Respond to the Word

1996

As you consider God answering that prayer of having hearts that care, consider this. It’s possible, according to the scriptures, to sear your conscience as with a hot iron. Jesus spoke of the parable of the seeds and the sower. He said one kind of seed is that which falls on the path and the birds of the air come and take the seed. That’s been referred to as “gospel-hardened” people. It’s people that have heard the Word of God so much, and that trampled the ground so often over and over and over again over the same spot, that it’s become a path. That hardened path, the seed falls onto that ground and it doesn’t penetrate, it just sits there. And then satan comes and takes away that seed and then it doesn’t exist anymore. You can’t grow a crop without seed, and you won’t have the seed very long and therefore no crop whatsoever that is from God if you allow yourself to go back and forth over and over again over the same path, over the same ground and you don’t respond to it.

There are times early in our walk with God and in certain seasons in our life where God essentially moves us. He brings such a deep conviction and such a sweet spirit over us, that it becomes almost impossible not to respond to the Word of God. It strikes us, it cuts us. We break down in tears and in humility and we say, “God, I want that!”

There are other times, and in fact the majority of times as you go on through your life, when God isn’t going to move you quite that way. He’s going to call you to respond to His Word, and He isn’t going to put you in a position where it’s so easy for you that it just overwhelms you, and you can hardly stop yourself from crying. You’re just going to have to respond to it.

And if you don’t respond to it, if you cut corners and go back and forth over the Word and you hear a song about being a servant, but you don’t change anything tomorrow about it. You hear a song or a teaching about something that convicts your heart, or ought to convict your heart, something that’s not a part of your life, and you don’t do anything about it tomorrow, what happens is, that you tread that path so much you harden yourself. You sear your conscience as with a hot iron, is the way Paul put it. You can sear your conscience.

You’ll think you’re doing okay because you know so much. You’ll be able to tell all kinds of people about all kinds of deep truths. You’ll be able to write glorious letters. You’ll be able to share with people that have never heard these things. But you’ll do it for your own ego because you want to impress people with what you know. God isn’t going to be very amused with that. If you’re not applying it to your life such that your heart is continually soft where you’re cut-able by the Word of God; if you harden yourself to it and don’t respond to it from the heart, whether you’re moved to or not--you know it’s right and so you respond to it. If you don’t do that, you will sear your conscience as with a hot iron, and you’ll lead yourself down a path and a road that is extremely destructive, if not fatal.

Let me reemphasize to you that, “Today if you hear His voice, harden not your heart.” That’s a command. Do not harden your heart if you hear His voice. Don’t be naive and foolish enough to think that you can hear it and not respond to it and everything will go well with you anyway. It’s not like that. Things will not go well with you anyway if you sear your own conscience by not obeying the Word of God. Being self-deceived, James said, by being a hearer and not a doer of it.

So please pay very close attention to things that are from the Word of God and are the Word of God. If you don’t pay attention to what you hear, if you’re not very careful how you hear, as Jesus put it, you’ll end up making a mess of your life and you won’t even know how you got there. It just happens in those simple things of not paying attention or by cutting corners. Someone asks you a question and you answer it half-way because of the consequences of answering it completely and fully. I can give you a thousand examples, but you can think of a thousand of your own.

Don’t cut corners and do not harden your heart, because there are eternal consequences of that. It’s not a game. It’s not just some sort of thing where you can add knowledge upon knowledge. God is very real. His judgment is very real. His blessings are very real. This is not a game. This is very, very, very, very, very real. It is not a game. It’s not for our amusement, or our entertainment.

God, for all of us, we want to get past the rhetoric into the Reality. We don’t exist on this earth, we weren’t born in order to just talk about any of these things. Father, You deserve to have a people that shine forth like the stars in the universe, a city set on a hill that can’t be hidden. A mountain that the nations stream to because they see the Testimony of Jesus and the Life of Jesus. God, we don’t want to have opportunities such as this and to then walk away unchanged. Father, You’re going to have to help us. It’s just too easy to get caught in a whirlwind of the things of the world and the worries and cares and concerns and deceitfulness of the stuff around us. To have our heads and our hearts filled with junk to the extent that we can’t reverence Your Word and fear You as a Great and Mighty King.

We know that it’s a fear that’s the beginning of wisdom, and this wisdom that You’ve shown us, apart from fear is not wisdom at all, it’s delusion. So we want to have the right kind of fear where there is a reverence in our hearts and we don’t go on just mouthing words. We don’t go on just desiring change, but we are decisive in the bringing about of change in response to You. Just as surely as if Jesus tapped us on the shoulder and said, “Would you please go do this?” We wouldn’t just say, “Oh, yes, Lord. Oh yes. That’s a great idea, Lord. That’s so neat. I’ll ponder that for the next ten years.” We don’t want to do that. We want to be a people that are responsive and decisive and obedient in practical things. Real change happens and we need Your help our God, to do that.

We pray that You would use our brothers and sisters and our circumstances and whatever it takes to turn us over Your knee or to lift us higher and elevate us and motivate us in Your grace. Whatever it takes. Father, we want to be different. As we look around, it’s such a disappointment when we look in the mirror or look around and things go on and on and we know they don’t honor You. Father, give us the Insight that we need and the purpose of heart to break out of the time lock that we’re in where all of our time gets stolen from us, and help us to be useful servants of Yours, to do something about the things in our own life and the things in others’ lives, whether believers or unbelievers.

God, break us free from this time warp of floating through time and the calendar gets flipped and flipped and things go on. Father, we want to be like Your Son where absolutely nothing in our path remains unchanged. It’s either the fragrance of life or the stench of death, but nothing remains unchanged. Father, help us to be those kind of people in Your Son. Amen.