Listen--Do You Hear?

Listen—What Do You Hear?

“To be at ease is to be unsafe.” Pope John XXIII When one is not listening; one is at ease and is not awakening. Awakening to what? “Sanctify them in the truth, Thy Word is truth.” John 17:17 Whatever Jesus has to say about any and every thing: our day to day life, our gifts and callings, our hopes and fears, our disappointments, our triumphs, our moment by  moment Overcoming victories, our expected end and our destiny in Jesus—that is what defines his word of truth spoken into and over our life.

We must be daily aroused by the hearing of Jesus. He shares the depths of His conversation with Papa! That is at times disturbing to our plans and illusions. Apart from this depth of listening, we are prone to call our judgments and opinions; vision, prophetic direction, or even his will. “Disturbance leads to conversion, and conversion leads to the Lord.” 

Is His disturbance of your ease causing; let’s say, discomfort? Only in His disturbance of daily truth are we open to his comfort of our daily reality. “Maybe he is gently asking you to let go of some attachment so that you may have more of Him. Be at peace. Whatever it is, you can’t will it, disavow it, or empty yourself of it. It is only the power of a Presence, the compelling attractiveness of a Person, the irresistible loveliness of Jesus Christ that can set you free.” Brennan Manning

Bernard of Clairvaux wrote, “Only he who has experienced it can believe what the love of Jesus is.” In your daily listening to Jesus, he comes to you where you live and loves you as you are. Has he said something like this before as you listened? He declared from the beginning that we are made in the image and likeness of God. Yet we; having not listened, declare something or someone (even ourselves) as not good.

This is a very present word to me. I imagine you to be able to understand by experience. “The Lord once brought me up short with the challenge: “Why do you persist in seeing ________in the hands of the devil, rather than in the hands of their faithful Shepherd?” Once disturbed by listening, I realized that in my mind I had been imagining all of the evils of our present age as being ultimately more powerful than the timeless love of God.” Robert Frost

“Pain, inconvenience, sin---these are the problems  of being, the alarming, embarrassing, even tragic things that God is apparently willing to put up with in order to have beings at all. But whatever the problems are, they are not the root of being. That root is joy and now!

As we listen, we recapture the element of delight in creation. Imagine the ecstasy, the veritable party of joy, wonder, and delight when God makes a person in His own image—when God made you. The Father gives you and I as a gift to Himself. You and I are a response to the vast delight of God. And so are those who may be a part of your disturbance. Regardless of the mess you (or others in your life) have made out of the original clay, wouldn’t you agree with Aquinas that “it is better to be than not to be”?

Have we fully appreciated the wonderful gift we are? Could the Father’s gift to Himself be anything but beautiful? He looks past the present problems, failures, issues and even sins and sees the gift we are in Christ! He has forgotten all that marred our mirror image! He only beholds the beautiful Sons and Daughters that Christ is bringing to glory! In this true present and future mirror image we can look forward to a “new and better way” of loving Jesus Christ and those around us, and I would let them know before life’s evening.

Listening to Papa’s Opinion in Jesus, Ron Ross