Hear the word of the Lord, O nations. (Jeremiah 31:10)
Have you ever been guilty of not listening to someone like you should? All gender-based stereotype joking aside, it’s a serious question. As intelligent beings, human persons have the ability to express themselves through the form of communication we know as language. But more than merely possessing the ability to communicate, we also have the desire to be heard, understood, and responded to. Ignoring someone who is speaking to you, not giving them the requisite attention necessary for them to be properly heard and understood, carries the potential of offending the speaker and disrupting your relationship to them.
Where did this aspect of our humanity come from? Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that God created us to be like him. Throughout the Bible we discover that God is a God who speaks. In fact, one can view the Bible as a message itself. In its pages, from cover to cover, can be heard the voice of God calling us to his Son, calling us to himself. God is not an impersonal, abstract force but rather a communion of divine Persons who want to be known. He has spoken. We must listen.
“Speak, Lord, for your servant hears.” (1 Sam 3:9) This should be our posture whenever we open God’s word, or bow our heads to pray, or listen to a sermon on Sunday morning. We do so trusting that the God who speaks is able and willing to speak to us. But you cannot truly hear someone unless you are actively listening to them, and God’s desire is not that you simply listen for listening sake, but that you might actually go do what it is you hear (Luke 11:28).
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