Try Softer: He Speaks in the Silence | Part 3

Welcome to the Awakening Church podcast.

We pray this message encourages you and provides the hope and light of Jesus Christ.

Thanks for tuning in.

I'm here really this morning just very simply to tell my story.

I'm here to tell you what Jesus, what the Savior, our Redeemer, I love that word, our rescuer, has done for me.

How he has turned a hard story, a story of my failure, really, into the best of love stories.

And I'm here to remind you that he wants to do the same thing for you.

Not once or twice, but for the rest of your life.

Psalm 107, verse 2 is one of my favorites, where he says, Let the redeemed of the Lord tell their story.

Psalms 107:2

Those who've been rescued from the hand of the foe.

Any of you like me feel like you've been rescued from the hand of the foe?

A few years ago, I sensed God urging me to tell my story.

In fact, I felt him inviting me to do two things.

Isn't it amazing when you have a sense of that invitation?

Two things to do before I die, not a bucket list, but a task list, really.

Ephesians 2, verse 10 tells us that we are God's workmanship, crafted uniquely, given specific tasks, assignments that are ours to do, that if we don't do them, I believe they just get left undone, and our world is the poorer for it.

Ephesians 2:10

My first and I believe most important assignment, what they call your first mountain.

My first mountain was raising our four kids along with Phil to love and walk with Jesus.

There is nothing more important that I could possibly think of giving my life to than that.

And it's still my most important job.

I'm now the matriarch of a family of 17, soon to be 18, still growing.

But as it turns out, the Spirit had more for me when that was less of my main job.

In John 9, verse 4, Jesus Himself said, all of us must quickly carry out the task assigned us by the one who sent me.

John 9:4

Because there's little time left.

Do you hear that urgency?

A little time left before the night falls and all work comes to an end.

And I felt him leading me, pushing me, inviting me, daring me to write my story, to write it for the next generation, to write it with my children in mind, and my children's children.

So I did, I wrote my story.

But someday when I die and my life gets summed up in just a few words on a tombstone, it's not going to say, here lies Diane Comer, mother of John Mark or Matthew or Rebecca or Elizabeth, wife of Phil, writer of books, achiever of great things.

No, none of that stuff.

I know exactly what words I want written there.

Diane Comer, 1959 to, who knows when.

She delighted in God.

Because that has become the truest part of my story.

How God brought me to this place where my life is defined, not by how well it's going, how great my relations are not, nor by who I know, not by what I do, certainly not by what I achieve, but by simply and honestly finding my worth, my purpose, my value, my delight, my joy in God, in loving him, and then in being allowing him, experiencing him, loving me.

I want to tell you my story in the hope that, first of all, that you can find yours.

Because you have a story just like I do.

It's a story of God coming near.

The book of Hosea is a story of God pursuing you, of inviting you and alluring you out to the wilderness where he can capture your heart, your whole heart.

Because that's where the joy is, the beautiful, satisfying life that you crave, the life all of us long for.

Little background to start my story.

I grew up in my early years in Europe as an American living overseas.

And while we were living there, we kept hearing about this thing in the 60s and the 70s called the Jesus movement, going on back home in the States.

And one day I picked up the Stars and Stripes newspaper, and right there on the front of the page, top of the fold, was a picture of thousands of young people with their hands raised and a band in the background, all bearded and you know, kind of post-hippy days.

Hands raised, worshipping Jesus.

And a hunger began to form in my heart with that picture of to know what this Jesus was all about.

I didn't understand, I'd heard of God, I kind of knew, believed God, had no clue where Jesus fit into the picture.

He came back to America when I was in high school and we stumbled upon accidentally a really great church, now venture church.

And one by one, each of us in our family gave our hearts to the Lord.

We were baptized, we were discipled, we were taught, we were transformed by the Lord Jesus Himself.

Our family was radically, radically changed.

But somehow in there I adopted the thinking that if I would be very good and do all the right things and be very disciplined, discipline was a huge part of that, be very disciplined, then God would look at me with favor and he would bless me.

One of the phrases I kept hearing about that time was God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.

Everyone was tweeting that back in the 70s, even before Twitter wasn't invented.

And I loved that message.

And it is true, God does love you more than any of us can grasp.

He does have plans for you, wonderful plans.

But just in case, I had my list of rules and I made sure I could check every one of those rules off.

I had the idea that if I could just be disciplined enough, if I could just read my Bible enough, if I could just try hard enough over and over and over again, then God would bless me with a wonderful life.

And by wonderful and by bless, I thought that all would go well with me and I would basically live happily ever after.

It was a great theology, even though it was pretty empty, but I liked it and it worked.

Seemed to.

God did bless me, gave me a tall, handsome, godly husband.

You know, I mean, you know, Phil back then was the catch of the church.

He was a worship leader, drummer in a rock band, just out of his rock band, kind of, you know, that little bit of bad boy.

Drum of the 1970 Le Mans.

You need to look that up after church, not now, Google it.

And Forest Green 1970 Le Mans.

I mean, come on.

He was the coolest guy ever.

And I was this shy person, could hardly talk to him.

And then God gave me one by one four beautiful, amazing, happy children.

We had by that time a lovely home in Santa Cruz with the view of Monterey Bay.

Now, a little tiny view, you might have needed binoculars to see it, but it was there.

I had everything I'd ever wanted.

I had the life.

You know what I'm saying?

And yet something was wrong, and I knew something was wrong.

I wasn't as happy with all these blessings, with this wonderful life as I thought I ought to be, as thought I should be.

Worse, deep down inside I was in a constant state of restless, anxious dissatisfaction.

Every morning I got up to do what I was supposed to do.

I read my Bible, I'd get out my list of prayer cards to make sure I didn't forget anything, to make sure God didn't forget anything.

I'd make my mental list of everything I was supposed to do so I could check it off and be a good girl so that God would bless me with a wonderful life.

And every morning I woke up dreading my day.

Any of you?

Any of you wake up dreading your day for no good reason?

Along about that time, God brought into my life, I believe, He brought them into my life, a couple of women whose very lives made me long for more.

There was Lori Kais.

Lori's still alive, she's in her 80s.

Lori can still glean more wisdom from the Word of God than any woman I know and make it real in practical everyday life.

I so look forward to her texts to me because there's always this rich nugget that I've never noticed or seen before.

And she's always so excited to see these treasures.

She picks up treasures and passes them on.

And there was Muriel Cook.

She was beautiful and elegant and so filled with the joy and the delight of God.

I wanted to be just like her.

These women were women at rest.

The phrase I hear a lot now and I really like is a peaceful presence.

Do you know anybody like that in your life?

Somebody who is just to be around them is to breathe deep, your shoulders relax, and you think, ah, a peaceful presence.

Psalms 34, verse 5 describes this kind of person who looks to him and are radiant.

Psalms 34:5

These women radiated something more, and I didn't know what it was.

And then there was Kathy.

Kathy wasn't pretty at all.

She sang in the choir.

She's had a hard life.

Her life was hard in that moment.

Her husband was in prison.

Every time the choir would sing a song about the savior, about the redeemer, about the cross, Kathy wept.

Tears would flow down these deep crevices on her face that lined her face and drip down her chin.

And I would look at her and say, think, what is Kathy crying about?

Like I don't get it.

I wanted that.

I wanted to be moved like Kathy was.

I wanted to be tender.

And I knew that that wasn't who I was.

I tried everything to chase those feelings of discontent away.

Trying harder didn't work.

Being more disciplined didn't work.

Reading books about trying harder and about being more disciplined didn't work.

I didn't dare tell anybody the truth about me.

I just kept it locked up inside and pretended that I was something I wasn't.

And sometimes, lots of times, I blamed others.

Maybe it was Phil's fault.

He was too busy, he was out too many nights, I was carrying too big a load.

Maybe it was my children's fault.

Maybe I had too many of them.

Maybe it was just that fixer upper house we lived in that we didn't have enough time or skill or money to fix up.

And so I asked God to do whatever he needed to do to make me really close to him, to have that deep down sense of his presence, that satisfaction that I saw in just a handful of people.

I asked him to give me that kind of intimacy that made these women so tender, that made them weep over the cross.

Now I want to pause right here and just come out of the story for a minute.

I do not believe for one second that God heard my prayers and just said, okay, I'll just zap Diane with something really hard so she stops trying so hard to be so good and so perfect all the time.

I'm just gonna mess up her life a little bit so that she gets this whole grace thing.

No.

He's our father.

He loves us like nobody else.

I do not believe that God heard my prayer and thought, hmm, okay, I'll make something go wrong to teach Diane a lesson.

I do believe that God knew beforehand the kind of disruption that the fall, the way back in Genesis 3, caused.

Not only in our souls, in our spirits, but even in our bodies.

That for me, the corruption that fall happened at the fall when sin entered the garden would mean an autoimmune rarity that would cause a part of my body to be broken irreparably.

So back to my story.

Just had my third child, and I was in that glow of relishing my little baby, Elizabeth.

John Mark was five, Becca was two and a half, and my ears seemed plugged, just sort of muffled, like they were full of cotton or something.

And I'd had pneumonia when I was pregnant, and so I thought maybe I had water on the ear, something like that.

So I made an appointment with an ear specialist so that I could just go in, get a pill to unmuffle my ears.

I just get in there real quick, pick up a prescription, and go home.

But after what seemed like hours to me of listening to pings and whistles and long silences with the audiologist obviously marking on her chart, the doctor asked me to join him and to come into his office.

That's never a good sign.

And he sat behind his desk and he wouldn't look at me.

He just kept his head down, staring at his papers.

I remember him constantly re-stacking them, making him perfect, completely detached.

And my heart was racing, thinking, this is not how it's supposed to go.

And after a long pause, he told me that I had a major hearing loss.

He used words like severe and profound.

Said there was nothing he could do about it.

I ought to get hearing aids right away.

We would do some tests, but and by the way, it's going to get much worse.

All I heard was that dreadful word hearing aids.

No way.

Hearing aids, my grandpa wore hearing aids.

I did not need hearing aids.

I was 26 years old.

I went home, told Phil, cried, and then I did what I'd always done when hard things had happened in my life and nothing very hard had happened.

I stuffed it deep down inside and plastered a fake smile on my face.

I would be okay.

Some of you do the very same thing and it doesn't work, does it?

Not for long.

It just begins to ease out, eke out of our pores, or explode at inconvenient moments.

It's difficult to describe to another person what it's like to begin to lose your hearing and to lose it quickly.

First, it was the little things.

I couldn't hear the telephone ringing if I was in another part of the house.

You know, this is back when we all had these wall phones attached to the kitchen usually.

And then there was this long kind of a bungee cord that you could walk around with.

You know, those are vintage now.

Most of you have never seen them.

How many of you have never seen a wall phone actually working in somebody's house?

Oh, come on, be honest.

You haven't seen it.

I mean, it's the weirdest thing, honestly.

So many of you are so young.

Remember that this when you get older.

It's so weird when things that were normal in your life all of a sudden are vintage.

That is really an odd feeling.

When I finally did hear it ring, I could hardly ever tell who it was.

All voices quickly began to sound exactly alike to me, male or female.

Once I carried on a confusing conversation with Lucy for about 10 minutes until I realized suddenly I wasn't talking to Lucy.

I was talking to Stacy.

Being in hearing impaired involves a lot of frustration and a lot of embarrassment.

A lot of moments when you just feel so stupid and out of it and pushed away from the real world.

It was so frustrating to want to talk to somebody and want to get to know someone and know that if I tried to enter into the conversation, I was probably going to miss so much of it.

It really wasn't even worth trying.

To be afraid of a conversation that I had no chance of understanding.

Or worse, to see that dread look on a person's face that makes me know that I didn't understand and I said the wrong thing at the wrong time.

But it was at home that the pain was the greatest.

When my baby, Elizabeth, cried in the night and I could not hear her.

Mother doesn't hear her baby cry.

When Becca, who was the cutest little toddler ever did see, just full of vivacity and joy, she'd wrap her dimpled arms around my neck and whisper sweet secrets.

And I didn't hear.

Or when John Mark, my sweet, quiet, introverted thinking son, chattered in the car all the way home from camp where he'd been away for the first time, and I had no clue what he said.

I was driving my car crying out to God, how can this be?

The pain right there.

That's grief.

Nothing else really matters.

I burned cookies because I couldn't hear the buzzer.

Alarm clocks became useless.

Couldn't pick up the phone to make an appointment to get my hair done.

I couldn't listen to music.

Those are just inconveniences.

I wanted to hear what my people had to say.

I wanted to be involved in their lives, to know their hearts.

I had pictured them as teenagers sitting on the side of my bed late at night telling me everything.

I wanted to carry their burdens, I wanted to share their joys, I wanted to celebrate with them, I wanted to know their secrets.

I wanted to know them.

Would they still talk to me?

How could they?

What about Phil?

Would he grow distant?

Would I lose him?

Phil thinks out loud.

Now we call them an external processor.

He thinks out loud, he processes out loud.

His greatest need is ironically for me to listen.

To help him sort it out just by listening.

How can I be a wife?

How can I be a mother and not hear?

I was terrified of a life without sign, sound, of all that I was losing in the process of losing my hearing.

I began to sink into a deep dark depression.

I'd never experienced depression before, never really known about depression.

Everyone has their low days every now and then, but this was darkness, like darkness at the edges of my eyes, it felt like.

That's a no-brainer.

So why wouldn't he?

Let me warn you, as one who's been there, just how terribly dangerous self pity really is.

You don't want to go there.

Trust me, you don't want to go there.

It's like digging yourself into a pit that you cannot climb out of on your Own.

It's a tool that the enemy has been using for centuries to defeat you and me.

And it works remarkably well.

Phil began to grow alarmed.

He saw me withdrawing and tried so hard to cheer me up in his cheerful way.

He'd say things like, Come on, die, you're not dying or anything, you know.

What's a few, what's a little hearing anyway?

Okay, that did not go over so well.

Just he made listen to this.

We might have had a few words over that one.

But I wrapped myself up tight in a cloak of self-pity and shut everyone out.

Me, the perfect little pastor's wife who followed all the rules.

I read my Bible and heard only harshness.

I thought, who likes him?

Not me.

I went to church and I thought inside, it's not true.

How can God say that he loves me and let me go deaf?

I cried in worship, not tears of tenderness and of brokenness, but tears of intense anger that God was not coming through for me, that he'd abandoned me.

I hear people say all the time, it's okay to be angry at God.

Part of me wants to agree and does agree.

Obviously, David poured out every emotion to God, and God never rebuked him for it.

Part of me knows that God values truth, that he values authenticity, but I'm not so sure personally that it's actually really okay to be that angry at God, at least not in the embittered way, blaming way that I was pushing him away.

I think I was in a very dangerous place back then.

My soul was teetering right on that brink of rebellion.

And sometimes I think now I look at my kids all walking with Jesus, leading their own kids to walk with Jesus, all effective followers of him.

And I think, what would have happened if I continued down that path?

And I shudder.

But does the Father, does the Savior ever turn his back on us?

Never.

He never turned his back on us.

2 Timothy 2.13 says that even if we are, maybe I would say even when we are faithless, he remains faithful.

This Savior who died for us didn't do it when we were all dressed up and doing everything right and trying our hardest.

He hung there seeing the real me, that I am, not the me I pretend to be.

He loved this whole package just as I am.

And every once in a while, given the right circumstances and the right pressures, we get a terrifying glimpse of who we really are without him, apart from him.

Like every relationship, there will come a time when you don't understand why and what's going on.

When my hearing began to fail, it was one of those times for me.

Why?

Who could possibly say there's anything good in a young woman, a young mom going deaf?

Why wouldn't he take this thing away?

But here's what I know now that I didn't understand then.

When Jesus hung on the cross willingly, nobody made him, for us, for you, for love, he was for one long, agonizing moment abandoned by God.

In those horrifying moments on the cross, God did look away.

God did reject him.

Jesus was willingly abandoned for you and for me.

For the part of me that rejected him when one thing went wrong in his life, for that entitled part of me, he was willingly abandoned so that we would never be abandoned.

People will abandon you, people will cancel you, people will leave you.

He will never abandon you.

He hung there so that our sin would never keep us from the Father, so that intimacy, satisfaction, the life that is truly life, the Bible calls it, would always be possible.

Back to my story.

One evening after church, at Phil's urging, maybe pushing a little bit, I asked for the elders of our church to pray for me.

Now, James Fives has a whole section about when if any of you is sick or hurting or failing, go to the elders of your church and ask them to pray for you.

So I did that for healing for this terrible thing that was coming at me like a train wreck to make it go away.

And I thought, well, I've begged and I've begged God and He won't listen to me.

I'm not good enough.

Maybe He'll listen to these men.

These men, these friends, they prayed like I had never heard people pray before.

They prayed that God would heal me.

They believed that He could, that He would.

They wept with compassion.

They laughed at God's goodness in the midst of it all.

And as they prayed, in this little cinder block room, side room of the church, something happened.

And it's still so hard for me to wrap words around it and try and describe.

But 1 Timothy 6.16 says that God dwells in unapproachable light.

Unapproachable light.

And I think, no, I don't even just think.

I know with an absolute holy confidence that He let me see a little glimpse of that light just enough to turn my life upside down.

Like the sun streaming through the clouds on a day like today, and in the valley you see all these rays of light coming down and hitting the ground.

That's exactly how it felt to me.

And I heard these simple words, really just two words.

Two words in my name, and I heard it as if I was really hearing it.

It's okay, Diane.

Diane, it's okay.

Sternly, it's okay.

Over and over and over again, as these men were praying, I was hearing, it's okay, it's okay, it's okay.

And I knew with an unquestionable knowing, I've never doubted for a minute that he was saying no to the healing.

I've come now to call it the beautiful now, but at the time it was just no.

That he had a gift for me in this affliction, a treasure, something I needed, something I wanted more than I wanted to hear.

He would make it okay.

I would have to trust him.

Somehow, somehow, I still do not understand.

It was okay in that moment.

Hearing him, seeing that light, that glimpse of light, just like that, supernaturally, right then, God picked me up out of the pit of despair.

I had dug myself into and set my feet on solid rock.

On him, I will never be the same.

I am not the same woman.

He healed me.

Not my ears, but me.

The deepest part of me that I didn't even know needed healing.

Very next morning, God spoke to me through his word in a way I'd never experienced before.

Psalm 40 has become my song.

It says, I waited patiently.

This is David.

And you know, David was anything but patient.

He was this intense guy.

And actually, the word patiently can sometimes be better translated intently.

I waited intently for the Lord.

He inclined to me and heard my cry.

He brought me up out of the pit of destruction, out of the miry clay, and he set my feet upon a rock, making my footsteps firm.

And he put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise to our God.

Many will see and fear and trust the Lord.

And then in verse 6, my ears thou hast opened.

And he has.

He has opened my ears to hear him, to know him in a way I never would have known him before when I was trying so hard.

Now I know why he died for me.

Now I understand why Kathy cried at the cross.

I got that glimpse of who I really am apart from the Savior.

I am not and never will be a good girl.

Not really.

I cling to him like I never did before because I know how desperately I need him.

How close I came to throwing it all away.

I love Deuteronomy 13:4, especially the end.

Deuteronomy 13:4

He says Moses is talking and he says, listen to his voice and cling to him.

It's the opposite of trying harder, isn't it?

It's the opposite of discipline.

Just listen to his voice and cling to him.

Throw your arms around his neck and say, I'm holding on and I'm never letting go.

I got up that morning and my whole world was different.

Nothing had changed, and everything had changed.

I opened my Bible, and for the very first time, it wasn't about discipline or following the rules or about being a good Christian girl who gets up to have her devotions every day because I should.

God spoke to me in his word.

Words jumped off the page.

Comfort, friendship, a deep, deep knowing.

Correction, but correction that felt so good, like coming clean and being set free.

Assurance that he's with me in the middle of my pain, that he's present, that he would make this terrible thing okay, but he would not make it go away.

And the years that followed, I slowly lost all of my hearing.

By the time I was 30, I was essentially deaf.

I could hear in certain circumstances only.

I wore the biggest, ugliest, they call them deaf aids, hearing aids that they make.

And my world became smaller and smaller as the sounds faded away, and my ability to hear and understand and respond to people diminished.

It was hard.

So hard to function in a world without being able to understand, to hear noise and not know what it means.

I'm not going to pretend that I like that still.

There is a grieving that never really goes away.

I'm now completely deaf.

But a few years ago I had what is called a cochular implant.

It's a surgery for those who lose all their hearing in both ears.

When hearing aids really just can't give enough comprehension anymore, no sound is really able to penetrate the silence.

Essentially, it's a little tiny computer that makes the mechanical sounds that I hear, that we all hear, and turns them into electrical pulses that the brain then can comprehend.

I thank God all the time for the men in white lab coats and brilliant engineering minds who thought up this so that I could come back into this world of hearing.

The father has turned, though, this loss of hearing into an incredible gift for me.

Now I can't wait to get up every morning.

I make my pot of tea, meander out, curl up in my big white chair, I get out my Bible, maybe a couple of different versions, because I love words and the way things are said, and I listen.

The harder it became for me to hear everyone around me, the easier it became for me to just slip into the beautiful silence of hearing God speak as my savior.

It's nothing mystical or especially prophetic, something, certainly nothing weird.

Just everyday stuff giving me the hope and the insight and the wisdom where I need it to do life his way.

Conviction.

I hear lots of conviction.

But those are those gentle corrections that feel like the most real love imaginable.

Sometimes telling me who to pray for, and sometimes even how to pray, as if his whispers in my ears, and then my praying specifically for my people, my family, my friends, as if it matters.

As if it what matters to me matters to him.

God has become my friend.

I was telling my story to a friend once, and she shocked me by saying, You are so lucky, Diane.

She's right.

I am so lucky.

But my story doesn't end there.

I am still deaf.

When I take this little device off, you can only wear it, it attaches to the outside of my school, the receiver, to a magnet, and it starts to ache after a while.

Can't wear it all the time.

I don't sleep in it.

You can't wear it in the water.

When I take this device off, my world is completely silent.

I cannot hear thunder, the smoke alarm, the doorbell, nothing.

I leave water running all the time.

Do you know water makes noise?

And when you don't hear it, you don't notice it.

I burn a lot of dinners.

Don't hear that sizzling.

It's a great excuse.

But with this thing on, I've entered back into the world of hearing once again.

It's not perfect, it's a computer.

If it gets too much information too fast, it gets really distorted.

Hearing is still hard work for me, exhausting at times, as I take every piece of information in that I can to try and make sense of it.

I'm supposed to take this off every day for periods of time, resting from the work of hearing.

And you know, sometimes that is so convenient.

I adore my external processing husband.

I adore how I talk.

I mean, that was one of the things that attracted to me in the first place.

I was so shy and stumbled over my words, and he could just put me at ease.

But sometimes it's just so nice to say, I'm unplugged.

My grandkids have nicknamed it, they call it now my superpower.

I can hear or not hear.

And you know, I wish sometimes that all of you parents of young ones and all of you parents of teenagers could have this gift for a whole weekend.

But the truest truth is that what I thought was the worst thing that had ever happened to me has now become the best thing about me.

You know, if you ever had to ask a question, what is your favorite thing about yourself?

And it feels super awkward, right?

You know, it feels like you're boasting if you say something good.

I realized just even just the other day, and I was reading a book and asked that question, the best thing about me is I lost my hearing.

It's the best thing about me is that I'm deaf.

And I thank God every day for this gift of hearing that came to me in the suffering of not hearing.

I now have an intimacy with my Savior given to me in my failure, in my weakness that I never had in my strength of trying so hard and being so disciplined.

It is his gift to me, and I know that now, so much so that one time many years ago we were camping, and I'd gotten up really early while everyone else was sacked out, and I made my way to a bench I'd seen the day before.

And I sat there with my Bible open on my lap, overlooking this beautiful lake, worshiping, and I was sure I heard him say, real clear again, die.

Do you want it back?

As if God was giving me a choice.

But I begged for healing all those years ago.

And my heart froze.

Do I want it back?

No.

I don't want it back.

Not if I were to lose this intimacy.

Not if I were to become that self-sufficient, I can do it, I'm disciplined, good girl again.

No.

If it would mean losing this listening.

This morning, I want to leave you with just three thoughts, not even three points, just the three things to remember and to think about, especially when life goes bad.

When life goes bad sometimes.

When life goes bad and you're crying out for God to take this hard thing away, and He doesn't, and you don't know why.

He doesn't, at least in ways that you can see, that you can sense.

May I just remind you, first of all, that God is in the middle of your mess.

He's there.

You may not, probably will not feel it in the confusing mix of emotions.

But God is right there in the middle of the muck with you.

I didn't know that, not really.

I thought he'd abandoned me.

I thought I was alone, but Jesus will not, does not ever abandon his own.

Ever.

And secondly, there is a word translated here in the Old Testament, in Deuteronomy 6 and throughout the Psalms, it's all over the place, where God says, Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one God.

We call it the great Shema.

What it means is not just to hear, it means to listen with the intent to obey.

It's this rich word to listen with the intent to obey.

We're not listening for platitudes, for bumper sticker theology, for tweetable niceties.

No, we're not listening so that we can tell others what we think God wants them to do.

We are listening with the intent to obey.

And may I caution you, as one who's hard of hearing, who's deaf, to listen in humility.

We're all kind of deaf towards God.

Listen in humility lest we think we hear what we really want to hear.

And so we mishear God.

And then we're disappointed because we were so sure he said that to us and it didn't happen.

Listening is a skill.

It takes time, lots of time, but listen with humility.

You know, I can't tell you how many arguments Phil and I have had.

Because I swear he said something.

And he says to me, Dad, I did not say that.

And here I am, a deaf woman, arguing back.

Oh, yes, you do.

I heard you.

I heard you.

Gosh, we do that even with our Lord Jesus.

We're sure we heard what we wanted to hear, and we mishear God all the time.

We must listen humbly.

Listening will take the rest of your life to conquer.

One last thought.

What if?

What I can't help but wonder what might happen if every one of us here in this room right now, we decided we actually really want to hear Jesus speak to us.

Not just when we have a big decision to make, but every day, all the time.

What would happen if we all decided to get up, say, an hour earlier than we need to?

And maybe that sounds impossible, it's hard enough to get up on time, a half hour earlier than we need to.

And we use that entire time to enter into this gift that God offers to each and every one of us, to listen.

And we open our Bibles and we read His words, and we stop and we listen.

And maybe we even write it down what we hear.

And we pray about what we're worried about, what kept us up at night, and we stop and we listen.

Really listen with the intent to do whatever he says, the intent to obey.

What would happen?

What would happen if every one of us did this every day, all day long?

I'll tell you what I believe would happen.

We, those of us in this room, would set the world on fire.

You, awakening church.

Would set this valley on fire.

Because God would be telling each of us, and we would be hearing what he wants us to do, who he wants us to love, who he wants us to be, what he wants us to say, what he wants us not to say.

What would happen if we came to him and said, Here I am, Lord, I am listening.

Listening with the intent to obey, listening to how you want to write my story.

I'm letting my hands off, I'm letting you write my story, how you want to use my story, the story I didn't want.

I did not want to be the story of a 26-year-old mom losing her hearing.

I certainly did not want to be the story of this person who tried so hard falling flat on her face the minute something went wrong.

I didn't want to hear the story of this entitled woman raging at God.

But God wants to use the real story to bring each of us back to him and to bring glory to him.

What if we came to him and said, we want to allow him to use the worst parts of my life and to turn those parts of us into our superpowers?

Will you pray with me?

Will you stand and let me pray for you?

Father, for this family right now, we stand before you as your kids, as your children of all different ages.

We're brothers and sisters and mothers and grandmas and aunts and uncles and fathers.

And we're all your sons and daughters, and we love you.

But our love is so small.

Would you enlarge our hearts to love you more?

I ask that you would remind each person wherever they are in their story what you're really after.

Knowing you intimately, hearing you, your personal words just for them.

In the way that you speak, that they can hear you most clearly.

Your words that bring us to that deep sense of satisfaction that nothing else can bring us to.

And that deep conviction in our hearts that you are our everything, and that we can trust you with everything.

May each and every man and woman in here today know and experience your love.

Lord, I pray that even this week, that those who do not even understand how loved they are by you, who maybe feel that they're still performing for love all over the areas of their life, I pray that you would speak to those who get up early, who open your word, and that you would tell them what it is about them that is so beautiful, that is so unique, that is so needed in the kingdom of God.

I pray that every single person who's willing to listen would hear about your love and experience the overwhelming love of Christ like you did for me on that morning so many years ago.

I pray that you would have each of us so tender that all of us, Easter's coming, that by Easter, getting up early and daring to listen, by then our hearts, this whole room would be filled with worshipers who are weeping at the story of the cross.

Because they understand that you have met them there, that you've transformed them there.

Lord, I just pray that you would wrap this church in your loving kindness, your grace and your power and into an intimate relationship with yourself.

In Jesus' name.

Amen.

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