Swift To Hear

Love . . . is not provoked.

1 Corinthians 13:4-5

If you’re in a hotel room and you can hear the people talking next door, you might turn on a radio to drown out the intruding noise. The radio provides a type of “white noise”—competing sound frequencies designed to make it harder for your brain to pick out the intruding voices. White noise generators—machines that produce a low sound made up of thousands of frequencies at once—are used wherever an intruding sound needs to be quieted.

Without knowing it, we live in a world filled with white noise. There are seemingly thousands of voices and sounds competing for our brain’s attention. The problem is that they do their job too well: they keep us from hearing the one voice we truly need to focus on—the voice trying to break through all the white noise. That voice might be our spouse, our child, a friend in need, a counselor with a word of reproof—or it might be the voice of God. Think how much misunderstanding and resulting anger could be avoided if we could tune out all the voices except the one we really need to hear. The apostle James called it being “swift to hear” (James 1:19).

Whose voice is competing for your attention? Make it a point this week to isolate the important voices and give them your full attention.

When he brings out his own sheep, he goes before them; and the sheep follow him, for they know his voice.

John 10:4