God-Waves by John Fisher

The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge. There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard. Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world. (Psalms 19:1-4)

Wow. That’s a lot of noise. Imagine if you could hear all that speech and all those voices all the time. You would probably go nuts. As it is, people who are really tuned into God run the risk of being locked up.

Think of the traditional hymn, “This Is My Father’s World.” It has a line in it: “This is my Father’s world; He shines in all that’s fair. In the rustling grass I hear Him pass; He speaks to me everywhere.” Now think about it: this guy is either a nut case or he is so aware of God that he hears him everywhere—even in the wind that ripples through the grass.

I think a good analogy here would be the invisible presence of radio waves in the air. Imagine what we would hear if suddenly our ears were tuned into frequencies shared by AM and FM radio. Imagine the noise of hearing all those stations all at the same time. We would walk around mad, covering our ears all the time, and pleading for the noise to stop. It’s a little like this for the psalmist, David, when he tunes into God in the universe. He is deafened by the sound of God speaking in the heavens—through space and time, past stars and worlds beyond. What he’s hearing is a display of God’s creative handiwork that pours out continual truth about the presence and the nature of the God who created it. And if we could hear all that all at once, we would be overwhelmed. So we can’t. Our hearing is limited to a very narrow frequency band so as to allow us to function day by day in the world.

But that’s where worship comes in. Worship is tuning into the sound of God if even for a moment, to remind us of His presence and power. The important thing about this is that the sound, like radio waves, is always going out. It’s there all the time. We just don’t hear it because we haven’t trained our ears to hear it.

You don’t have to go anywhere to hear God today; just tune in. But beware. You might want to cover your ears, because the sound is deafening.

John Fischer is the Senior Writer for Purpose Driven Life Daily Devotionals. He resides in Southern California with his wife, Marti and son, Chandler. They also have two adult children, Christopher and Anne. John is a published author and popular speaker.