He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To the one who conquers I will grant to eat of the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God. (Revelation 2:7, ESV)
There are numerous warnings in Scripture that state that those who have ears to hear, let them hear what God or Jesus or the Spirit or the Word has to say. First, we have to ask ourselves, who has ears? It is the assumption that everyone has ears to hear (notwithstanding anyone who has some sort of physical defect or abnormality). Hearing is really more of a state of the heart than a state of the ears. Even a deaf person can “hear” in this sense. They can “hear” the Word of God through reading the Scripture. They can “hear” the Word of God when someone communicates gospel truths to them. Anyone has the capacity to hear. The problem is that most people don’t want to hear because of what hearing actually entails.
This leads to the second question. What does it mean to hear? Biblical hearing is more than just receiving and processing the audio waves. True hearing is receiving what is said / written and then acting upon it. True hearing entails obedience. So, in a sense, you can hear without hearing. Jesus quoted from Isaiah when He explained why people weren’t picking up on His parables. He said:
For this people’s heart has grown dull, and with their ears they can barely hear, and their eyes they have closed, lest they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears and understand with their heart and turn, and I would heal them. (Matthew 13:15, ESV)
It’s not that the people couldn’t physically hear or physically see—their ears and eyes were working just fine. But the problem was that they were not truly hearing and seeing—they refused to accept what Jesus was teaching and they refused to live according to its implications. The problem was not the ears or eyes, rather, it says that their heart had grown dull. The heart was bad, and it made them spiritually deaf and blind.
But we have to be careful in pointing fingers at others. We might say that this deafness and blindness is a problem of the lost. But notice what is going on in Revelation 2:7 that I quote above—it is a warning to the church. A church can become deaf to the Word of God. Even saved, born-again, Bible-believing Christians can have a dull heart leading to living like a deaf and blind person. A church that lives for itself or lives like a country club or lives for the world will deafen itself to the convicting call of Christ to repent and return to its first love. We have to pray to God to give us listening ears and obedient hearts, and we actually have to obey when it comes down to it. We may talk a good game, but our choices and actions might say something different. May we at Harvest Baptist Church choose to hear and obey and we will see ourselves becoming more than conquerors in the face of whatever this world may throw at us.