Beautiful Words Blog | It All Starts With Hearing, Part 1 By Pastor John Moropoulos | Gateway Christian Fellowship

Friends, this is the first part of what I expect to be several blog entries that focus on the subject of hearing, our auditory sense, and the role it plays in our walk of faith. These next several weeks I suspect to be something of a journey itself. I have a sense of where we are going, but don’t know exactly where we will end. My hope is in a closer walk with Jesus.

So, the first step. The primacy of hearing. We are a visual society. We get most of the clues that guide us through our days with our eyes, or at least we think we do. We use expressions like, “I saw the best movie the other night,” or, "We had the best time at our friend’s house. You should have seen it.” We say these things even though the sounds we heard were an essential element to our experience.

We typically only refer to hearing if we specifically mean just that. “I listened to an amazing new song.” There is probably no better example than the now commonplace idea of the “music video.” Some of us are old enough to remember when there wasn’t such a thing. If you wanted music, you listened to music. That was enough.

So our culture has been moving away from sound, simple sound. We are visual. Or are we? Consider the following:

While light, the agent of sight, travels much faster than sound outside of our bodies, our brains process sound at a speed that puts the processing of light to shame. Ever notice that when you see something dramatic, whether good or bad, it takes a second to process the event? There is a pause before our emotions kick in. But at the sound of something dramatic, say a loud car crash, our response is almost instantaneous. The cry of an infant brings an immediate emotive response.

And consider this, while sight takes a nightly break, our sense of hearing never shuts off.

Turning on a bedroom light may wake a person up, or it may not. The right noise, however, will do the trick. Who owns an “alarm lamp?”

Finally, consider this: in the world of vertebrate creatures, there are a good many species that are blind in their natural state. Bats, moles, some fish, certain snakes, and others are born blind and live life through the use of other senses, primarily touch and hearing. There are no vertebrates, however, that are deaf in their natural state, that is we don’t expect them to be born deaf.

All of this is simply to say that hearing is really important. In a recent interview with a well-known big game guide, one with extensive experience dealing with animals who can turn the hunter into the hunted, the question was asked, “What’s the most important thing to do when dealing with a dangerous animal?” The answer, in short, was, “Be alert.” The telling detail was this: “You may not always see the threat, you will almost always hear it.” Hearing is a really big deal.

So it should come as no surprise that the foundation of Israel’s relationship with God should be this,

Hear O Israel. The Lord your God is One Lord!

There it is. Hear! The thing God really wanted was their attention. “Pay attention to what I am saying!” was the message.

As we get further into this, it is my hope to explore the faculty of hearing and its connection to the heart. I hope to come to better understand and maybe even be able to explain how hearing God opens our hearts to God and makes our actions a natural response to His voice.

I’m excited to see where this goes.

Pastor John