Word of Salvation – Vol.51 No.26 – July 2006

 

Hearing with Attention

 

A Sermon by Rev Albert Esselbrugge on Mark 4:24

Scripture Readings:  Psalm 119:33-56; Mark 4:1-25

 

Brothers and sisters, young people, boys and girls.

In the verse we are looking at today, our Lord calls on all His people to use their ears wisely – to use discrimination in what we hear, so that the truth and only the truth is what we seek to fill our minds with. We are looking at this in the context of what we have been addressing lately as the marks or characteristics of the church of the Lord Jesus Christ.

The task of a preacher and pastor is to bring the Word of God as faithfully, as clearly, and as understandably as he can. That’s his duty, and his privilege. You will probably want to add several other features that would improve the way he preaches, and while he needs to do what he can to meet other criteria in preaching, they can never overtake or replace his main duty. You may want the preaching to be interesting, and have life, to be fresh and new every week, and positive, and I am sure that there will be other points you will think are important concerning preaching.

But as we proceed into the year, you will, I hope, see that a clear and faithful presentation of the Word of God is the preacher’s major task, and to achieve something of that takes an enormous amount of energy and time each week, much more than you may appreciate. There will be times when we will have warm and uplifting things to say, and other times when there will be direct and hard sounding things that need to be said.

What we want to address ourselves to now is how we can best hear the preaching, because while we all have our ideas and views concerning the preacher and preaching, in this passage our Lord primarily gave directions as to hearing. The art of listening and attention can be just as difficult as the work of preparing and delivering a sermon.

When we hear the truth, we need to give it the attention it deserves. When it comes to the food we eat, we are careful to eat that which is both tasty and pleasant to the palate, and also healthy for our bodies. We must take the same discriminating effort with the food for our souls.

That’s the first thing we hear from our verse. “Consider carefully what you hear:” It’s phrased as a command. In the previous verse our Lord called out, “If anyone has ears to hear, let him hear”. Now the Lord is saying to us: use your ears well, and to the very best purpose. When He instructs us to consider carefully what we hear, the meaning of the words he is using compares the way you look after your hearing to the way you would look after your money. There are several things we can say about hearing in this way.

We have already mentioned exercising discrimination. Our Lord when telling a parable about the Shepherd and his flock spoke about his sheep hearing his voice and protecting them from the thief and robber. He also made the remark that his sheep “will never follow a stranger; in fact they will run away from him because they do not recognise the stranger’s voice” (Jn 10:5). We must trust and respect those we listen to, and reject all who speak false doctrines and strange ideas.

Another way in which we are to consider carefully what we hear, is hearing with attention and application. Learning a truth is never the end of a matter, it’s only the beginning. After the truth is learned, it must be applied. Like the house built on rock (Mt 7:24-27) – he who hears and practices God’s Word is wise and is building on firm foundations. But he who hears only is a fool.

We can illustrate this from another of our Lord’s parables, the Parable of the Sower. A sower went out to sow seed, and as he scattered the seed, some fell among thorns, grew and was choked by them. Other seed fell on shallow soil, grew quickly but withered just as quickly for lack of roots. Other seed again, fell in rocky places and along the path where birds came and ate it, and still other seed fell in good soil and produced a full harvest. The Lord explained that this latter seed, the seed that bore fruit, was like truth sown in the person who hears the Word and who understands it. They produce a crop yielding a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown. There must be a genuine and sincere desire in our hearts to hear the truth of God for it to take root in a fertile soul.

A third consideration in hearing with care, is hearing for ourselves, with a desire for a personal application. You may remember young Samuel of the Old Testament who kept hearing someone calling him and thinking it was his old master Eli. Eventually Eli said to him, “If you hear him call again say, ‘Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening’.” That’s how we ought to come before the Lord. Looking for what He has to say to us personally.

Some people are content to hear pleasant things – things like the promises and the grace of God – but when it comes to hearing about God’s judgment, His threats and instructions, they won’t sit still for those. Some people will gladly hear about those things which concern others and the sins of others – about their lives and manners – but get upset and won’t hear anything touching themselves or their own sins. That kind of attitude is not a careful consideration of what we hear. If hearing the truth is to produce in us a harvest of praise and growth to the Lord, we need to be looking for how it applies to ourselves.

That means we will also have to consciously exercise our memories to hold onto the truth. How often have we noticed the memory act like a water tight container and a sealed trap when it comes to things owed to us, but when it comes to God’s commandments, the head and heart suddenly become like a sieve to water, unable to hold God’s Word, or sermons or texts, and so unable to produce anything of the sermon to the benefit of others who were not there.

How important it is that when we begin to make our preparation to go to church, our first and most important preparation be prayer. Pray with a sincere desire that the Word of God will be blessed to us! The preacher must enter into the preaching of the Word every time again with the prayer, “Lord blind the eyes of the congregation to the man, to my personality and sin – let them only hear You Father, and see the glory of the Saviour”. And as the preacher prays like that, we together need to seek the grace of God to bless us with a longing desire for the Word to come into our hearts. We should seek this for the whole Word of God, not just those parts of the Word that touch upon a favourite set of doctrines.

Our Lord follows His command to consider carefully what we hear with a proverb. “With the measure you use,” He says, “it will be measured to you.” Or, if you like, we can put it this way: In proportion as you give yourself to hearing, you will gain from hearing. We can illustrate this in a very practical way – by the expected result of preaching.

If we go to church without any real interest, and worse still, with no interest in the Word of God, we will find exactly what we expect. Everything will be uninteresting. If we come into the worship service to find fault, we will find it by the bucket-full. There are more than enough people around us to pick on, and the preacher himself will supply you with plenty to criticise – if that’s what you’re looking for.

But everyone who comes looking for solid truth will learn it from any faithful ministry. “Blessed are those, who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled”. Those who bring faith receive assurance, and those who come with joy are made glad, and those who seek, shall find. “Come unto Me and I will give rest”, says the Lord.

There will be no blessing to anyone if what they are hearing is false and in error. But even if the truth is being spoken, we will find no blessing if we come with a careless, forgetful, fault-finding hearing of the truth.

You will notice that attached to our verse is a little phrase packed with a promise – “With the measure you use, it will be measured to you… and even more“. The sense is that those who hear will have a greater desire to hear.

Sometimes people say that one sermon a week is all they can digest. But in the words of our Lord here, there lies the implication that the problem may not lie in the digestion, but in the appetite. The more we exercise a careful hearing of the Word, the greater our appetite will be for more, and not only will our desire for more grow, but so will our understanding.

New Christians and growing Christians need to grasp this. They come to a stunning realisation of the glorious mercy God has extended to them in Christ Jesus, and there is often an expectation in them that they have now grasped all the mysteries of Grace. They join in the worship services with great enthusiasm, but often afterwards may be deflated and discouraged. The language and words of worship are unfamiliar. A multitude of concepts that they haven’t even begun to consider or thought about are introduced all at once and they become confused, and wonder if there is something lacking in themselves. The temptation can be to look for a simpler service, or to give up. But that’s where we need to exercise patience with each other and with ourselves. The more we desire to hear, the more we will grow and understand what we hear. But it takes time. And the blessing of being patient and giving it time is that the more we hear the truth, the more convinced we will become of what we hear, and the greater our personal grasp of the blessings we hear becomes.

God gives more to those who value what they have. Do you remember the parable our Lord told of the talents? That’s the lesson about a man going on a journey and entrusting his property to his servant. To one he gave ten talents, to another five, and to the third, one talent. When the master returned he called his servants to account for how they had handled his property. The first two had valued their trust, doubled the master’s property and were given even greater responsibility and reward. The third had buried the money, returning it intact, but the master had it taken from him and given to the others calling him a lazy and wicked servant. Our Lord then said, “Everyone who has will be given more, and he will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him.” Jesus wasn’t teaching that the rich get richer! Rather, the more we use the blessings He has given us, the greater and more wonderfully we come into the joy and benefit of those blessings. “Consider carefully then what you hear.” Use your hearing well. “If anyone has ears to hear, let him hear.”

To learn the truth of God thoroughly, we not only need to listen, but we need to tell it to others as well. An old Rabbi can help us here. He once said, “I have learned much from my tutors; more from my companions; but most of all from my pupils”. The more light we give to another, the more we get ourselves. You get a better grip of truth by thinking about it and meditating on it with the purpose and desire to share it with another. As we begin to share the truth with another, we have to get into it, and get the truth into us! Only then will we be able to convey it sensibly and explain it clearly. So if you are serious about understanding God’s Word, get serious about sharing it with others!

This need to learn in order to teach is one of the great blessings of being a preacher. It’s the best way there is of learning the great doctrines of God’s Word.

Here, then, are four simple things that we can take from our text:

* The first is hear – it is our wisdom to know what God says.

* The second is hear well – God’s teaching deserves the deepest attention. It will repay the best consideration we can give it.

* The third is hear often – waste no Sunday, nor any of its worship services. Use the Bible studies during the week.

* And finally hear better – the more carefully we exercise our hearing, the greater our growth in holiness will be, and we will find heavenly joy by hearing with faith.

He who has ears to hear, let him hear, for with the measure you use, it will be measured to you, and more shall be given you besides.

Amen.