Keys to the Kingdom

By Carolyn Tucker

Close Enough to Hear

The other day I heard a woman say that she and her husband had agreed that they wouldn’t try to talk to each other if one of them was in another room. It’s just a fact that if you’ve been married 40+ years, you can’t hear as well as you did when you first said, “I do.” My normal speaking voice is “loud and clear,” but when I would spend the day with my Dad in his later years, I had to talk really loud so he could hear me. By the time I hugged and kissed him goodbye and drove home, I was worn out from basically yelling all day.

God will not use His “outside voice” when He speaks to His children. He chooses not to yell because He knows we can hear Him if we choose to. His normal voice is a “gentle whisper” (ref. 1 Kings 19:12). In fact, since God’s voice is kind and nonabrasive, it’s possible we could miss what He’s saying to us. But if we set our hearts to listen, we will hear Him. “God has given me the capacity to hear and obey…” (Psalm 40:6 AMP).

My family and friends know that I welcome their visits and phone calls. Healthy interactive conversation consists of, “Talk, Stop, Listen“ over and over until the conclusion. It’s hard to visit with someone who isn’t a good listener. It’s also hard to visit with someone who doesn’t talk. It takes two to tango in order to have a satisfactory conversation. I would suspect God is disappointed when His children don’t have a ready ear toward His voice. We’re eager to tell Him what we need, but we often don’t wait to hear what He has to say. If we’re guilty of not being a good listener, we should repent for our selfish and ungrateful  attitude.

I had a brief conversation with a fellow believer that said, “God doesn’t speak to me.”  I wonder if this individual is simply in another room when God speaks. In our energetic culture, believers may have trouble being quiet (which invites our Best Friend to talk to us). “Be still and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10 NKJV). We can miss God by living a hurried lifestyle, doing our own thing, and not making room for His voice. From the beginning night of Jesus’ earthly life, there wasn’t room for Him back then either. It’s definitely our responsibility to create a welcoming atmosphere so we can hear God‘s voice.

I’m certainly not wise enough to orchestrate my own life. I’d be yelling “Gee” when I should be yelling “Haw.” (These are unique voice commands to tell a workhorse to turn right or left when pulling a plow.) Christ followers want to live productive lives and bear good fruit for the Kingdom of God, but we desperately need God’s help to accomplish this goal. Jesus tells the crowd to listen to the explanation of the parable about the farmer planting seeds: “The seed that fell on good soil represents those who truly hear and understand God’s Word and produce a harvest of thirty, sixty, or even a hundred times as much as had been planted!” (Matthew 13:23 NLT). I want to be good dirt and grow a big crop for Jesus — but first I have to listen and understand so I can produce.

The Key: Stay in the same room with God so you can hear and obey His voice.

This last installment of my analysis as to why rural America is shrinking has to do with the growing cultural trend towards a preference for entertainment experiences and the electronic filter of relationships through social media.  The evaluation is more experiential than it is statistical, but certainly current lifestyle trends lend themselves more toward urban living than the traditional rural experience.

Case in point, my fondest memories from my youth are of sitting on the front porch of my grandparent’s home overlooking the bandstand in the center of the town square in a farm community of 1,300 people.  We shucked corn, snapped beans, hulled peas, and cleaned fish while we listened to the St. Louis Cardinal on the radio.  My most magical summer was the “Phold of 1964,” the year the Phillies collapsed in the last two weeks of the baseball season and were overtaken by my red-hot Cardinals.  It was an experience that gelled families and communities all over the Midwest.

My seven city-raised children would blanch at the prospect of spending a summer of listening to the radio and in idle conversations on the topics of religion, politics, world and local news, and sports.  My eleven grandchildren would ask about the strength of the WiFi signal on the porch, and tolerate the scene until allowed access to their gaming console again.  Do I sound like I have lived during 70 decades?

Most of us can identify with this great generational divide on one side or the other.  Whether social media, gaming, exotic vacations, movies, bingeing TV shows, etc. are more healthy and constructive than front-porch-sittin’ remains to be seen, but one thing is certain: the change in culture has seriously impacted the perceived value of small communities.  The “brain-drain” of our best and brightest to major universities and big jobs in big cities continues, with no end in sight.

What can, or should, rural communities do about this megatrend which is contributing significantly to our population loss?  We certainly cannot compete with the entertainment and shopping venues of major metropolitan areas, and we would be foolish to try to a large degree.  We would have a difficult time recruiting Fortune 500 companies to our county in order to offer the next generation world-class job options.  We should do all we can to make high-speed Internet access broadly available across the county.

I believe we need to be who we are: a place that offers time for community and contemplation; a place that has the advantages of nature and the social and recreational aspects that come with it; a place that has history and played an important role in one of the most critical periods of American history; a place with time to love and to be loved.  Sounds like heaven to me.

We need to be the best Bourbon County we can be.  We need to lean into each other, support each other, and cultivate county-wide trust together.  Someday, our culture will again want what we have, which I think represents the best of human nature.  In the meantime, we wait, we work, we pray, we relate, and we build…together.

A spider and a centipede are having tea.  The centipede gets up and offers to go buy snacks.  He goes out the door and hours pass.  The spider is so hungry, wondering what happened, and opens the door, only to find the centipede sitting on the doormat, still putting on his shoes.

Sometimes I am that centipede.  It takes me F.O.R.E.V.E.R. to tie my hundred shoes, to get going…in a spiritual sense, I mean.  In real world activities, I am the Energizer Bunny.

Francis Chan’s “New York Times” best seller, Crazy Love, makes me wonder if I am taking my own sweet time in becoming what God desires for me, even after 45 years of being a Christian.  Chan writes much about “lukewarm Christians” (in other words, not Christians at all).  They love God for what He can do for them (like eternity in Heaven) and not for who He is.

The test is simple, using the question John Piper wrote in God In the Gospel: “If you could have heaven, with no sickness, and with all the friends you ever had on earth, and all the food you ever liked, and all the leisure activities you ever enjoyed, and all the natural beauties you ever saw, all the physical pleasures you ever tasted, and no human conflict or any natural disasters, could you be satisfied with heaven, if Christ was not there?”

Spend some time before answering.

The author is concerned about the unfaithfulness of Christians.  Referring to the question “Can I go to heaven without truly and faithfully loving Jesus?”, Chan’s response comes as no surprise.  “I don’t see anywhere in Scripture how the answer to that question could be yes.”

We know that Jesus’ sacrifice to die on the cross for our sins benefits us eternally, but have we ever considered the emotional pain well before the crucifixion, like how it had to sadden God to say farewell to His son and send him to earth to live with sinners who would reject him, abandon him, deny him and kill him?  (If you are a parent, put yourself in God’s shoes.)

Leading up to that Heavenly good-bye, I wonder if the angels were huddled in panic.  Were there lingering hugs and tears? Surely Jesus knew what was ahead, that he would be grieved, tempted, exhausted, frustrated and would agonize over his impending death. Still, he volunteered to come, to offer to die in our place.

How much love he has for you and me, that he made that choice!

Jesus wasn’t finished. He returned to Heaven but did not leave us without help: the Holy Spirit. Jesus told His followers and therefore us, “… it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go the Helper will not come …” (John 16:7). Get that?  Better than Jesus remaining with the disciples is that we can be gifted with his Spirit. And what a gift he is!   In John 14, we learn much about what we Christians have living inside of us, thank you, Jesus, waiting to be used.  A helper.  A comforter.  A teacher. A guide.  A prophet. A convicter. An intercessor.

Christians, we have been given everything we need to faithfully follow Jesus.  It is time we lace up our spiritual shoes and get moving.  Luke 10:2 reminds us of Jesus’ words, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few…”

Often, I have made time to talk about politics, about families, even about the weather, but I don’t make time to put on the Jesus shoe to tell others what matters most.

I have to wonder, Would Chan use that as a definition of “lukewarm”?