Are You Really Listening?
By Carol Wollaston
Not only did Jesus come to earth to restore spiritual blindness, but He also came that the deaf might hear.
Spiritual hearing is indeed a remarkable sense. Many times in the scriptures, the Lord admonished His people because they had become dull of hearing. It seemed their ears were stopped-up. The Lord told Isaiah that His people had ears but did not hear, because the Lord Himself had made them deaf in their rebellion. God alone determines the time that hearing will commence again. This is because He wants His truth to be really heard by an open heart. Hearing, then, is linked to understanding and illumination of the Word of God, and by this means change can take place within the hearer.
Have you noticed that you can be in conversation with someone and be aware that he or she is not really listening? Their distraction minimises their ability to show real interest, not only in the topic of the conversation, but also in the person bringing it. Often they are more interested in formulating their own replies or opinions than in what you are saying to them.
This can happen when the Lord speaks to us. Romans 10:14 says, ‘how shall they believe in Him whom they have not heard? And how shall they hear without a preacher or messenger?’ If Christ speaks to me through the preacher or messenger then I will be hearing the gospel to me – the good news to which I must pay the utmost attention and then act upon it. I must not be offended by it or be distracted by thinking of my own opinions or justifications. Rather, I must hear it as ‘glad tidings of good things’ brought by a friend eager to help me hear the Word of God to me. Now faith will rise in me to see action flow on from hearing. ‘Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God’, so I cannot lose! (Rom 10:17) The Word brings faith with it if I receive it. Then I can believe and obey.
James exhorts us in his letter to be not ‘forgetful hearers’ but ‘doers of the Word.’ (Jas 1:25)
Many times Jesus challenged His followers to have ‘ears to hear’. After His resurrection, the challenge came to His followers to listen ‘to what the Spirit is saying to the churches.’ Now He would speak by His Spirit through the members of His Body in the Church.
We desire to have no obstruction and no impediment to listening – no forgetful hearing and ears that do not want to be ‘tickled’ by gossip or idle talk. Jesus, the living Word, wants to transform our hearing so that we can be the people spoken of in John 8:47 – ‘he who is of God, hears God’s words’.
