With the door to the tomb wide open so anyone who wanted could observe the miracle in progress, John 11:43 records the Lord shouting, “Lazarus, come forth!” Then, verse 44 announces that after four days of lifelessness, the formerly deceased friend of Jesus and brother of Mary and Martha walked out of his grave. His exit was somewhat impeded by the cloth wrappings that had been used to prepare his body for burial. So, Jesus invited some in the crowd of stunned observers to participate in the miracle and said, “Loose him, and let him go.”
Come on! This is just flat out amazing! Words fail. I don’t know what else to say but, “Praise God!” It’s an astounding event in the life and ministry of Jesus – so simply described, and yet so powerfully impactful. And that impact stands on its own without requiring any commentary from me.
But there is something in this passage I’d like to highlight, and it’s this: When the Lord speaks, it will usually produce something that needs to be unwrapped.
God’s words are powerful. They create, heal, and restore. They change things in both the visible and invisible realms. Listen to what the Lord himself said about this in Isaiah 55:11:
So shall my word be that goes forth from my mouth; it shall not return to me void, but it shall accomplish what I please, and it shall prosper in the thing for which I sent it.
Consider the magnitude of the cosmos that erupted from the simple phrase, “Let there be light.”
But his words are also always densely packed with divine perspectives, insights, revelations, and instructions. Psalm 119:105 says:
Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.
So, if the full dimension of what God intends to set in motion through his words is going to be realized, we need to be more than casual observers of what they produce. We also need to become willing to engage in the process of unpacking the depth and complexity of their meaning. And that’s true whether they’re shouted into a tomb, breathed onto the pages of Scripture, or whispered into our souls.
Whether it was contained within something someone said, a moving piece of music, a Bible passage, or a dramatic sunset, most of us have had moments when we sensed the Lord communicating with us. And it’s sobering to realize those expressions from his heart are meant to both do things and reveal things. So, let’s change how we respond to them.
That means instead of just enjoying the moment and allowing the message to quickly fade from our awareness, we’ll treasure his words enough to capture them by writing down what we believe we’ve heard, telling someone else, or prayerfully acknowledging them before God. We’ll make time to carefully consider what was said, meditating on it, probing its implications, and inviting the Holy Spirit to expand and illuminate it for us. And we’ll respond to what was said with appropriate surrender, repentance, and obedience.
When we learn to value the voice of God by doing these things, we’ll find ourselves becoming more sensitive to its sound. We’ll be quicker to recognize and respond to moments of divine encounter and discover they happen more often than we once thought. More importantly, as we become committed to the discipline of unwrapping, like the bystanders Jesus invited into Lazarus’ miracle story, we’ll be better positioned to participate in the wonderous things Jesus is always doing in the lives of others and the world around us.