Your Origin And Destiny

There are stories and testimonies of people hearing the audible voice of God in situations where on reflection they know no other voice in our world would have achieved the same impact or result.

This has been a definite spoken voice with clear words, inside or outside themselves, on occasion heard by others also.

It seems uncommon to hear God’s voice more than once or twice in a lifetime.

I have for years been collecting reliable descriptions of God speaking audibly to someone on Earth, to learn more about him.

One incident was written out for me by David Craig, an Australian I met soon after I arrived in this country in the mid-1980s.

As a young man, David became an alcoholic who was seldom sober. Unable to beat his addiction, and in a drunken stupor, he decided to end his miserable life. He swallowed handfuls of pills and lay down on a rock, expecting the overdosing to kill him, or that once comatose he would be drowned by the incoming tide.

Later that night, David found himself floating in the swollen waters at the mouth of the Johnstone River in Queensland, Australia. The cool water helped revive him and he remembered that he had come there, to Flying Fish Point, specifically to commit suicide. The pills had drifted him into unconsciousness as he had planned. However, the tide must have risen such that it floated him out into the estuary.

Now that David had sobered up and the salt water had made him vomit up most of the overdose of pills, he no longer wanted to die! He struck out towards the lights blinking across the water through the darkness and drizzle.

No sooner had David struggled up the shore than he heard an authoritative voice say to him:

“David, I have more for you to do than this.”

David turned around slowly and looked for the speaker, but there was no one to be seen. He was shocked. The voice had seemed to have come from all around him, from the very air. He kept peering, but it was a rainy night and people had wisely stayed indoors.

“David, I have more for you to do than this.”

Those words kept reverberating inside his mind. A deep and unexplored part of David, a part ignored since childhood, told him it must be God who had spoken; but why? David had become an atheist who had spent hours in pubs arguing against the existence of God, so now he was particularly confused. He decided to stagger home and try to think it through later.

Years have passed since I first interviewed David in Brisbane in the 1980s, and he is no longer a hopeless and suicidal alcoholic. As a direct result of God speaking to him, David sought and found Christ as his personal Saviour and Lord. Jesus subsequently graciously helped him beat his addiction to alcohol.

David visited me at home in Toowoomba some years after my initial interviews with him. When I opened the door to see who had knocked, I did not recognise him at first—he looked so different—happy and healthy. But there was more to the change in his looks than the fresh, healthy glow. When I discussed this with David later, he described a miracle healing he had had from incurable Parkinson’s disease subsequent to my first meeting him. This healing had contributed to the change in his looks because Parkinson’s had previously removed expression from his face.

As we spoke, I could hardly believe the positive changes I saw in David—physically, emotionally, socially and spiritually. God had continued to intervene creatively in his life on each of these levels. At that time, David was serving God as an Anglican priest, and continued to do so in various positions and countries before retiring recently in Australia. Although officially retired, he remains very active in his Christian service.

What important lessons might we glean about God from what he said aloud to David? That is our focus. God’s precise wording was: “David, I have more for you to do than this.”

*He used David’s name, so knew him personally, despite David being a vocal atheist and an alcoholic. During dark times, we may suppose that our sins or rejection of God to have permanently spoilt our chances of a close relationship with him, but don’t you believe it! That’s a lie!

*God’s words to David suggest that he has a worthwhile purpose for even the most desperate and lost person; furthermore, suicide is absolutely not part of that plan.

All individual lives, until they have run their God-ordained course, are consistently shown by him to have a meaningful future and a deepening purpose to fulfil.

You and I are no exceptions; we matter to God, who loves us as much as he loves David.