Receptivity Series

Communication is complex. Communicating well is one of the hardest things we undertake to do in our lives, whether with our wives or with our children, or with crowds, like I am doing now. I mean honestly, it’s more than most of us can manage just to learn how to hear our spouse and children correctly on a consistent level, and these are the people we supposedly know best and spend the most time with. We share a common life and set of experiences with them, and we STILL get it wrong a lot of the time.

And yet, week after week and year after year, congregations of people, each person with their own individual feelings, beliefs, opinions, backgrounds, biases, ideas, ideals, and hangups gather in churches all over our country and listen to one human being as he (or she) stands up and delivers one message to the whole group. What’s the chance of that working out well, do you think?

There are times my wife sends me to the store to pick up some things and when I return home and unload the bags, I realize I did not correctly understand what she needed. That can be frustrating, and we’re talking about something as unimportant as milk or bread or dish detergent or toilet paper. What about when the subject at hand is God? What about when it’s eternity? What about when it’s the way we live, and about the quality of our lives with God and with one another? In sermons the stakes are just so much higher and it’s so critical that we all understand what in God’s name we are here to accomplish – what is the point of me standing here week after week – what are you supposed to be doing, what is your role to play in all this, how are you supposed to be hearing, what are you supposed to be seeking to “get out of it”?

So we have talked about how difficult communication is and how high the stakes are when it comes to hearing sermons. So why haven’t you heard a single sermon in your life on how to hear a sermon? I can assure you, most preachers have spent countless hours learning how to prepare and deliver them. We invest so much into that process, as if we are the most important part of it all. But we’re not. Yes it’s important that I speak clearly and persuasively and authentically, but no matter how skillfully I do this, it will make little difference if you do not know how to listen, how to hear, how to think, and how to participate in what it is that I am saying to you. And it’s my responsibility to teach that to you, just as on the first day of class, the instructor realizes that he will need to spend that time educating the students on how to learn what he is going to be teaching. We’re going to spend the next few weeks about how to listen to a sermon.

Six times in the gospels, Jesus says, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.” The fact is that the importance of my skill in speaking pales in comparison to the importance of your readiness to listen, and to your capacity to take what is given and allow God to work it into the deepest places in your life. As you develop that capacity, you will find nuggets of truth and wisdom in more and more things. When that capacity goes undeveloped, the skill and power of the speaker makes almost no difference. Jesus spoke to this spiritual fact very powerfully and directly.