Are We Hearing Correctly?

I find that many people today hear what they want to hear rather than hearing what another has spoken. There seems to be a disconnect because many people listen to others and then arrive at a totally false conclusion. This can happen often between married couples but it also happens with friends, business people and the general public. We can hear people on the news and misunderstand what they said and then go around telling people our false conclusions. If people don’t learn the art of listening they will keep coming up with those bad conclusions.

When I use to do a good deal of counseling as a pastor, and people came for counseling over some conflict they were having with someone, one of the hardest things to convince them about was how poorly they probably listened to the person they were having the conflict with.  The second difficulty was getting them to hear what I was advising them to do or not do compared to what they thought I was saying. All of us take listening for granted but often we really don’t hear what others are truly saying. Again, I need to reiterate that good listening is an art and a skill that all of us need to keep working on until we connect the dots better with one another.

I fear too many professed believers THINK they hear God when in fact they are more than likely hearing what they want to believe. The parts of the Bible or sermons they want to hear they celebrate in and the things they don’t want to hear they close their hearts to. I can’t tell you the number of times I preached on a topic in which people HEARD something I never said.  People today, like so many past generations, hear what we want to hear because it confirms something that we have an opinion on. I have looked back over the years and questioned the times I believed I heard God tell me to do something and probably didn’t.  It wasn’t intentional on my part.  It was just inexperience in discerning the voice of God and lack of full compression of the knowledge of the word of God. Practice makes perfect and that includes our skill in listening.

There are many times that Jesus used the phrase, “He who has an ear to hear let him hear”, for good reason. What he was communicating was  just because you have ears doesn’t mean your hearing correctly. Look at the verse below and consider what it says and what you think it says.  What you need or want influences what you think it means.

John 5:24                                                                                                                                                                                                  “Truly, truly, I say to you, he who hears My word, and believes Him who sent Me, has eternal life, and does not come into judgment, but has passed out of death into life. 

When it comes to understanding what it takes for a person to be born again according to Jesus we can discover certain verses of scripture text almost saying different things. One verse says he who believes and is baptized and another, like the above verse, says something different. I think God gives us principles and concepts of spiritual life that we can twisted if we isolate verse and only believe them rather than accumulating all the verse on the same subject.  It’s like a jig saw puzzle. You have to put all of the pieces together to get an accurate picture.

In the verse above, Jesus says he who hears my word, meaning not everyone who physically is listening hears the meaning of Jesus’ words. Some people think they hear what God is saying every time they read God’s words when, in fact, they don’t. It may even mean they heard the opposite of what Jesus meant all the while embracing the word he spoke. How strange it is when we can twist meaning without even realizing it. Take, for example, the word FIRE. Our past experiences tell our mind that this is a good or bad word and thus we come to different conclusions when someone uses the word fire.

Assuming we did hear what he said, Jesus then adds the condition of BELIEVING Father God is the one behind all that Jesus did and taught. The idea is Jesus didn’t just give us nice principles to help us be good on our own, he gave us God’s word to live by, not to pick and choose the principles we like. I fear that people take much of what Jesus said as suggestions, which they were never meant to be. Jesus is asking if we believe that his words have authority in our lives because Father God is behind them all or do we just take Jesus’ words as a take it or leave it situation.

Thirdly, Jesus said that if these two conditions are a reality in our lives then we have eternal life. He says eternal life has two major elements. First, it means that we avoid God’s judgment for our sin and second is that we have passed out of DEATH into LIFE. The idea of having eternal life is clarified by what Jesus said in his priestly prayer hours before going to the cross. (John 17:3) Eternal life is a RELATIONSHIP with Jesus and the Father, NOT a time clock.

Many in the body of Christ misunderstand these two important things. ETERNAL LIFE is not about living eternally, it is about our relationship with God.  Jesus dealt with this idea of being born again with the Jewish leader Nicodemus in John 3.

John 3:6-7                                                                                                                                                                                                   “That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.  “Do not be amazed that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’ 

I have encountered professing believers that say and believe that God does it all for them in their conversion because they say they were DEAD before knowing Jesus, as if that means they could not choose God nor anything else, which is a lie. How foolish to think of the word DEAD in scripture is the inability to choose. God constantly calls us to choose life rather than death and righteousness rather than wickedness. Why would God challenge us to choose if we could not choose? It boils down to a misunderstanding of what God says verses what we want him to say. If choosing is all up to God, then we really aren’t responsible for anything because God is sovereign and he makes it all happen not us.

Moses gave the children of Israel the challenge of CHOOSING BETWEEN  life and death. God let the consequences of our choices rest with us, not him. God makes the provision of salvation but doesn’t force us to accept it. He offers blessings or curses based on our choice, not his will. If you ask any true believer if God wants anyone to sin they would say no. If God indeed hates sin and love righteousness then the only one to blame for the mess in the world is our very worldly choices.

Deuteronomy 30:19                                                                                                                                                                                                “I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. So choose life in order that you may live, you and your descendants, 

Jesus said in the book of John that he was the vine and we are the branches. He said IF we abide in him, meaning we are the ones choosing, then he would abide BUT if we did not choose to abide we would be cut off.

John 15:4                                                                                                                                                                                                      Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself unless it abides in the vine, so neither can you unless you abide in Me.

Never let people with a religious doctrine tell you your choices don’t matter because God is in control of your life.  All you need to do is to try walking into oncoming traffic and see if your choice doesn’t matter. This religious perversion of God’s sovereignty distorts His word. The Bible and common sense says that God delegates many choices to man, which is why it’s called free will. God first gave the ability to choose to Adam and Eve and they chose poorly. He also gave us the ability to choose when we make bad choices. He doesn’t stop us.

Today, we have a choice to HEAR or not to hear, or to BELIEVE or not believe.  Today, let us boldly choose to hear the truth and power in the words of Jesus that were sent from the Father.

Pastor Dale