Take Care How You Listen | Behold Your God Podcast

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Well, welcome to the Behold Your God podcast. I'm Matthew Robinson, the director of Media Gratiae, and I'm joined again by my good friend and co -host,

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Dr. John Snyder, pastor of Christ Church New Albany and the author of the Behold Your God series.

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We're here in John's study at Christ Church New Albany, coming to you with another episode of the

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Behold Your God podcast. This one is titled, Take Care How You Listen. John, thanks for being here again.

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Yeah, great to be here. We've been thinking about the subject of hearing in the Christian life, and we've been trying to apply the command of Christ from Luke 8, 18, take care how you hear.

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Now, hearing might not be something that really jumps out at us immediately as being a significant part of the

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Christian life, or even a significant responsibility for each individual Christian, but it really is because we are the only ones in the universe who serve a speaking

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God. The fact that God speaks is obvious. He speaks to us through general revelation, of course, in creation.

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He speaks to us in special revelation, which is through His Word, and that primarily through the preaching of His Word.

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You know, as I was thinking about this topic and thinking about Christian history, how has this been understood in the past,

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I was reminded that in the second Helvetic confession, which is a confession of faith written in the 1560s, they put it really boldly.

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They put it like this, the preaching of the Word of God is the Word of God. That sounds like a really strong statement.

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You think, where do they get that? How do they back that up? Well, in the Scriptures, Jesus Himself says in Luke 10, 16,

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He who hears you, hears me. And then in Romans 10, 14, the

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New American Standard rightly renders that, How will they believe in Him whom they have not heard?

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And how will they hear without a preacher? And so the implication is that Christ Himself is speaking in the

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Gospel proclamation, making the preached Word the primary means of grace.

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And then, of course, Paul says it very clearly to the Thessalonican Church, When you received the

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Word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the

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Word of men, but as what it really is, the Word of God, which is at work in you, believers.

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That's 1 Thessalonians 2, 13. Yeah, and Paul in 1

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Corinthians says a similar thing. He says, For since in the wisdom of God, the world through its wisdom did not come to know

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God, God was well pleased through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe.

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And when we look at this topic, it really is a thrilling reality for the believer that we do belong to a

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God who has a mouth and speaks, so unlike the idols of the world, which the

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Old Testament points out. They have ears, they don't hear, a mouth, they don't speak, hands, they don't work, feet, they don't move.

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But our God is not like that. And so it is wonderful to realize that He not only speaks to us through His Word, but He chooses,

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He calls, He equips, and He sends men with that Gospel message to us.

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But that does bring us up to really a big sticking point. We could ask this question.

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If God is a speaking God, then why is humanity in such a mess? And the only answer is that actually, every one of Adam's family was born with a spiritual deafness.

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Now, not deaf to every voice. Sadly, we're very responsive to certain voices that we should not be responsive to.

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But the one voice we cannot afford to miss is the one voice that by nature, we're deaf to that voice.

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Well, especially here in the South where we live, and certainly in other parts of the world where it's still part of the cultural climate to attend church, so many people still go to church and they listen to sermons week in and week out.

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And yet sadly, we know from personal experience that it's not just the person outside the walls of the church that deals with this awful condition of spiritual deafness.

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There are people in the pews who are spiritually deaf and they sit under the Word of God and they don't hear.

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Now, that shocks us maybe when we consider it, but really it shouldn't. In John 5,

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Jesus, He's speaking to the Jews. He says, you search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life, but it's these that testify about me and you're unwilling to come to me so that you might have life.

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And so it's amazing. It's an amazing picture. Here's the very living Word of God, the second person of the

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Godhead, and He's standing in front of these unbelieving Jews. And the more that He speaks, the scripture tells us, the more that they were seeking to kill

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Him. So how do we make sense of all that? And how do we spot a spiritually deaf person?

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Well, you know, Paul says in Ephesians 2 that we are dead in our trespasses and sins.

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And I think we understand that as spiritually, we are completely unresponsive, like a corpse, unresponsive to the

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Word of God, unresponsive to the witness of believers around us. And part of that is that we're spiritually deaf.

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We don't hear. Now if you talk about how to spot a spiritually deaf person, though, that becomes pretty difficult.

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Think about a natural deafness, a person who is physically hearing impaired. We could ask ourselves some questions.

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What do they look like? Well, what gender are they generally? Well, they're from both genders.

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What race? Well, we find them in all races. You know, what nation, what age, what temperament and personality?

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So when we talk about a person being hard of hearing, it's not like you can spot that. It shows up in every type of person in every generation from every background.

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Now think about it. Think about that same thing spiritually. What church does spiritual deafness show up in?

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Well, actually it shows up in all churches. There's spiritual deafness in Baptist churches. There's spiritual deafness in Presbyterian, Methodist, Congregationalist, Anglican churches.

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What kind of person is spiritually deaf? Well, we find men and women. We find grandmothers and grandfathers, but we also find grandchildren.

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So spiritual deafness runs straight through humanity, and it's found in all types of people.

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Now, the good news. While this is a universal ailment, the consequence of Adam's sin, there is the universal cure that God has sent one,

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His own Son, who had perfect hearing. And in perfectly hearing and responding to the

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Father, His perfect obedience and His sinless sacrifice has plowed away, has opened a way for men and women who don't hear to be able to hear.

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But not only has Christ spoken the truth about the Father to us, but He also sends His Spirit in what the

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Bible calls the new birth or regeneration, and works within a soul in such a way that the hard, stony heart becomes soft, or we could say the deaf ear is opened, and we hear

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God as if for the very first time in the preached Word. Yeah.

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You know, so the new birth. It's wonderful that God does this for His people, but let's bring it back to the verse that we've been basing our last two discussions around,

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Luke 8, 18. Jesus isn't speaking to the unbeliever here, but to His disciples.

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He says, So take care how you listen, for whoever has, to him more shall be given, and whoever does not have, even what he thinks he has shall be taken away from him.

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Yeah, I think that verse, you know, we mentioned that it's a pretty thrilling thing to belong to a God that speaks.

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And look, let's just be honest. From Genesis to Revelation, it's there that God is a communicating

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God, and also alongside that is the reality that that makes listening pretty important for us.

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If we belong to a God that was mute, that couldn't speak, who cares if we don't listen?

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But if we belong to the one God, if the Christian can say, I am the one kind of person on this planet that can listen to the

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Creator through Christ in His Word, well, then it's a pretty significant responsibility, and we don't want to take that lightly.

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The verse you just read makes it clear that there's a type of listening that's not really listening.

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There's a type of careless coming up to the Word of God, and God responds to that careless listening by removing even what little thing we thought we had of spiritual truth.

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So going to church every Sunday may not be a very positive event if we come carelessly, and God is actually taking from us the little bit that we thought we understood.

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But then there's a type of listening. The child can do it. The grandparent can do it. The well -educated, the uneducated, it doesn't matter.

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We come with a humble, earnest heart, and we look yearningly to God, to His Word, and there it is in our hands there.

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God sends a preacher to us. And there's a type of listening that is humble and responsive, purposeful, and God gives and gives and gives to that person much more than they ever had before.

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Now, the Bible gives us some really great pictures of this using the agricultural metaphors, and let me give you just the first one.

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It's well -known. In Matthew chapter 13, we read this, And He spoke many things to them in parables, saying,

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Behold, the sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seeds fell by the road, and the birds came and ate them.

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Others fell on the rocky places where they did not have much soil, and immediately they sprang up because they had no depth of soil.

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But when the sun had risen, they were scorched, and because they had no root, they withered away.

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Others fell among the thorns, and the thorns came up and choked them out, and others fell on the good soil and yielded a crop, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty.

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And then He ends that with that wonderful statement, He who has ears to hear, let him hear. So let's think about what, you know, later in the passage,

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Christ explains it. The seed is the Word of God. It goes out. And some of our hearts,

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I mean, what kind of heart you bring to a sermon determines really what you get from the sermon. So you come to a sermon with a heart that is so hard, that when the seed falls on it, even though it's perfectly good seed, it does you no good because the cares of life immediately come and fill your mind, and whatever the preacher was saying about Jesus and you, it's gone before you get into the car.

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Then there's other people, though. Their heart is like the shallow soil, and the seed falls on it, and immediately it seems to take root, and a plant just, you know, it just breaks the soil, and everyone watching might become very encouraged at first, but when hard times come,

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Christ says, because there's no real root system, it proves itself false, we could say, and it withers.

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The other kind of heart we could bring is a heart that's really full of all the stuff of this world.

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It doesn't have to be bad stuff. It can be really good stuff. It can be the very gifts that God has given us in kindness that ought to lead us to repentance, but instead the good gifts become the best idols.

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And so the seed falls on our heart. We seem to be responsive, but when life's things rise up, they just choke out the seed, and we really just don't have room for Christ.

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And in this parable, there's only one kind of heart that is responsive. It's the heart that is soft, and plowed, and uncluttered, and ready for what

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God says. Yeah. So, even with the work of God in the soul, and He's come,

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He's united us to Christ, He's brought us to spiritual life in Him, He's given us eyes to see,

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He's given us ears to hear, this miracle of regeneration that God does in His goodness and in His grace to His people, still, that doesn't mean that every

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Christian will always get the same benefit from a sermon, does it? What are some things that might keep a believer from hearing the voice of God and the preached word as we should?

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Well, another agricultural metaphor that we find in the Old Testament is the issue of fallow ground.

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Let me read you just two places where this shows up. The prophet Hosea, to a very rebellious, sadly drifting

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Israel, writes this, So, as in sowing seed, so with a view to righteousness, reap in accordance with kindness, break up your fallow ground, for it is time to seek the

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Lord until He comes to rain righteousness on you. Now, another passage is in Jeremiah, chapter 4, verse 3,

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Thus says the Lord to the men of Judah and to Jerusalem, break up your fallow ground, and do not sow among thorns.

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Okay, so hold on. Mississippi, where we live, is a fairly agrarian culture. There's a lot of farming and agriculture, just like that area of northeastern

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Jerusalem where the prophet lived in his day. So we might have a better idea of what fallow ground is than some other people would who haven't seen fallow ground.

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So define fallow ground for me, also in the sense that the prophet's using it metaphorically there.

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So fallow ground, physically, in normal life, would be ground that has been allowed to be left alone.

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So it was ground that once was plowed and planted and productive, but you know the cycle that God gave to Israel, six years they would use the land and then the seventh year they would let it lay fallow.

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They would rest during that seventh year. And so, you know, for a farmer, it's obedience to the

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Lord in that culture. So the seventh year he leaves it alone. It's not plowed. So the ground becomes hard and it starts to get covered in weeds.

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Now the next year after that, if the farmer were to go out with really good seed and just throw the seed on top of the land, he really would not have any reason to expect a good harvest.

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It would almost be a complete waste of his time if anything came up. So we take that picture and we look at it spiritually.

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Imagine a person who God has opened their ears and their heart has been made new.

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And you know, so as a believer, there's a stretch of time where people watch them.

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They are astonished at how different they're becoming. I mean really, as Christians, we know what to call it.

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Christ is being fashioned in them. The fruit we're looking at, it's Christ -likeness. But they become careless.

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So perhaps like what we've been talking about, perhaps they've not come to the Word of God with that soft heart and they allow other things to clutter it.

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So through neglect of their soul, through not being careful to continually humble themselves before the

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Lord to keep their repentance up to date, on the outside they're going through all the same motions.

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They're always at church and they're having their nice quiet times at home and they're reading good books. But they haven't dealt with their heart.

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It's unplowed and now it's become hard and it's also become cluttered.

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And so when the Word of God goes out on it, we have as much right to expect real

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Christ -likeness would flow from those sermons as we would have for the farmer to think that he would receive a harvest off of a fallow ground.

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Yes, so the truth is that as amazing as it is that we have a God who speaks and that in His wisdom

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He's chosen to make the primary means of grace to His people to be the preached

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Word, the truth is that no matter how much preaching we listen to, so no amount of sermons, no amount of conferences that we go to, no matter how many podcasts we listen to, none of that will help us at all if we come with this hard, cluttered heart, fallow ground that we've refused to break up.

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And that's a sobering thing to think about because we've really never lived in a time when we had more access to preaching than we do right now.

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I mean, there are people who listen to sermons all day at work on the earpods and when they're out for a run or, you know, when they're cutting the grass.

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And, you know, this may be you, and this may be the answer to sort of the nagging question if you're listening.

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You know, why is it that I'm listening to so many good sermons? I listen to so many good podcasts, and yet I'm just not moving forward spiritually.

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Well, if we're sowing among thorns, as the prophet warns us not to, then all that can do us no good.

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What are some ways that we could diagnose that in our lives? Well, if we take that picture, the agricultural pictures, and if we could just, maybe we could give ourselves a simple test.

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I like things to be pictorial and simple. It's easy to kind of carry it with you through the day.

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So the Christian just goes out throughout the day with all the busyness that we have. We can't remember everything a podcast says.

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We can't remember everything the preacher said. We probably forget a lot that our own study of the Scripture that morning said.

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But you can take this picture. Take the picture of a field. Imagine that your life is one acre of property, and you go out and survey it.

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Would you say, or maybe we ask it this way, how would you measure the yield, the harvest, that is a consequence of what you've been listening to?

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Would you say, like a farmer, you're getting 100 to 1? So you plant one kernel of corn, but up jumps a stalk, and there's much more than 100 kernels on that stalk.

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Are we getting 100 to 1? Would any of us say, with a clear conscience, with our families right there, to say, yes, you're right.

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When I listen to a sermon, when I read the Bible, I'm finding 100 changes.

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For that one sermon, probably we would feel a little uncomfortable saying that. Well, what about 50 to 1?

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What about 30 to 1? Really, many of us would have to hang our head in shame and say, you know, really?

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I'm hoping for 1 to 1. I've heard a sermon this week, and I would like my wife,

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I would like my kids, I would like the people that work with me to be able to look at me and say, you know, every time you go to church, you come back to work, and there's something a little different about you.

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That would be a wonderful test for us. Yeah. We've been thinking about this individually, but would the same thing apply corporately?

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I mean, I'm thinking of churches where the Word is preached and families that sit under sermons and have family worship, et cetera.

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Yeah. I think any spiritual entity could use that test. So a family of believers, you know, you ask yourselves, guys, are we being changed?

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Have we believed that horribly believable lie that we've gone far enough with Christ?

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I mean, we've produced enough. You know, the Master has nothing more to ask of us. Think about a church, a church that regularly plows its heart.

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The individuals, the pastor, I mean, really a lot of this has to do with the leadership. Does the leadership use the

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Bible in a way that can plow the heart? Now, not every sermon can be plowing. It would be like going out and plowing a garden, and then you plant the garden, and then right when the stuff starts to break the ground, you go back out and plow it again.

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Well, what kind of harvest can you expect if you plow every week? Sure. So we plow and we plant, and there are those times where a sermon is just a spring, a gentle spring rain.

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The gospel just comes, the love of Christ, the patience of God, the faithfulness of God, and it fertilizes the soul and things thrive.

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But there are times in every church's life, periodically, where we have to step back and say, guys, we've gotten kind of hard and cluttered, so plow.

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And the preacher can do that. But the individual has a responsibility to do that. And sometimes you have to take a pickaxe to what

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Tozer called the most sensitive flesh of your heart, and you have to make room for what the

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Bible just said to you. Now, if we go back to the metaphor of being kind of hard of hearing, hearing impaired, think about what we might expect in a person spiritually using a physical ailment as a picture.

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So if I don't plow up my heart, if I let the ground get foul, what can

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I expect? Well, think of a hard of hearing person. When you first start getting hard of hearing, and I'm 49, and I think that I have to admit that I'm starting to get a little hard of hearing.

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My kids tell me I don't hear things they hear, and at first I thought they were just being goofy.

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My wife tells me I don't hear very well. I thought, well, you mumble. And that's the first stage. Well, think of it this way.

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First, you start missing conversations that you don't know you're missing. You don't miss the whole conversation.

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You just miss parts of the conversation. So if someone says to you, did you hear that conversation? You say, I heard it.

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Of course I heard it. I was right here. But you didn't hear it all. And as it progresses, you hear less and less, and you don't realize it.

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So if we're not careful, we can become spiritually hard of hearing as believers. We come, the preacher preaches, the

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Bible is laid out in front of us, and we think we're hearing it all just like we always used to.

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But our hard heart is missing some pretty key elements. And it doesn't even bother us because we don't notice.

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Or, as I mentioned, we say other people mumble. So I say to my wife, and she says to me, speak up.

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And I say, well, I am speaking up. You can't hear. No, she says. You're not speaking up. And so we're at that age now where we have to realize, you know, it may be that it's me.

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But in a church, it can go a long way. A church, an individual, can hear the

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Word of God over and over. And we notice, okay, it starts to get bad enough that we notice we're not hearing the conversation.

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And then what do we do? Well, we're faced with a question. Do I say, it's me. I have become hard of hearing.

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My ears are clogged. Or do we say, you know what? Something's wrong with the preacher.

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Lately, he just doesn't preach right. I don't think he's really on target like he used to be.

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Maybe I should go somewhere else. Maybe, I mean, I can remember as a younger believer thinking that I probably should buy a different version of the

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Bible. Like I'm reading from the King James. I need the new King James. I'm reading from the new King James. I need a new American Standard.

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You know, I need a new Bible. I need a study Bible. I need a nicer Bible. And if I get this, my ears will be opened.

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And it's rarely that. We start to think people are just mumbling spiritually.

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And we need to ask the question of ourselves. Have I become hard? Because I haven't plowed up my heart.

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Another thing that can happen eventually, if things continue to progress when you're hard of hearing, you just realize

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I'm not getting the conversation. So you just yell at the person next to you and say, What'd they say? And that can really isolate a person in life.

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But spiritually, it's much more dangerous. Because everything you get from that point forward is only what someone else can tell you.

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It's like every message from God. It doesn't come from the Scriptures anymore. It doesn't come from the preaching of the Scriptures and the explanation of the

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Scriptures. It comes from somebody that you work with who's a Christian. And they say,

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Well, I don't know, I just feel this way. And you go, Yeah, that makes sense. Or you turn on your TV and there's a preacher on the

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TV who's just giving you his opinions. And you say, You know, I agree with that guy. Everything that you know about God becomes second hand.

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And those are real dangers for us. You know, it's really sobering. And I think probably every believer, we would be the first in line to say,

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Yeah, that's me. And so, you know, to give comfort to the believer, if you feel conviction in that way, respond to it.

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It's certainly not too late. If you feel that kind of conviction, then the Lord is very pleased to...

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I mean, we know the difference between when Satan comes to us with an accusation and when the

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Spirit comes to us with a rebuke. The enemy says, See, there's no hope for you. You've gotten hard of hearing.

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Whereas the Spirit comes and shows us the malady, but then points us to Christ and reminds us of the good gifts of repentance and faith and helps us to use it.

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And so, you know, to encourage those who are feeling conviction over this.

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But then there's also another way of hearing this. And that's to say, Well, that sounds like a bunch of pious hooey to me.

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You know, what's the big deal? I mean, if we're Christians, we're Christians. And we're not going to lose our salvation.

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So, you know, what's the big deal if I lose a little hearing? If maybe I'm not as sharp as I used to be?

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My family's not going to necessarily go apostate. My church's not going to go apostate just because I'm a little hard of hearing.

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What's the big deal? What kind of warnings would you give to people who would have that kind of approach to what we're saying?

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Yeah, that's a really good point. You know, if we don't have the good news, we don't repent.

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Because we just throw up our hands and say, I deserve it. Or, I've tried before. But like you said, you look at the realities of the

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God that speaks to us and the Son's work and the Spirit's work. Triune God.

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Can anything be too hard for Him? He can teach us. Like He's taught hard of hearing kids before.

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But, like you mentioned, there's the other element, the warning. And without the warning, then we tend to become pretty sleepy.

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I think that two dangers in particular come to us. And one, we could say it this way.

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People who are hard of hearing, they're often hearing impaired in the physical realm because it's a genetic thing.

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Their family has deafness in it. So, Mom was hard of hearing.

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I'm hard of hearing. My kids are going to be hard of hearing. So, you know, you find that. It just passes on through the generations.

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We can do that spiritually. Even among Christians. Now, we know that Adam passed down a deafness.

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But I'm talking about not a genetic, but a cultural influence.

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So, let's imagine a young person. They don't even have to be young. A young Christian. So, whether they're 50 or whether they're 15.

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And the person embraces Christ and their ears are open and they just can't get enough of His Word. I mean, we've seen it.

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And it's a real booster shot to everyone in the church that loves the Lord. It's just a reminder of those early years of our betrothal to Christ and the love and the fervency.

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It makes us all, it stirs us all to want to be more careful.

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But what if, what if the church, what if the true believers in the church have become hard of hearing, have become fallow ground, have become careless with how they approach the sermons.

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And the younger believers, the newer believers, watch. And at first, they're just a little shocked.

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Like, ooh, why am I the only one doing this? Maybe they become a little judgmental.

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Oh, Mrs. So -and -so says she's a Christian, but she doesn't seem to pay much attention to the sermon. But, if God is not merciful, oftentimes what we find is we pass on our spiritual deafness to the younger generation.

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And the next generation in that church, they don't have anybody that's listening carefully. It's like they've all learned from us that you don't have to take sermons seriously.

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So there's one danger. We can pass that on to the next generation. And by our lives, not our words, but by our lives, we can say to them, actually guys, you can slow up a little.

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You don't have to take sermons that seriously. Another, I think another danger is taken from the book of Amos.

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And that's where God says these words in Amos chapter 8.

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Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will send a famine on the land. Not a famine for bread or a thirst for water, but rather for hearing the words of the

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Lord. People will stagger from sea to sea, from north even to east.

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They will go to and fro to seek the word of the Lord, but they will not find it. So, can you imagine a believer who has it's like they have walked so wonderfully close to the

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Lord, so intimate, so responsive that their life is just full.

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It's a hundred to one produce. Every word God speaks to them, it's like a hundred areas of the life in very small but real ways are being transformed into the image of Christ.

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But imagine that believer becoming careless, fallow, hard of hearing.

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And God, you know, God disciplines them. God gets their attention in little ways, but they don't want to pay attention.

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So, ultimately in love, God allows them to enter into a time of spiritual famine so that even though they show up at church every

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Sunday and they hear the Bible preached to them, it's like there's nothing being said.

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It's just Bible words, you know, without the spirit, without the impact, the weight of those words that used to be there.

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He has left us just to do church all by ourselves until we repent. But, of course, there is the other option.

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Imagine a person who's come to church. They've been in church all their life, and when the preacher gets up to preach, it's kind of like Charlie Brown's parents.

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Wah, wah, wah, you know. And they think, Bible talk, Bible talk. When is this going to be over? And then

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God gets a hold of them, and He opens their ears, and suddenly they're responsive, and a life that was so miserably empty and religious is now full.

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And that can be any of us. Well, it's very sobering to think about.

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I think that we tend to think, we put a lot of emphasis on maybe the

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Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount, but we forget that Christ gives commands all throughout the

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New Testament. And this is one of them. Be careful, take care how you hear.

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So, I appreciate you walking us through this. It is a very sobering word, but how would you leave the person who, again, maybe feels conviction by this, is afraid, that's me,

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I'm the one, I'm going to wither up and die on the vine. How would you encourage them here at the end?

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Well, you know, the enemy always gives us two lines connected with sin. Before we sin, before we're careless as we approach the sermon, he whispers in our ears, so to speak, it's not a big deal.

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Come on, how many sermons are you going to hear? Who cares if you kind of zone out during the sermon and think about business, think about the kids, think about whatever's happening tomorrow morning.

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So, it's not a big deal, but after we sin and when we see it in light of God, that it was actually against him that I just sinned.

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Then the enemy says to us, wow, you know, after all that he did for you, you treated him like that?

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And he says to us, to tell you the truth, that sin's a pretty big deal. It's so big. I don't think

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God would really be interested in you coming back, repenting, of walking near him again.

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And so those, sometimes I ask myself, which is the more deadly sin? Which is the more deadly lie?

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And which is the greater sin? To take God lightly, or to take his grace lightly? To take sin lightly, or to take the cross lightly?

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And I don't think we could say either one was greater. They're both perilous. But for the person that listens to sermons and thinks, you know, that's,

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I've become that way. I've become hard. I think that the best thing to do is to back away from us.

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And if you're a believer, you look to Christ and you say, you know, salvation was not you putting me on a good track and then wishing me good luck.

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But you are my salvation today. And I lay before you honestly what

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I've done. I have become hardened and careless. And why have I done it? My pride, my unbelief.

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Why? But I deal honestly with the King. But then I step back. I look at that King and I say to myself, no

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God that can speak the way He speaks, that can call matter into existence and fashion it in creation, that can call all spiritual beings to judgment, that can bring life to so many countless hundreds of thousands of souls that cared nothing for Him, that God cannot lack the power to speak again to me, to make my heart soft.

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So I bring myself to Him and I plead with Him for Your glory. Do not leave me in this state of being hard of hearing.

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But if I wasn't a Christian, if I've never felt that the Scripture has kicked the front door in of my life and just turned everything inside out and upside down, and the old master has been laid low, and a new master has been embraced wholeheartedly.

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You know, think differently now. Love differently now. Choose differently now. If that's never happened, why not come to God on God's terms for God's glory and say, these are the things that Jesus Christ said to people just like me.

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And if you don't open my ears, I will be forever without hope. But I read here that you say, come to You, so I'm coming.

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And I need You to speak to me. And He will. Amen. Well, I hope that our discussion has given you something to think about as you walk into church this

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Sunday and prepare to sit under the preached Word of God to hear the voice of Christ behind and through the voice of the minister.

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If this is your first time listening to or watching the podcast, then we do want to thank you for giving us some time.

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If you want to know more, you can visit our blog at Mediagratia .org. The link is in our description here.

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Also, on the blog, you'll find links to all the resources that we've talked about here, and you'll find all of our other episodes in the podcast.

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So John and I are going to continue discussing this subject in a special supporters -only podcast that we record as soon as we finish recording our main podcast each week.

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If you'd like more information about how to come alongside Mediagratia as a supporter that enables us to continue to do big studies like the

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Behold Your God studies, as well as podcasts and other media like this, take a look at our blog and look at the support link that's there.

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We're going to shut this down now and go into our supporters podcast. Thanks for taking time to listen.