Luke 9:44-45 “Let these words sink down into your ears, for the Son of Man is about to be betrayed into the hands of men." (45) But they did not understand this saying, and it was hidden from them so that they did not perceive it; and they were afraid to ask Him about this saying.”
And so we come to the method of spiritual growth through meditation in God’s word. In the passage of scripture quoted above our Lord Jesus was trying to get the disciples to understand what was about to happen to Him in Jerusalem. In other words they needed spiritual understanding. But as the scripture reveals to us, because it was hidden from them they did not understand Him. There was a specific reason why this truth was hidden from the disciples at that time, which we will not discuss now as it falls outside the scope of this teaching. Nevertheless it is the Lord’s statement, “Let these words sink down into your ears” that I want to discuss in this section. So what did our Lord mean when He said to the disciples that they were to let His words sink down into their ears? The disciples could hear perfectly what Jesus was saying with their physical ears, but it wasn’t their physical ears that Jesus was referring to; He was talking about the inner ears of their spirits. When our Lord walked on the earth many times He would make the following statement, “he who has ears to hear, let him hear”. When Jesus made this statement He was not referring to their physical ears, because all could hear Him with their physical ears. Jesus was referring to their spiritual ears, i.e. the ears of their inner man. So how do we hear with our spiritual ears? Our Lord Jesus said we are to let His words sink down into our ears.
Proverbs 18:8 and Proverbs 26:22 “The words of a talebearer are like tasty trifles, and they go down into the inmost body.”
As quoted above, twice in the book of proverbs the Holy Spirit reveals to us just how words enter the spirits of unbelievers, for the inmost body referred to in this passage of scripture is the spirit of man. In this world unbelievers dwell on the words of a talebearer. In other words they meditate on those words, for they like to think about what was said. And so as they continue to think about those words, those words eventually sink down into their spiritual ears and their spirits absorb them. In the same manner born-again believers can allow the word of God to go down into their spirits, because although the words are different, the principle remains the same. In other words it is through the meditation of God’s word that we allow His words to go down into our inmost bodies i.e. our spirits. We have already seen in the previous section that our minds are the gateway to our spirits, and that nothing enters our spirits from the outside except through that which our minds understand. And so even when we are taught the word of God by the Lord’s ministers we still need to meditate on that word with our minds so that we can have understanding of the word taught.
Michael E.B. Maher
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