He knew you first
A verse I had carried the wrong way round for thirty years, and a fisherman called out of his boat by Someone who already knew him. On where hearing God actually rests.
Not long ago I was checking the Scripture quotations in a manuscript. It is slow work. You keep the Bible open beside the page and compare each verse, and for an hour nothing happens. Then I came to John 10:27, and the words on my page did not match the words in the book.
I assumed the page was right and the book was wrong. That verse has been mine for thirty years. I have preached it. I have quoted it to people I was praying with. So I turned to the chapter and read it with my own eyes.
My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me.
John 10:27 RSVCE
For thirty years I had said "and they know me". I said it with warmth, in the same breath as the rest, and nobody once stopped me. It sounds right. It even sounds humble. I know my Shepherd, and so I follow Him.
I stayed with that for a long time. A slip of memory would have been easy to forgive. This was more than that. I had turned the verse round because that is how I secretly believed faith works. I must know God well enough. I must reach some level of prayer or holiness or clarity. Then I qualify to follow Him. And when I cannot hear Him, the fault must be a gap in my knowing, so the answer is to try harder.
The verse runs the other way. Before one word is said about following, the sheep are known. The clause I kept turning round sits between the hearing and the following, and it belongs to Him.
The knowing in this relationship began on His side.
At the gate of the fold
Jesus said this to people who had watched shepherds all their lives. In the villages He knew, several flocks spent the night in one walled pen. Three or four flocks mixed together in the dark, with one man asleep across the opening. In the morning each shepherd stood at the gate and called. His own sheep separated themselves out of the crowd and came to him. Nobody sorted them. The voice did.
How did they come to know it? They had lived with him. His voice at the water in the morning, on the road at noon, at the gate at dusk. The knowing grew the way you come to know the footsteps of someone in your own house. You never studied those footsteps. You lived with the person, and one day you could tell them from every other step on the stairs.
The man in the boat
Then He did it with a man. He walked along the shore and saw two brothers casting a net, and He told them to come after Him. They left the nets. Peter did not know Jesus that morning, or not much. He had heard of Him. He had not spent years learning that voice.
But Jesus knew Peter. He knew exactly who stood in that boat: a quick tongue on a large heart. The boast at supper about dying for Him was already known, and so was the charcoal fire in the courtyard a few hours later, where the same mouth would swear it had never met Him. So was the second charcoal fire, on a beach after the resurrection, with three questions asked beside it. All of that was inside the call. The call carried His knowledge of the man, and that is what gave it the strength to lift him out of a boat.
That is where it begins with you as well. He knows your name and your history. He knows the particular shape of your hoping and your fearing, and the things you hope nobody ever finds out. None of it has made Him withdraw the call. He is still at the gate of the pen, calling you out by name, and He was doing it before you had discerned anything at all.
I want you to take this into every question you bring Him about love or about a decision. Whether this is the person, or whether you will ever be free of the thing you keep confessing. Every question like that is a question about hearing His voice, and hearing His voice rests on His knowledge of you long before it rests on your knowledge of Him. With the order backwards, my own faith kept turning into a performance, an exam I was always about to fail. With the order the right way round, it is a friendship, and a friendship can carry a bad day.
Thirty years of walking with Him, and I still mishear Him. Some days I talk over Him. What changed when I read that verse properly is where I stand after I have strayed rather than how often I stray. A sheep that mishears is not put out of the flock for it. The shepherd goes after it, because he knew that one by name before it wandered.
So I have no method to hand you, and I do not think He hands out one either. He gave us a shepherd rather than an examiner. An examiner's voice has to be answered correctly the first time, with the clock running. A shepherd's voice only has to be followed, and following leaves room for stumbling and for being carried. The sheep in that village pen were never trained. They came out to one voice in the morning because they had spent every ordinary day beside the man it belonged to. They learned the voice by living with the shepherd. It is the same with His sheep. He knew them first, and they come to know Him on the way.