Whose voice are you listening to? 1 Corinthians 14:10 KJV reads, “There are, it may be, so many kinds of voices in the world, and none of them is without signification.” There are many voices in the world, says the apostle Paul, but never have there been so many as are heard today. The voices on radio, TV and in the press penetrate our homes and have become so familiar that we take them for granted and hardly notice them. Yet they are always there, unconsciously influencing us. We live in an age of noise and excitement. In cities and towns, although we are not always aware of it, there is the continuous roar of vehicles and machinery, and often above us can be heard the drone of aircraft. We tend to push extraneous noise into the background, selecting only the things that we consider important to hear. The following modern-day parable is a good example of this selective hearing.

Two men were walking along a crowded sidewalk in a downtown business area. Suddenly one exclaimed, “Listen to the lovely sound of that cricket!” But the other could not hear it. He asked his companion how he could detect the sound of a cricket amid the din of people and traffic. The first man, who was a zoologist, had trained himself to listen to the voices of nature. Instead of explaining, he simply took a coin out of his pocket and dropped it to the sidewalk whereupon a dozen people began to look around them. “We hear,” he said, “what we listen for!” The first man had trained himself to listen to the voices of nature above the roar of traffic. Similarly, through reading God’s Word, we must train ourselves to listen to the voice of God above the seductive voices of the world.