***Listen To Audio Version: There is a Sound Audio 591
Today’s Devotional Scripture: 7 (For we walk by faith, not by sight:)
- 2 Corinthians 5:7 KJV
27 My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me:
- John 10:27 KJV
41 And Elijah said unto Ahab, Get thee up, eat and drink; for there is a sound of abundance of rain. - 1 Kings 18:41 KJV
17 So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.
- Romans 10:17 KJV
The Message For Today (July 14, 2026):
***Listen To Audio Version: There is a Sound Audio 591
There Is a Sound of Abundance of Rain
I was writing this week and was stumped by a rule we learned in elementary. Was it “a L-shape”, or “an L-shape”? I had forgotten the rule, and honestly, “a L-shape” did not sound right in my mouth, even though “L” is a consonant, and I was sure the rule was that consonants take the letter a. My ear kept flinching at what my head said was correct. So I did what you do when you cannot remember: I researched it online. And what I found preached to me.
There is a rule in the English language that no one teaches you to feel. They teach you to see it. A or an. Most of us think it depends on the letter. It does not. It depends on the sound. “L” looks like a consonant; it is spelled like one. But say it out loud: “ell.” It opens with a vowel sound. So it is “an L-shape”, never “a L-shape”.
Say the wrong one and your mouth stumbles; there is a catch you cannot explain. Say it right, and it glides.
My ear had been right the whole time. The spelling lied; the sound told the truth.
Isn’t that our struggle?
We keep trying to discern God by spelling: by reading the circumstance, the label the doctor gave it, the name the enemy called it, the way it all looks on paper. We sound our lives out by sight. But sight only ever reports the surface; it reads the letters and calls it the truth. “For we walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Corinthians 5:7 KJV).
The Shepherd never said, “My sheep read the room.” He said, “My sheep hear my voice.” He never told them to watch, to scan the field, or to measure the threat. He told them to listen. Real sheep can barely see. But they can hear, oh so well, the voice of their shepherd in the dark. Hear. (John 10:27). Not squint. Not analyze letters. Hear.
I had already written this word about sound over sight before I ever walked into church service on Sunday. And when I got there, a visiting pastor I had never met, a woman I had never once heard preach, stood up, opened her Bible, and preached from 1 Kings 18.
She said, “RAIN, Release All I Need.” She said: “There is a sound… a sound… a sound… a sound of an abundance of rain.” She said it four times, the way you say a thing you never want a people to forget. And then she said, “Go look again.”
I had not sent in my devotional for the week just yet. God sent a woman I had never met to preach the very word already in my mouth, so that “in the mouth of two or three witnesses” the word would be established (2 Corinthians 13:1). That is not a coincidence. That is confirmation.
The woman preached the weight of the message: For three and a half years, not a drop. The brooks dried up, the ground cracked open, and heaven had been shut like a door. And into that drought, Elijah says the strangest thing a man can say under a cloudless sky: “Get thee up, eat and drink; for there is a SOUND of abundance of rain (1 Kings 18:41 KJV).
There is a sound of it. Not a cloud. Not a raindrop. Not even a shadow on the horizon. A sound. Elijah heard the rain before a single soul saw it, and he announced the abundance while the sky was still blue. Because “faith cometh by hearing” (Romans 10:17 KJV).
Before your answer ever shows up where your eyes can find it, it makes a sound your spirit can hear. Faith is “the evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1 KJV) and sometimes the first evidence God hands you is not something you can see at all. It is something you can hear.
But hearing the sound was not the end of Elijah’s work; it was the beginning of his travail. He climbed to the top of Carmel, bowed himself to the ground, put his face between his knees, and sent his servant looking toward the sea. “There is nothing,” the servant said.
Elijah said the words I want you to carry out of here today: Go again seven times. Six times, nothing. Six times, an empty horizon; and yet, six times Elijah did not cancel what he had already HEARD.
On the seventh time, the servant said: “There ariseth a little cloud out of the sea, like a man’s hand.” Can you imagine the excitement, not Elijah’s, but the servant’s, and the rising of his own faith in that very moment? That now he had seen the very blueprint of faith. He had watched a man announce rain over a blue sky, hold that word through six empty reports, and send him back a seventh time, and there it finally was: proof in the shape of a man’s hand.
And that is the lesson in it. A hand-shaped cloud, but Elijah knew it was the front edge of a great rain. Do not despise the day of small things (Zechariah 4:10). Do not despise the small cloud, or you will miss the downpour it was sent to announce.
When God is about to send the rain, He starts multiplying the sound. And then He did more than multiply it. He sent the rain. About seven hours after we left the church house, the sky that had been clear that morning broke open. A real downpour; flash flooding in the streets, water rising where dry ground had been just hours before.
He said it in my writing, He confirmed it through the mouth of a visiting pastor, and before the day was out, He sent the very thing He had been preaching: “a great rain” (1 Kings 18:45). The sound in the morning had become a downpour by night.
So whatever you have been believing for, the healing, the increase, the enlarged territory, the spouse, the child, the open door, or the prodigal coming home, stop reading it by sight. Stop sounding it out by how it is spelled on paper. There is a SOUND of abundance of rain, and your ear will know it before your eye ever does.
Release all you need into His hands, get your face down low, pray, and go look again. And if you look and see nothing, go again. Your sixth “nothing” is not your verdict. Your seventh time is coming, and the little cloud is already on its way.
Get up. Eat. Drink. The drought does not get the last word. The downpour does.
Closing Devotional Prayer
My prayer for you:
Father, forgive us for reading our lives by sight when You told us to know You by sound. Tune our ears to Your voice above every other voice. Let us hear the abundance before we see it, and hold onto the word You have spoken when the horizon still says “nothing.”
Teach us to release all we need into Your hands and go look again, and again, until the little cloud appears. Let this be the seventh time. Send the rain, Lord, the downpour, and let it be a great rain. An abundance of rain. In Jesus’ name, amen.
Written by our Tuesday writer, Marshay Iwu
