you have accepted Christ as your savior, that you know His voice and you follow the Good Shepherd.  None of us know when we will face our judgement day, I pray that you will be ready when the time comes.  We are going to spend eternity somewhere, the question is where will you spend it?

I sometimes wonder why I waited so long to give it all to Him.  I know that I felt that I would be giving up too much.  I was having a good time, or so I thought.  I didn’t know what a good time was until I gave my life to Christ.  Then I discovered true peace and joy.  I pray that you do the same.  Listen and be sure that it is His voice that you follow.

Have a great day!