The ear makes no distinction between hearing and listening. But, there is a big difference. Any husband who has been married more than a few days knows that hearing and listening are two distinct things. Hearing what a wife is saying is one thing, listening is another. Ask any woman if the difference is not clear. Hearing takes place without any listening when the one doing the hearing is not concentrating on the one doing the talking, but occupied with other things.
Is it not possible that God is speaking more than we are hearing because we are not really listening? Oswald Chambers wrote, "What hinders me from hearing is that I am taken up with other things." The real issue may not be the silence of God, but the fact that we are distracted and taken up by other things which seem so important to us. Certainly there are the obvious things with which hinder our hearing and listening ability. The thing that seems to be glued to the palm of our hand is one, a re-run on the television may be another, and a job may be still another. But, it could also be some unexpected things like our insistence that a certain number of chapters in the Bible must be read every day, or a certain amount of time must be spent in prayer, or serving on a bunch of committees at the church.
The voice of God may indeed be filling up the world around us, but we are not really listening. Every now and again we catch the sound of His voice, but never enough to stop us in our tracks to listen to the voice. Maybe we should just lay everything down and put it away for a moment and speak the words that the boy Samuel spoke long ago in the darkness, "Speak, (Lord) for your servant is listening." (I Samuel 3:10)
Is it not possible that God is speaking more than we are hearing because we are not really listening? Oswald Chambers wrote, "What hinders me from hearing is that I am taken up with other things." The real issue may not be the silence of God, but the fact that we are distracted and taken up by other things which seem so important to us. Certainly there are the obvious things with which hinder our hearing and listening ability. The thing that seems to be glued to the palm of our hand is one, a re-run on the television may be another, and a job may be still another. But, it could also be some unexpected things like our insistence that a certain number of chapters in the Bible must be read every day, or a certain amount of time must be spent in prayer, or serving on a bunch of committees at the church.
The voice of God may indeed be filling up the world around us, but we are not really listening. Every now and again we catch the sound of His voice, but never enough to stop us in our tracks to listen to the voice. Maybe we should just lay everything down and put it away for a moment and speak the words that the boy Samuel spoke long ago in the darkness, "Speak, (Lord) for your servant is listening." (I Samuel 3:10)
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