Earplugs

"Yet they would not listen and obey or incline their ears; but they stiffened their necks, that they might not hear and might not receive instruction" (Jeremiah 17:23)

I can't think of any parent that hasn't experienced the frustration that can be involved as you try to communicate with a child. I've literally watched children stick their fingers in their ears and proceed to yell "la la la la la la la" at the top of their lungs to avoid listening to the words coming out of a parent's mouth.

Why doesn't a child want to hear his parent? Doesn't the child understand the parent's language? Certainly, a young child has limited vocabularly, but children speak the same language as their parents and a good parent speaks to a child's level.

Doesn't the child recognize that a parent speaks out of love? I think most often he does. Doesn't the child trust the parent? Again, I think most often the child would say he does.

If it isn't a question of language or love or trust. What is it? The communication barrier between a parent and child is most often a state of the child's will that is already set against hearing.

Quite simply because once he has heard, and his parent knows he has heard, he will be forced to make a choice about obedience to something he has already decided he doesn't want to do. It is the wall of the child's self already under construction, and it begins early to separate the child from his parent as he seeks to form his own identity in the world.

The Bible translations are mixed in the wording of the verse above . . . some using only the word listen or only obey or hear, but I particularly like the combination used in the Amplified translation. For to "listen," to "hear" demands response.

The resonse may be to ignore, but as it is the not doing of what has been commanded, it must be deemed disobedience. Or the response may be the doing of that which has been instructed, in which case it is obedience. But it will be one or the other, it will fall on one side of the line that has been drawn.

I am coming to realize more and more how we, the very children of God, behave toward him the way earthly children behave toward their parents. We simply refuse to listen. We busy ourselves with service, make our choices, ask for His blessing, pronounce ourselves "good Christian people" and plug up our ears.

I believe all Christians have heard their Father, for Jesus tells us that He and the Father are one and that His sheep know His voice (John 10:30; 10:27, respectively).

So, we hear Him at some point, and we obey. Perhaps our obedience stops at our choice to repent and believe. Perhaps we listen a little longer and decide to obey a few more select commands. But somewhere along the way, for the sake of our own convenience and comfort, we stop listening for anything new. We pitch a tent and start to camp.

Some of us only camp for a week. Some of us camp for the rest of our lives, coasting on a 40-year-old revelation of God because we were unwilling to sacrifice any more of our self.

Protecting self against further change, beyond what we have defined as our accepted Christian normal, is a form of trying to save our life.

It falls back to making our choices, good though some of them may be, based on our minds, wills and feelings. But we are called to live as Christ, whose heart's sole desire was to please and be a delight to His Father, our Father.

Jesus didn't act on every "opportunity for service" that presented iself, yet He taught the story of the good Samaritan to show that we must be willing to be inconvenienced by the needs of others.

Christ's life reveals that it is only by being perfectly in tune by unbroken relationship with God that we are able, as He was, to perfectly discern each step, each divinely appointed act of our calling on a day-to-day basis.

The communication of that relationship, as we speak surrender to God and He speaks direction, instruction and encouragement, enables us in perfect peace to do His will. We are free to be inconvenienced because we realize every detail of our lives, including our broken schedule, is sovereignly in His hands so as to be to His glory.

Christ warns us that "whoever wishes to save his life will lose it," and that if we are "ashamed of His words," refusing to hear and to accept the instruction He offers, He will be ashamed of us "when He comes in the glory of His Father with the holy angels" (Mark 8:35,38).

Are we listening?