SWIFT TO HEAR | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · Aug 2, 1905

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 31, No. 31.

SWIFT TO HEAR.

SOME men’s hearing gets to be very sharp. Take one who is working in a telegraph office: The click of the instrument rings out day and night, carrying messages over the wire. The far ends of the earth receive these despatches; but the moment the call comes over the line for that particular office, he is instantly alert to receive the word that is coming to him.

You and I probably might sit there for hours and hours and hear that call, but it would not appeal to us in the least; the sounds would all be alike to us. But to the one whose ear is trained to hear such sounds, the message is as clear as noonday.

I went into a boiler factory once. Such a bang and clatter as went up from every direction! It was enough to make one distracted. I wondered how men could make themselves understood at all when they spoke to one another. But did they ever do that, or was the work carried on from morning till night with no word spoken? The answer came to me when I tried to tell the foreman of the shop what my business was. He answered me in a tone of voice such as he might have used out-of-doors, where all was still. I was compelled to lean far down, in order to hear what he said at all, while he caught my lightest word. His ear was tuned to all the sounds that seemed to me so distressing.

To every one of His children, God speaks. Not many of us catch the meaning of what He says. Why?—Because our ears are attuned to other sounds. We hear the call of the world when it comes inviting us to scenes of pleasure. Fortune has only to whisper, and we follow her to the ends of the earth. The faintest whisper of sin reaches us, and we obey; but when God, the Father of heaven and earth, stoops to talk with us, we do not hear.

And yet, we are told that we should be swift to hear. We must be, if we would escape the awful allurements of the world about us. Sometimes it seems to us as if God were indeed gone from earth altogether. So dull have our ears become from constant listening to the calls of evil, that we do not recognize even the thunder tones with which He sometimes speaks to us.

But how shall we come to know that God is speaking to us? When the telegraph operator is learning to read that mysterious click which stands for the Morse code, every instrument save the one in the office of his teacher is shut off. The only sound that comes to him over the line is that intended for his own ears. All the disturbing sounds are turned off while he listens to the friend speaking to him at the other end of the wire. So, and so only, can he become conversant with the wonderful art he is studying.

So we need to stop now and then, with all the world shut out, and, in the secret of our closets, listen to God as He tells us the sweet story of His love. When we have once mastered that so that we will know just when He speaks to us, we may go out into the world and hold our hearts true forever and forever against all the noises that sin can possibly make to turn us aside.—Christian Work and Evangelist.