Since my work happened near the end of the process, I had the pleasure of seeing and experiencing the fruit of the effort that others had already put into the project.  As I read through the New Testament, I was struck by several things.  Even though my day-to-day job is to study and teach the New Testament, reading through The Voice helped bring to life the message of encouragement that pervades these writings.  Through them we don’t just hear random voices of the various human authors.  Rather, God's voice speaks through them, and it was His voice that I heard afresh when reading through these texts.  In particular, it was God's message to the different Christian communities to remain faithful no matter how hard things get that I heard.

With the waning cultural dominance of the church, the need for a contemporary expression of the church's faith as revealed in the Bible is becoming urgent.  The early church struggled to follow God in their pluralistic world, where their claims to truth were not well received.  As a result while reading through The Voice, the idea of faithfulness in the face of suffering was more pervasive than I had previously realized.  The church today is and will be increasingly facing similar issues and needs a fresh encouragement to remain faithful in the midst of social pressure.  Part of that faithfulness is the responsibility to continue to witness to the truth of the Anointed One.  As we bring the message of the good news revealed in the Bible and communicated through The Voice, the culture may reject it because of its truth claims, but at least they won’t reject it because it is communicated with archaic or merely ecclesiastical terminology.