“And your ears shall hear a word behind you, saying,
“This is the way, walk in it,”
when you turn to the right or when you turn to the left.”
~ Isaiah 30:21
During my walk last evening I noticed a steady stream of small planes in the sky. Our home is only two miles from our airport and we do see and hear planes occasionally, but recently it has been non-stop. Perhaps the fire season and the crop spraying season have converged. Maybe there are other reasons at play; but, whatever the case, there are plenty of planes.
While I was walking, I kept looking up to see what type of plane was following me and I couldn’t help but remember when one of our tiny grandsons was fascinated with airplanes — and I mean fascinated! He could spot one in the sky well before any of us heard it or noticed it. He called them something that sounded like ‘hair-pen’ which is only adorable to grandparents. And, as grandparents do, we immediately abandoned the perfectly acceptable English word for ‘airplane’ and would ourselves proclaim, ‘look, a hair-pen!’
We parents and grandparents are a pitiful lot — embracing those charming made up words and leaving behind everything we once held true and reasonable to cling to a new vocabulary crafted by an 18 month-old. Yes, you say — knowing full well you’ve done it too! How many words and actions and foods have been re-named in your household by little people. Worse, you’ve clung to the alternate pronunciation for years — decades! Paul and I have had an empty nest for a solid ten years and yet often use some of those heirloom toddler vocabulary words in our daily conversations. Pitiful!
Parents do eventually correct the toddlers, as they should. But I got to thinking that the same thing can happen in our spiritual lives. We can be just like toddlers and hear something wrong, continue to hear it wrong, speak it to others wrong, and eventually believe it wrong. It’s cute when an 18 month-old hears a word wrong, but it’s no longer cute when an adult Christian hears The Word of God wrong.
We hear things all the time that sound similar to the truth. Things like: God helps those who help themselves, or if God closes a door, He will open a window, or everything happens for a reason. Shall we call these hair-pens? If we’re not careful, we begin to actually repeat what we hear and even believe what we hear. Heaven help us, when our friends and family pick up our spiritual vocabulary and we create an echo chamber of wrong hearing and wrong thinking.
The point of all this is a reminder to check our hearing. How is your hearing? During Jesus’s earthly ministry, he said multiple times, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.” (Matt. 11:15). Two thousand years later, we are so blessed to have easy access to, not only His Words, but the entire Bible, which speaks truth into our lives. But we still need to hear it correctly!
The reality is that we’re all tempted to hear what we want to hear especially when we have layers of stress, or difficulty, or upheaval, or conflict, or health problems in our lives. During those seasons we may be prone to act like toddlers and hear things a certain way, “What’s that you say? God will never give you more than you can handle?” We think to ourselves, “That fits my life right now, I’m going to repeat that one!” What just happened? You created a hair-pen. Something you heard and want to believe even though it sounds a little different than anything you actually find in the Bible.
The truth of God’s Word is stable and consistent — we can’t just rename or rebrand our ideas of who God is and how He relates to us in order to match our circumstances in life.
So, what are we to do to improve our hearing? I’ve thought of three things:
Gifted Teaching: There is no substitute for being taught the Word of God on a regular basis by someone whom God has gifted to teach the Scriptures. If your church meets that criteria then you should go as much as you possibly can. If it does not, you may have some searching to do.
Personal Listening: It’s also important to hear for ourselves. Do you have a reading schedule to read/hear the Bible for yourself regularly? Added bonus points if you can be involved in a small group that studies verse-by-verse, so you have the opportunity to discuss what you’ve just heard.
Open Heart: Lastly, hearing the Word of God without a previous bias is critical. My husband just taught on this recently and it really captured my thinking (link below). We always need to come to Scripture for what it is saying, not to reinforce something we learned in childhood or read on a Facebook Meme.
The summary is that we want to be the adult and not the toddler in our spiritual communications! No hair-pens for us!
As far as an update on me — some of you ask me from time to time, ‘how else can I be praying for you?’ Well, in this final stretch, one of the side effects from chemo is neuropathy in my fingers and toes and it's gotten a bit annoying. I’m feeling well enough to do a few things, but my hands won’t always cooperate. The hope is that it’s not permanent for me, but I won’t find out for a few more months. Five train stops left!
My Love,
Sue
Here is the message I referred to above from Acts 18: listen watch