Faith | Is your voice silent? Don’t miss the moments to speak up

When each of our five children were around 10 months old, they would point with their tiny forefingers and say, “What’s that?”

Prompted by curiosity, those were some of the first words they ever put together.

Our voice is a powerful tool for connecting with others. We use our voices to express our thoughts, feelings, and ideas to one another. We can shout, “Dinner’s ready,” or whisper, “I love you.”

The truth is, everyone wants to be seen and heard, especially by family and friends. And for many of us, we want to know that our God and Creator hears us when we pray.

The Bible begins with Adam and Eve walking through a paradise in the cool of the day, talking over the delights and quandaries of the day with their Creator, thoroughly enjoying the intimacy of that moment.

In Genesis 3, however, when Adam and Eve chose the way of the serpent over the way of the Lord, their communication with God was severed. It would be 240 years and three generations before man reclaimed his voice, and began to “call upon the name of the Lord.”

When I was ten, a man I loved with all my heart had cancer of the larynx—my granddad. My family called it “cancer of the voice box,” which doctors removed. From that time on, he was silent. Although he still smiled at me and hugged me, I never heard his voice again.

The voice is a powerful and spiritual piece of equipment. It is a creative force and tool for either good or evil.

In the gospel of Mark, we read about a group of religious leaders meeting in a house of worship.

Then, Jesus walked in ...

There was a man in the synagogue that day who had a withered hand. The religious leaders intently watched Jesus to see if he would heal the man on the Sabbath “so that they might get a charge to bring against Him.”

Jesus had the man stand up in the middle of the gathering, and asked the leaders, “Is it lawful and right on the Sabbath to do good or to do evil, to save life or to take it?”

Scripture says of the religious leaders, “But they kept silent.”

Silent? Really? When I read that, I remembered my little ones. I wanted to point and say, “What’s that?”

Here was a man who needed help and healing. Jesus asked those leaders — people of faith — to respond to his question. He waited to hear their voice. But those in authority who ought to have spoken, kept their silence.

As the saying goes, you could have heard a pin drop.

Sometimes we lose our voice because of a virus. Sometimes we lose our voice because of cancer. But most of the time, we lose our voice because we choose to. We are apathetic or intimidated or afraid or self-conscious.

Do we have a voice?

Yes, we do, and we should use it to call out the name of the Lord and to do good and give life wherever we can, as often as possible. And we must do this even if we are the lone voice of one crying in the wilderness, even in the face of many counter-biblical forces.

From the beginning, men have called on the Lord to, “Deliver us from evil.” Something is triggered in the spiritual realm, activated by God’s creative power when we speak, when we use our voice as God intended to create life, make changes, cast vision and lead people.

Yes, there is a time for prudent silence. But there is also time to speak truth, to speak life into a dark situation.

God help us not to miss those moments.