Do You Hear What I Hear?

Thanks to a head and chest cold that kept me completely out of commission for an entire week and semi out of commission for another two weeks, I am (almost) deafer than a doorknob. Even when I brush my teeth, the scrubbing sound is strangely muffled. Like when a camper is camping in a forest and downstream, he hears a lumberjack sawing his timber. He hears the saw’s back and forth, back and forth. He thinks. The crashing of the log slices as they fall. He thinks. But it isn’t until someone assures him those sounds are in fact a saw and crashing log slices that he is sure.

“Do you hear what I hear?”, he asks, because muffled sounds make one uncertain about absolute truth. 

Deafness is particularly frustrating for preachers of the Gospel. We (Christians) preach because we are commanded to, and because we’ve found true joy and desire to share it. But the listeners don’t always hear, and their deafness — or at least seeming deafness — leads us to privately complain to the Lord that ears are closed and hearts are cold. It also leads us to pray and ask Him to open ears and change hearts.  

At times, He says yes. At other times, He says no. Or maybe He says wait. It’s hard to tell. That’s the rough part about putting out a message. Only God knows hearts. Only God knows which ears are open. Only God can revive and redeem.

“Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God”, says Rom. 10:17. And “Go into all the world and preach the Gospel”, says Mark 16:15.

But —

Paul says, “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the increase. So then neither he who plants is anything, nor he who waters, but God gives the increase. Now he who plants and he who waters are one, and each one will receive his own reward according to his own labor.” (I Cor. 3:6-9) 

So the message seems to be: humbly preach, humbly leave the rest to God, and humbly wait patiently for the reward. 

The preacher often feels like Ezekiel — commanded to speak to dry, fleshless bones. It’s embarrassing, almost, to keep talking when nobody is hearing. When everyone is clearly dead and decayed. But a command is not a long drawn out explanation of reasons to obey or comforting pats on the back that assure the preacher of success. It’s just a command. A Just Do It. 

In addition to my Christmas tree dying and the nasty chest and head cold I’ve had, my dishwasher fizzled. As in, I may be deafer than a doorknob but the dishwasher was deader than a doorknob. At one very low point during my illness, I stood at my sink scrubbing dishes by hand while plagued with dizziness, shaky limbs, lungs so taxed I couldn’t stand up straight at times, and a Kleenex stuck up my nose because the continual nasal drip made it impossible to wash dishes without taking a million breaks to wipe my snout. I was suffering. But pain, whatever it’s source, has the potential to open us up to the truth. 

C.S. Lewis said, “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” 

So a preacher can (and should) preach by bugling the Gospel as best he knows how. As loud as possible without being purposely annoying. But God is the one with the power to rouse a deaf world. Every Christian is called to preach, but the call stops there. The call is not to put flesh on brittle bones or turn stony hearts to fleshy hearts. The call is to cultivate personal joy, exude joy, preach joy, and hope and pray God awakens joy in others. 

The same power it took to resurrect Christ from the dead is the same power it takes to produce a life of active, practicing, persevering faith on the part of the hearer. 

Selah.

Preachers have that power living inside of them, but they cannot impart that power to another human being. Resurrection of the spiritually dead is God’s work alone — and this blog? It’s a simple reminder to myself, and anyone else who needs the reminder, to be the best buglers possible. To ask others, “Do you hear what I hear?”, but be satisfied with nothing but an echo in return. Or silence. Or rotten tomatoes.  

Perhaps the listeners haven’t suffered hard or long enough for the truth to come across loud and clear. Perhaps the listeners are not elect and will therefore always be deaf. Perhaps our preaching is the very tool that God will use in a listener’s life … ten years down the road. His Word does not return void. Trust that. Preach. And let God be the Resurrecting Life that He is. He will reward in due time. 

The command to preach can feel heavy, but if we take His yoke and do things His way, it’s light. Bearable. Dare I say enjoyable? The true burden is not preaching. The true burden is taking the weight of the world upon our shoulders and pretending like our preaching is what saves. Truth is, nothing but the blood saves. And what did Jesus say when He saved the world with His spilled blood? 

“It is finished!”

How difficult and strange, yet exciting, humbling, and comforting to preach in the midst of a battle of a war that has already been won.