Are you hard of hearing?

Physical hearing loss is usually a gradual process so it is not noticed for some considerable time. One symptom is that it sometimes becomes difficult to distinguish specific words or a person wrongly hears certain words especially those spoken by children whose voices are high pitched. Consequently you can misunderstand what someone is saying or even not hear the person at all. The volume of the radio or television gradually becomes higher and yet people who have hearing loss are sometimes not aware of it. Family members or friends are often the first to notice it.

Our text today addresses the underlying problem of the Hebrew Christians to whom the book of Hebrews was written. They had become dull of hearing. They had lost some of their capacity to hear the truth and to put it into action in their lives. They had become hard of hearing. This means they had become closed to the point of not being able to hear God any more. They were becoming increasingly deaf to His voice and, in consequence, the writer found it hard to explain to them some vital truth about Jesus. They had listened to the voices of this world and had lost their ability to hear the voice of God.

Often when Jesus was speaking He would say: ‘He that hath ears to hear, let him hear’. He knew that all the people were listening, but not all were hearing. So He constantly reminded them of the responsibility of hearing clearly and appropriately what they heard. ‘Consider carefully how you listen. Whoever has will be given more, whoever does not have, even that he thinks he has will be taken from him’ (Luke 8:18).

How does this apply to us today? To hear we must listen; listen carefully to the word of God. To the measure we hear and appropriate truth today we will receive it tomorrow. If we don’t respond to what little truth we know already, we won’t profit even from that. If we obey the truth God gives, our knowledge of Him will increase. If we don’t we will lose even the little we have. In other words, God’s word is to be obeyed, and as it’s obeyed we grow in relationship with Him as well as in understanding.

Another way of saying this is that there’s no standing still in the Christian life. All the time we’re either going forward or going back. It’s a very serious thing to be spiritually hard of hearing. Your ears are connected to your heart! Simply put, to the degree our heart is set on something other than the truth, we will be ‘hearing impaired’. Do you have a ‘heart condition’ which hinders you from hearing the truth?

Prayer: Father God, thank You for Your eternal truth and for the Holy Spirit who alone can bring that truth to my heart. Convict me of anything in my heart today that impedes my hearing so that I fail to truly understand who Jesus is and what He’s done, so I can know the life-giving truth offered in Him. Amen.