Voices

"USE YOUR OUTSIDE VOICE," the billboard read as we traveled along the interstate highway on our way home from Texas. Clever, I thought, (even though I wished the kiddos traveling with us would use their inside voices). By appealing to advertisers to take advantage of the millions of people passing daily or weekly and reading a commercial message, the billboard offered a unique avenue of communication.

Use your outside voice. Isn't that what John the Baptist did in the days before modern communication? In his raiment of camel's hair, the rugged outdoorsman announced himself as "The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight," Matthew 3:3. In verse 2, he preached, "Repent ye: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand."

Jesus had grown up by then and was ready to accomplish His mission. But when He was born, thirty years earlier, the angels had heralded his birth with their "outside voices" to shepherds on a Judean hillside. We know it as the Christmas story as recorded in Luke 2:1-20. First, the angel of the Lord appeared to them, and to reassure them in their fright, said, "Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people." Then he told them of Jesus' birth in the city of David and gave them the sign of finding the child wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger.

"And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace, good will toward men." You can be sure they were using their outside voices!

Several times during Jesus' ministry, God affirmed His Son in His outside voice: First, when Jesus came up from baptism, God spoke from a cloud saying, "Thou art my beloved son; in thee I am well pleased." And again on the Mount of Transfiguration, God re-emphasized in His outside voice, "This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased, hear ye him," Matthew 17:5.

Jesus used his outside voice when He stilled the waters, cast out demons, called forth Lazarus, and countless other times. Sometimes he magnified his voice by using the natural amplification of the lakes and mountains when he taught. Finally, He used his outside voice when he cried out from the cross, saying, "It is finished," completing the work of our salvation.

Once more His outside voice will be heard when, as in I Thessalonians 4:16, it says, "For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the arch-angel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first." And if we are alive and have heard the shout, the next verse promises, "Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord." One outside Voice you don't want to miss!