Swift to Hear

We all have voices in our heads. No, not crazy voices. (Well, not all.) But we all listen to stuff in our heads that tells us about lots of things. They tell us about our world around us and they tell us about ourselves. Some time ago psychologists referred to them as "tapes" that we play back to ourselves. Obviously "tapes" are now outdated, but the concept is still with us. We all have things in our head that we tell ourselves about our world, our selves, other people, just about anything. The problem is that when it's in your head, it's less likely to be evaluated. It's like we're going with "Well, it's in there, so it must be true." So we hear something from a favorite source and we incorporate it into our thinking and no longer evaluate it. We hear something from a friend (or an enemy) and we take it to heart and no longer evaluate it. Often it goes in unfiltered; we just take it as it is without initial fact-checking, so to speak. And we tell it back to ourselves and believe it because, well, it's in our heads.

I'm sure from out there (as opposed to in my head) you can see the problem. We know that Satan is the father of lies (John 8:44). He is the god of this world that has blinded unbelievers (2 Cor 4:4) ... who make up the majority of the human race, not a minority (Matt 7:13). We know that the mind set on the flesh is hostile to God (Rom 8:7) and that even for believers the heart is deceitful (Jer 17:9). We know all this, but we still listen to these "recordings" without examination. The truth is, all of us have been lied to and all of us tell ourselves lies and believe them. "I'm too bad to be forgiven" or "I know God says I'm forgiven but I don't think I can be" or "No one loves me" or "Not even God can love me." Maybe your "recordings" go a different direction. "I don't need forgiveness" or "I'm good enough" or "Everyone loves me" all the way to "God is lucky to have me." Whatever the gamut of the lies we tell ourselves, we all do it and we all believe them and we do it without examination.

This puts us in a precarious position. God says "X" and we say "Not X" and try to tell others, in essence, that either God is wrong or their interpretation of what God said was wrong rather than suspecting that we might be wrong. We buy the lie that we can't be forgiven or we don't need to be forgiven. We buy the fabrication that sin is beyond help or not that bad. We embrace the falsehood that God can't love us or that God cannot not love us. And these are just examples sprinkled in among all the other lies we've absorbed from politics, economics, culture, social media, the news media ... you get the idea.

We need to be swift to hear (James 1:19), but who we listen to is important. We've stacked a host of liars on the top of our list and, since we see them as confederates, we listen. The top of that list may be "my experience" or "my evaluation" or "my favorite news source" or the like. We forget that there's a worm in everything -- that the world follows the prince of the power of the air (Eph 2:2) -- and that the voice of God is typically a still, small voice. Jesus said, "Men love the darkness, for their deeds are evil" (John 3:19). Don't be that guy.