Take Heed How You Hear

Welcome to another week on Things Unseen. The other week, we were thinking together about preaching. It’s certainly an important subject, and for any of us who preach, it’s endlessly interesting. And it’s also important for all of us because the knowledge and application of God’s Word to us is so vital. But when we began reflecting on preaching, I think I mentioned that Jesus not only said, “Take care, take heed what you hear,” but also in Luke 8:18, He says, “Take care how you hear.” And then He adds this intriguing comment: “For to the one who has, more will be given, and from the one who has not, even what he thinks that he has will be taken away.”

You see what Jesus is saying? Hearing God’s Word rightly, that is what increases our capacity to rightly hear God’s Word—there’s a kind of exponential growth. But on the other hand, there’s a reverse graph. Not hearing it properly, rightly, isn’t a neutral thing; it actually makes it even more difficult to hear it properly the next time. And there’s a sting in the tail. The person who doesn’t hear God’s Word rightly may not know it. He may think he has all he really needs already. “But,” says Jesus, “even that will be taken from him.” It’s really a very sobering statement.

I feel fairly sure that most of us who are part of our Things Unseen podcast community, I think we do want to hear good preaching. We think it’s vital for our spiritual health and for the spiritual health of our church family. But I wonder if we give the same attention to how we hear what we hear as we give simply to what we hear.

When we were talking about preaching the other week, I mentioned those preaching grids so beloved of professors and teachers of budding preachers. But the wisest preachers also had hearers’ grids. Perhaps the most famous of them is found in a book by the sixteenth-century English Puritan William Perkins. It has the deliciously Reformed title, The Art of Prophesying. And in it, Perkins shares his own hearers’ grid with us. In it, he suggests that at any given time, there may be seven different kinds of hearers in the congregation. Now, he wrote about that because he wanted to help preachers address the people who were there in the congregation, not people who existed only in their imagination.

But we do need to ask ourselves, “What kind of hearer am I?” And not just once but again and again. It’s the easiest thing in the world not to do that—simply to assume, “I’m a good hearer of the Word of God,” and even not recognize it if I’m beginning to lose my ability to hear His voice. I listen but I’m detached. I assess but I don’t take in. I don’t chew on the message, I don’t digest it. And the more that happens, the more it’s going to happen.

I’ve met people who have been wonderfully faithful to their church, even when the pulpit has stopped feeding them, and they find themselves eking out spiritual nourishment, maybe on their own, or maybe in a small Bible study group. And then slowly, they get used to not being fed by preaching. And eventually, they feel, “Well, it is what it is.” And then, perhaps, they come with a friend to a church where the Word is faithfully ministered in the grace of the Spirit, and they realize that they’re actually being starved Sunday after Sunday. But now they scarcely noticed it because the impoverished diet of preaching they were hearing has actually damaged their appetite, and they badly need to get it back.

You see, if we don’t take heed to what we hear, we will slowly cease to take heed to how we hear, and that too is a very sobering thought. But, you know, the fact is, we can sit under a living biblical ministry, and because of our own detachment, we can similarly be starving ourselves by not digesting the food that’s being served. That’s also a sobering thought, but it’s a wake-up call as well.

So, the rest of this week, we’re going to think about different kinds of hearers. So, I hope you’ll join us over the next few days, especially if what we’ve been thinking about today is a wake-up call for you and you realize, “I think I may be starving spiritually.” So, join us again tomorrow on Things Unseen.