If Only My People Would Hear Me

If Only My People Would Hear Me

March 8, 2013

Friday of the Third Week of Lent

By Melanie Rigney

Return, O Israel, to the LORD, your God; you have collapsed through your guilt. Take with you words, and return to the LORD… I will heal their defection, says the Lord, I will love them freely; for my wrath is turned away from them. (Hosea 14:1-2, 5)

“If only my people would hear me, and Israel walk in my ways, I would feed them with the best of wheat, and with honey from the rock I would feed them.” (Psalms 81:14, 17)

One of the scribes came to Jesus and asked him, “Which is the first of all the commandments?” Jesus replied, “The first is this: Hear, O Israel! The Lord our God is Lord alone! You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. The second is this: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
There is no other commandment greater than these.”(Mark 12:28-31)

Piety

Jesus, take the wheel, take it from my hands/cause I can’t do this all on my own/I’m letting go/so give me one more chance to save me from this road I’m on/Jesus, take the wheel. (Written by Brett James, Hillary Lindsey, and Gordie Sampson)

Study

We spend an estimated 70 to 80 percent of our hours awake in communication with others. Of that time, 45 percent is spent listening (vs. 30 percent speaking, 16 percent reading, and 9 percent writing). Despite all that practice listening, we’re still not very good at it. We typically retain only about a quarter of what we’ve heard. There are any number of reasons—we have other things on our minds, we focus on what the other party is wearing or the way he or she speaks instead of on the content, we find the topic unpalatable for one reason or another. You can probably come up with additional variations on those themes.

We don’t listen well to God either. We tend to do a lot of the talking—help me with this problem, fix this for me, why did you let this—and fail to give him our complete attention when it’s his turn. Perhaps we think we already know what he’s going to say because we’ve heard it before, and chosen not to follow through on his guidance. Perhaps we’re afraid we’re going to get bawled out like naughty children. We forget that, as today’s readings show us, when we do listen and attempt to return to God’s ways, we don’t get spanked or sent to our rooms for a time-out. Far from that, actually. We get “the best of the wheat” and “honey from the rock”; our defections will be healed, and we will be loved freely. And those are promises well worth listening to, from the One who never lies.

Action

Just for today, focus on listening to God—no interruptions, no matter how long it takes him to speak his piece or as much as you might dislike what he’s saying to you.