THE JOY OF LISTENING
By Robert W. Burns

The Lord Jesus said to His disciples, “Blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear,” (Matt. 13:16)

The attentiveness of the people who were with Him was praised by Christ in these words. They were using their eyes to see. They were using their ears to hear. Part of our human difficulty is that many people walk about in God’s great world and they neither see with their eyes nor hear with their ears.

Early last week an interesting visitor came to my study, a man not a member of our congregation, but a searcher after truth who said to me: “For many years I have come almost every day to the Chapel of this church and here I have often found God myself; but for the past week I have come every day and nothing happened. Tell me, what’s wrong?”

I asked him, “Tell me about yourself,” As he went on to describe to me the experiences through which he has gone in the months prior to his visit to my study, I listened attentively to what he had to say. I knew the joy, the keen quality of joy, that comes from really seeing somebody and really hearing somebody. It was not hard to tell that the reason he could not hear, as he often had heard in the Chapel before, was that there were clamorous, competing voices inside himself, in his confusion of his personal life, which made it impossible for him to listen to anything outside of himself.

This is no criticism of this friend of our congregation. This is simply a description of what happens at times, I daresay, to everyone of us. We become so preoccupied with our own concerns and so confused by the competing voices within ourselves that we do not listen to anybody we cannot listen to anything outside ourselves.

“The Joy of Listening” is the joy of hearing, the joy of being attentive to what is around us, of becoming aware of the world in which we live with other people, aware of the many sides of our own selves, and aware most of all of God Himself. There is a joy in becoming aware. This is what I call your attention to as a part of the joy of listening.

The whole appeal of the scriptures is a challenge to us: “Come, let us reason together.” God Himself says, in substance, let us listen to one another. Observe the facts for yourself. Use all the avenues of your sensory perception. The appeal of the Bible is, Taste and know that the Lord is good.” The appeal of the Bible is, “Look unto me and live.” The appeal of the scripture is, “Hear what the Lord says.” The appeal of Christ was, “Reach hither your hand and touch the nailprints. Put your finger in my side.” The appeal of the scriptures is for us to “smell the sweet savor of life” that God has made so good. Even the sixth sense, that modern psychology recognizes, is used in the scriptures; the sense of the difference between heat and cold being our sixth sense. You may remember how John Wesley, in describing the moment of his great transformation, said, “I felt my heart strangely warmed.” This that the scriptures speak of as the warmth of God’s love, the sunshine of His grace. The lightness of the sunshine, so often used as an expression for God, today gives warmth and beauty to the world. The scriptures are full of this appeal for us really to use our senses to become aware, to listen. “Be still and know that I am God.”

God has made us in His image, and what is God like in us? It is the concern for each other that motivates us to listen, really to listen to other persons. “Blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear.”

What do we mean by listening to each other? Somebody here may say casually, “Of course I listen; I’m always listening; I’m not deaf.” But you are not always listening. This is a selective process. Sometimes you turn your attention off just as much as a person who is physically deaf will sometimes turn off a hearing aid. You wives know what it’s like, don’t you? Sometimes you talk to your husband and one look at his face makes you know that he is not paying the slightest bit of attention to what you are saying. If you ask him to repeat the words for you, he might do this in some routine fashion by rote; but he hasn’t heard you. Every parent has known the experience at times of talking to your children and some little Dennis the Menace, from two-years-old on, you know as you talk to that child he isn’t listening, and you say to him our of your own sense of frustration, “Look here, you listen to me.” Maybe he pays attention then, and maybe he doesn’t.

Listening is not simply passively sitting somewhere and letting sounds break upon your ear drums. Real listening is creatively active. One of the biggest compliments you can pay anyone is really to listen to him. You husbands, listen to your wives; and you wives, listen to your husband, nor only for the words that are said but the undertone, the tremor of the voice that means some moment of greater meaning than usual. Listen! Listening is more than physical, it is a quality of concern, of interest in someone else. Listening to another person answers a very deep need in us. We need to listen and to be listened to.

I heard sometime ago of the interesting experience of a man who began advertising in the daily papers of a great city that for $5.00 an hour he would listen to anybody. He wouldn’t give them any advice, he wouldn’t make any comments; but for $5.00 an hour he’d just listen to them. They filled his time. They filled his time so much that he doubled his rates and he had to get six assistants, and still people paid $10.00 an hour for somebody who would honest-to-God, really listen attentively to them.

One of our deepest needs is to hear and to be heard. All learning begins by listening. When a scientist goes into his laboratory, in substance he is saying to the facts, “Speak to me. Tell me how you behave. Give me the information I am seeking.” Thus the scientist is listening in his laboratory. As a teacher teaches in a classroom, the only way she has of ever getting any ideas through is if her students are attentive to what she says.

Of course, there are times when we listen when we really have no business as Christians doing so. The wagging tongue is often criticized but, my friends, the listening ear is just as guilty as the wagging tongue. Have you ever noticed the expression on some person’s face when one member of the group will start to relate what is obviously going to be some relished morsel of gossip, tearing someone in shreds. You can tell by the tone of voice that he is going to destroy the reputation of someone else. How avidly some of the group will listen, how eagerly they pay attention when they hadn’t been paying attention before. All of a sudden they awaken to the fact of what is going to come now that they can listen to and then repeat fits into their habit of hostility, in their desire to be destructive to other people. Sometimes the kind of listening we do is a revelation of the sickness of our soul or the health of our personality.

When you lose the joy of listening to God through scripture and prayer, you are spiritually sick. When you delight in hearing the sound of your own voice instead of giving attention to the voices of those about you, you are spiritually sick, When your ear reaches more for the praises of men than for the blessing of God, you are spiritually sick. When you are harsh and bitter toward those who differ with you, instead of feeling tenderly toward all who love Christ, you are spiritually sick. When you would rather hear the comforting assurances of the scriptures and avoid the challenge of “take up your cross daily and follow Me”, you are spiritually sick.. When you refuse to listen to any criticism of yourself and insist that all around you constantly bolster your egotism, you are spiritually sick.

This is what Jesus was talking about when with gladness in His heart He looked at the attentive faces around Him and said, “Blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear.” These people were alive, alive to the great truth Jesus had just given them in the parable of the sower.

Many people do not understand each other. I see every week at least one, and many weeks several couples in various stages of conflict, always marked by a breakdown in communication. They can’t carry on a normal conversation for any length of time without one of them losing his temper.

Dean Teele of the Harvard School of Business Administration wrote sometime ago a very significant article on the amount of hostility and tension in the business world and how these poor interpersonal relationships destroy the efficiency of any business operation. In his article he said: “One reason so many business men are uncreative is that they hate their jobs, and they hate the people around them.” Then Dean Teele concluded: “Our hates could be changed to love by changing the way we listen (to one another).”

How can we develop the skill we need in listening to each other? Here are five simple suggestions:

1. Be genuinely interested in the people around you, genuinely interested in them. Observe them thoughtfully. Ask questions about them. Seek to be really interested in them.

2. Put yourself in the other person’s place, try to enter into his experience. Say to yourself, “If I were in his place, what would I really be thinking in the circumstances that he faces?”

3. Then if you want to develop your skill in listening, watch yourself: How many times do you interrupt other people when they’re talking to you?

It was just within the last thousand years, which means, of course, it could have been yesterday, I had one of the most interesting opportunities to observe the interpersonal relations between a man and his wife. That woman couldn’t say three sentences without her husband interrupting her. He kept it up until at last I said, “Why not let her just tell her story as she wants to, and you be quiet, won’t you, for a while, and let your wife talk. She wants to say these things without being constantly interrupted.” How many times do you interrupt the people who are talking around you?

4. If you want to develop skill in listening to people, when they say something make an appropriate comment in response, throw them back the ball, follow up the line of thought they’ve been discussing, don’t just change the subject because some totally new idea has just occurred to you.

5. Continue the conversation as long as it is helpful. Sometimes listening can be destructive.

I think one of the most remarkable illustrations of that is of a man who went from the study of a pastor in our own city where, as he talked, and the minister didn’t restrain him at all, he built himself up into a first-class case of hysteria. He left the study deeply disturbed, got into his automobile and drove down on the South Expressway, pushed the accelerator clear to the floor and deliberately ran into the middle pillar of one of those great bridges and killed himself.

Sometimes you should not listen. Sometimes you have to say to people, “This has gone as far as it is good for us to go today. I’ll talk to you again another day.” Or totally change the subject with them, somehow get their mind off of this that is becoming a fixation and working them into hysteria. But as long as the conversation is helpful and the time limit does not become so great as to be hurtful, then we need to keep that conversation rolling in the way it’s going.

We can develop skill in listening to each other. This is why Carl R. Rogers in one of his great books wrote these short sentences about the importance of listening: “When we listen with understanding it means to see the expressed idea and attitude from the other person’s point of view, to sense how it feels to him, to achieve his frame of reference in regard to the thing he is talking about. Stated so briefly, this may sound absurdly simple, but it is not. It is an approach we have found extremely potent in the field of psychotherapy. It is the most effective agent we know for altering the basic personality structure of an individual and for improving his relationships and his communications with others.”

It does that, Dr. Rogers is saying, not only to the person who speaks, but it does it to the person who listens. Listening develops your capacity as a person. Listening can help to change your whole character structure, as well as change the character structure of the person who is listened to.

The worship service is, in one sense, an experience in listening. Most important of all, we come in to be quiet, to listen to God, to look at the windows with their reminders of God’s love, to see the altar and the cross, to hear the music, to listen in the quiet of the Communion to what God may have to say, to hear the scriptures. It is an experiment in listening, attentively, really putting our minds on it and listening.

I spend more time in listening, by far, than I do in talking. All through the week, as well as on Sunday, I give attention to two major centers of interest: What does God have to say on any single issue? What is in the mind of Christ? This is in the background of my thinking constantly. From time to time my mind flashes momentarily to the center of attention and I hold it there and then, when my attention wavers to the other center of attention, the persons that I am with, the people that I am talking to or listening to, I search for what does God have to say on this issue and what does this person really think? My own mind will flicker back and forth and, keeping the two together, I try to compare what is in their mind and what I think is the will of God.

“Blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear.” The beginning of all processes of change for good, the start of redemption for us personally, the renewal of our soul, the achievement of religious reality, the recapture of the rapture we knew when first we met our Lord — all this begins every time with listening.

If Saul had not been willing to hear on the Damascus road, he would never have become the great Apostle. If he had not been willing to see beyond the light that flashed to blind him, to see with the eyes of his mind and to understand — if he had not been willing to do this, all the great career of the Apostle would have gone by and someone else would have had to be called by God.

One of the most thrilling and dramatic illustrations of what I am talking about today is in a book by Richard E. Byrd called ALONE. You will remember that Admiral Byrd took an expedition to the Antarctic. Throughout all one winter he stayed at a lonely post on a bleak icy shelf between Little America and the South Pole, seeking to obtain scientific data. The whole winter, in that particular place for months, he was utterly alone. Here is what he wrote about the experience:

“I am not alone. The human race is not alone in the universe . . . For those who seek it, there is an inexhaustible evidence of an all pervading intelligence.

“I paused to listen to the silence . . . The day was dying, the night was being born but with great peace. Here were the imponderable processes and forces of the cosmos . . . Harmony, that was it! That was what came out of the silence — a gentle rhythm, the strain of a perfect chord, the music of the spheres perhaps.

“It was enough to catch that rhythm, momentarily to be myself a part of it. In that instant I could feel no doubt of man’s oneness with the universe. The conviction came that that rhythm was too orderly, too harmonious, too perfect to be a product of blind chance — that, therefore, there must be purpose in the whole and that man was part of that whole and not an accidental offshoot. It was a feeling that transcended reason, that went to the heart of a man’s despair and found it groundless. The universe was a cosmos, not a chaos; man was rightfully a part of that cosmos as were the day and the night.”

Admiral Byrd listened. He really listened until he heard in the processes of life what everyone can hear if he will give attention to hearing and listening.

This is the appeal of the scriptures of the life of Christ to us if we listen to hear, really to hear. This is the appeal of Christ from that hill shaped like a skull: “God forgive them for they know not what they do.”

God is asking us to listen and, as we listen, to understand.

Robert W. Burns is minister to the Peachtree Christian Church, Atlanta, Ga.. and was recently president of the International Convention of Christian Churches.. His skill in counseling with married couples has received attention in some of the national magazines.