Ears to Hear

“Who hath ears to hear, let him hear.” (Matthew 13:9). Jesus gives this admonition immediately after delivering the Parable of the Sower, in which He describes the importance of having our hearts prepared to receive the word of God by likening our hearts to soil and the word of God to seeds. I don’t believe that it was an accident that the Savior was talking about ears immediately after discussing the growing of crops. After all, when we talk about crop yields for plants like corn, we use the term “ears.” The more that we prepare our hearts to receive the word of God, and the more we labor with diligence to ensure that our seeds of faith sprout and grow, the more ears we will have to hear the word of God. If we have allowed our faith to wither and our fields to lay fallow, we may not have very many ears with which to hear the still, small voice of the Holy Ghost. Consider the example of Nephi and his brothers. “And they said: Behold, we cannot understand the words which our father hath spoken concerning the natural branches of the olive tree, and also concerning the Gentiles. And I said unto them: Have ye inquired of the Lord? And they said unto me: We have not; for the Lord maketh no such thing known unto us.” (1 Nephi 15:7-9). Laman and Lemuel did not have ears to hear, and so, to them, it was like the Lord was not talking to them. But it was because their hard hearts did not allow the word of God to sprout and grow within them, so that they may have thirty, sixty, even a hundred ears with which to hear and understand the words of the Lord. God is talking to us all of the time, but we have to have the patience and the faith and the diligence and make sure that our hearts are prepared to receive the word of the Lord so that we may have as many ears as possible to hear all of the different things the Lord has prepared for us.