The Tremendous Value of Listening to God’s Word Read Aloud

The Significance of Hearing God’s Word

A week ago I was struggling to sleep. My mind was filled with so many things. I turned the light on, trying not to wake up my husband. I was too tired to read, but what I did was turn on an audio Bible of 1 Thessalonians—because I’ve started studying that in the last couple of weeks—and just let the words speak over me as I lay in my bed. And it brought such a sense of calm and refocus. One particular verse that stood out to me described the importance of what it means to live a godly life, “to aspire to live quietly, and to mind your own affairs,” diligently working at what the Lord has given you to do (1 Thess. 4:11).

It just helped realign all of the busyness in my head and to think, Kristyn, focus on the things that you must do, the things that the Lord has called you to do. It spoke to me, it preached to me, and it was powerful in the sense that somebody was speaking it over me. In these last few weeks I’ve been doing so much, and this ministered to me personally and it didn’t even require me to seek it out or to put forth much energy. To have God’s word wash over me and comfort me—this was a significant part of my week last week.

We all love to hear a story being told. My four little girls are utterly engaged whenever I tell them a good story. They like to hear the sound of my voice telling it. My older two are starting to read for themselves, but they still want me to read to them. There’s something about that experience. The Bible is full of lots of different types of literature, but there is a massive portion of it which involves the telling of a story—the first few books in the Bible and the Gospels for instance—and I think hearing it read out loud has a wonderful value and significance in the life of a person and of the whole family.

I think there’s tremendous value in hearing God’s word read out loud simply because for many generations it was the only way people heard it. They heard it read in the home or in church or in public spaces. There were so many generations during which people just could not read, and so it was always an audible thing. There’s something very powerful about Scripture being read. I like to read, but I find that I can concentrate on it much better when I personally read it out loud or when I hear it being read to me. I love to open up the Bible and hear it being read and follow along at the same time. It helps with concentration, it helps keep you engaged in the text, and I think—in the book of Psalms for example, which has this great lyrical quality—it’s hard to capture that when it’s read silently and you can’t actually hear it. These were songs that were to be sung by lots of people, so I think it’s important to engage with the whole essence of what the Psalms were meant to be.

We live in a time where there are so many conversations, so many opinions, so many thoughts on everything, and social media has provided so many different platforms to express these conversations. It can be an awful lot of noise. The importance of making God’s voice the leading voice, the biggest voice, the greatest voice for your whole life has never been more significant.

I always take any opportunity to tell young people to be utilizing and filling yourselves with the Scriptures—putting in deposit after deposit because you will need them. You don’t wake up one morning as somebody well-versed in the Scriptures and as a godly man or woman of God. That does not just happen overnight. It’s a life journey involving very basic things: reading and listening to the Bible, praying, being in Christian community. Those are the important things that are going to not just keep us on the right path but make us so incredibly fruitful in God’s kingdom.

Understand what it means to pass on the word of God to the next generation. We are caretakers of it and are committed to reading it, seeing its fruit in our own lives, and being faithful, as Psalm 78 says, to tell “the coming generation the glorious deeds of the Lord, and his might, and the wonders that he has done.”

I think an audio Bible is another resource that can speak into this particular time—the timeless word of God offered to whoever would listen to it. For moms like me or others who find it very difficult to find the time to sit and read very often, this is a way they can listen to God’s word while they’re folding laundry, while they’re putting babies to sleep, while they’re cooking dinner—it provides another way for people to be able to do that.

One of the greatest apologetics and defenses of the Christian faith is the Bible itself, how extensive it is, how it was written over such a wide span of time and geography and authorship and yet holds together in an incredible way. It is a beautiful tapestry of revelation that speaks to so much of the human experience and gives us such a rich, sweeping understanding of who God is.

God’s people should take every opportunity to listen to, engage, enjoy, and be comforted and challenged by the timeless word of God—the immovable foundation that it is for everything that we do.

This article is adapted from an interview with Kristyn Getty, who recorded the Bible for the ESV Audio Bible, Read by Kristyn Getty.