Eyes and Ears to See and Hear
The American Novelist Marilynne Robinson once said, “Wherever you turn your eyes, the world can shine like transfiguration. You don’t have to bring anything to it except a little willingness to see.” Therein is the first challenge of living by faith in a secular society. We have to be willing to open our eyes and, I would add, open our ears to see and hear God at work. If we don’t, we’re at risk of becoming people who, though still believing in God and professing to be a Christian, lack an “active practice” of the Christian faith.1
In Acts 17, we read of Paul standing before the Areopagus in Athens—the judicial council. Paul expresses his appreciation, mentioning how “very religious” (v. 22)2 the Athenians are. After all, the Athenians have various objects of worship. They even have an altar with the inscription, “To an unknown God.” Yet, for all of their religiosity, if you will, they don’t even know God.
When my wife and I were in Brazil, we visited the town of Ouro Preto in the State of Minas Gerais. Because Ouro Preto was a gold mining town, the Catholic Church built these beautiful church buildings decorated with gold that have become a big tourist attraction. And believe me, they are spectacular to see. But I always wondered how many people pass through those churches and yet don’t know God.
Temples and altars may look beautiful, but they don’t equate to knowing God. What good is religion without knowing God? We can have a nice building filled with beautiful artwork and still lack faith, or have faith but lose it. I don’t mean renouncing Jesus as Lord. What I’m talking about is losing faith in a functional sense. It’s the kind of life where we can be a church member but still live as though Jesus hasn’t changed a thing outside of what goes on inside a church building on Sunday morning. Another way of putting it is to say that losing faith is nominalism. To have a nominal faith is to say we believe, even though that belief has little to no bearing on the way we live. In other words, nominalism is a loss of faith.
There is more to knowing God and having faith in Jesus Christ than just nominalism. As Paul speaks to the Athenians about God, he tells them that God is the Creator who has purposely chosen to give the blessing of life. As part of creating life, Paul says that God created people “so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us” (v. 27). We just have eyes and ears to see and hear, eyes and ears that are open and willing to look and listen.
Although it may seem like God is far off sometimes, he’s not. God isn’t hiding from us. As Thomas Merton once said,
“God manifests Himself everywhere, in everything — in people and in things and in nature and in events. It becomes very obvious that He is everywhere and in everything and we cannot be without Him. You cannot be without God. It's impossible. It’s simply impossible. The only thing is that we don't see it.”
If our struggle is a matter of seeing and hearing God, how do we live with eyes and ears to see and hear the work of God taking place in life? The answer, I believe, is that we must train our eyes and ears to see and hear God.
“Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Christ on my right, Christ on my left, Christ when I lie down, Christ when I sit down, Christ when I arise, Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me, Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me, Christ in every eye that sees me, Christ in every ear that hears me.” - Saint Patrick
I started learning to play the guitar when I was twelve. Now, at 51 years old, I have been playing the guitar for 39 years. I’m no Eddie Van Halen or Stevie Ray Vaughan on the guitar but I can play well enough to hold my own in a jam session. Part of learning to play the guitar involves training the eyes and ears to see how other guitarists are playing and hear what they’re playing. The training of the eyes and ears involved in learning to play the guitar requires practicing what is seen and heard. Such training develops what guitarists describe as muscle memory, which then allows the guitarist to become more natural at playing what the mind has learned.
There are some parallels when it comes to learning how to play the guitar and learning to live by faith. However, instead of watching other guitarists, we train our eyes and ears by focusing on what God has done in the past so that we’ll begin to anticipate what God is doing in the present for the future of his new creation that he is bringing about in Jesus Christ. Such training involves spiritual disciplines: regular times spent in prayer, reading our Bible, reflecting on our daily lives as followers of Jesus, serving others in need, and spending time in fellowship with each other. These disciplines allow us to see and hear how God has worked among people in scripture, people within our local church community, and even in our own lives. In doing so, we develop a Christ-formed faith (cf. Gal 4:19) that allows us to more naturally live as participants in the mission of God.
Luke ends the story in Acts 17 with the following: “Some people joined him [Paul] and came to believe, including Dionysius, a member of the council on Mars Hill, a woman named Damaris, and several others” (v. 34, CEB). At the end of the day, to participate in the mission of God is to become so formed in Christ by the Spirit that we reflect Christ in a manner that compels others to become believers just like us. As the prayer of Saint Patrick goes…
“Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Christ on my right, Christ on my left, Christ when I lie down, Christ when I sit down, Christ when I arise, Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me, Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me, Christ in every eye that sees me, Christ in every ear that hears me.”
The more we see and hear God, as he has revealed himself in Jesus Christ, the more others will see and hear Christ in us—perhaps becoming believers just as some did after hearing Paul.
1Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007, 513.
2Unless otherwise noted, all scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, New International Version, NIV. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
