One of Jesus’ most repeated words in the Gospels is a version of it: “If anyone has ears to hear, do you hear?”(Mark 4. 23). If we are wise, we will listen carefully to everything Jesus says, especially what he says repeatedly, and in this case, listening is exactly what he tells us to do.
There is a very important reason behind Jesus’ exhortation:
- Be careful what you hear.
- With the measure you’ve measured.
- They’ll also measure you.
- And this will be added to you; for what he has given will be given to you; and.
- If you don’t.
- You’ll be taken away from it until what you have.
Do you understand what Jesus says? The fact that this warning itself is a bit difficult to understand illustrates your point: listen and think carefully, because if you don’t, you won’t understand it, and if you don’t understand it, you will lose the ability to understand what you need to do. .
It all depends on how you hear what God says, what we commonly call the word of God. Well, listening to God requires a lot of attention, are you paying attention?
Jesus gives this warning in the context in which He narrates a series of parables. Were the parables? In which Jesus hid deep secrets of the kingdom of God in short metaphors that often seemed earthly. In the stories told in Mark 4, he uses the land of a farmer (Mark 4. 1-8), an oil lamp (Mark 4. 21-25) and seeds (Mark 4. 26-32).
Read them. Of course, Jesus explains the parable of the earth (Mark 4:13-20), but what about the lamp or seeds?These stories seem simpler than they are and we will only really understand them if we pay attention to them.
And we have Bibles! None of Jesus’ original listeners had heard these parables before. They were not written in such a way that they could be read over and over again, examine their grammatical structure, and be conveniently referenced with other parts of Scripture. Early listeners heard these stories once. If they weren’t careful, they could lose the kingdom. It would be an expensive distraction.
When Jesus explained to his disciples why He taught in parables, He said he did so, quoting parts of Isaiah 6:9-10, so that his listeners — seeing, seeing, and inadvertently; and listen, listen, and not understand; Don’t they convert and be forgiven by them?(Mark 4. 12). Again, Jesus’ hard-to-understand explanation illustrates his point: if we do not listen carefully, we will lose what He says.
Does God really say riddles so people don’t understand?No, and yes. Jesus said parables to reveal the spiritual mysteries of the kingdom, and He really wanted people to understand them. That’s why he said, “If anyone has ears to hear, you hear?And ‘Be careful’. But his revealing method tested the vigilance and spiritual seriousness of listeners. Those who listened and were really attentive heard. But the spiritually numb and distracted did not listen to him. Jesus wanted to give the kingdom to the first, not the second. Do those who don’t pay attention reveal their spiritual stupidity? An insensitivity that has serious consequences: losing the kingdom of God.
If Jesus’ words here seem contrary to intuition, they are. Jesus spoke and acted consistently with God’s words and ways through the Bible, captured in this text:
For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor your ways, my ways, said the Lord, for just as the heavens are higher than the earth, my ways are higher than your ways, and my thoughts, higher than your thoughts. (Isaiah 55:8-9)
I have seen this passage, or part of it, quoted in Christian memes, calendars and greeting cards, often with a beautiful inspiring landscape, with the sea or the sky in the background, but if we insert biblical images as a backdrop, it would be things like a forbidden tree in Eden, the existence of Satan, a terrible deluge, Abraham about to sacrifice Isaac Jacob disguised as Esau, Joseph languishing in prison, Israel with a sea in front of them and the Egyptian army behind them, Rahab, the Canaanite Prostitute, marrying an Israelite, entering the lineage, David hiding from Saul in a cave, Jeremiah weeping for Jewish women cooking their babies, Jesus sleeping in a feeder and, above all, an adult Jesus mutilated and hung in a Roman cross.
God’s ways are not really our ways. None of us would have written the history of redemption as God did. The story itself indicates a personality and intentionality behind it.
And if we pay attention to Him, we can detect the personality and intentionality of the strange way in which Jesus communicates the kingdom of God in difficult-to-understand parables, none of us would do so.
The main qualifier is if we pay attention to it. Because, as Jesus said, if we don’t pay attention to what God says, we will lose what God does. It is an expensive distraction.
By the grace of God, we have an advantage over the original listeners of Jesus: we have the authority of God’s written word. In fact, never before have so many Christians had as much access to the word of God as they do today.
But we must not make ourselves believe that so much access and familiarity with Jesus’ teaching means that we do not face the same danger as the listeners of the first century. We may have a clearer view of the kingdom than the multitudes who heard Jesus’ parables, but we are as threatened by a selfless audience as anyone has been (Hebrews 5:11).
Christians have never possessed as much wealth as today’s Western Christians, which presents us with many temptations and threatens to destroy us (1 Timothy 6:9-10), and Christians have never been bombarded with distractions as numerous and varied as we have. familiar, too rich, and too distracted is a recipe for the kind of selfless hearing that often manifests itself as being able to explain what Jesus means without us actually doing what he says.
It is a false consolation to be able to teach a text accurately if we do not obey it, so functionally our carnal anxieties and desires govern us, not the commandments and promises of Jesus. This can be a more misleading way of listening to altruistic than just without listening or forgetting.
“Therefore, it is important that we hold on more firmly to the truths heard, never to turn away from them” (Hebrews 2. 1). If we do not pay attention to him, we may not even realize that we are adrift, we can look around and see many other distracted and selfless Christians, who speak of Jesus’ conversation without following in Jesus’ footsteps, think that this should be normal and assume that they are well. The only way to know if we pay special attention to what Jesus says, to the way He listens to him, is to actually do what He says (John 14:15).
Christian life must be a life of solidarity (Mark 13:37; Luke 21. 36; Ephesians 6. 18; 1 Thessalonians 5. 6; 1 Peter 5. 8) Christian life is a life of listening (Mark 4. 24; Luke 8. 21; John 10. 27; Romans 10. 17; Hebrews 3. 7 -8) . But listening carefully to Jesus is not a natural thing; must be cultivated and stored diligently. And there’s no formula to pay any more attention. Is it cultivated by making attention a habit?We practice the habits of grace. We learn to pay attention intentionally trying to pay attention. The Spirit will help us if we ask the Father to teach us. (Luke 11: 9-10; Psalm 25: 4).
So, whatever it is, we must be careful what we hear, because Jesus’ ways and words are often contradictory and we live in a time of destructive distraction and it all depends on how we listen to Jesus.