Refusing to obey God was equal to hearing without being willing to listen.  It was the same thing as looking with that reluctance that won’t see, and then doesn’t see.  Hearing and seeing lie deeper than ears and eyes, down in the purpose, the will, the desire of the heart.  Unwillingness dulls, and then deafens the ears.  It blurs, and then blinds the eye.  An earnest, loving purpose gives peculiar keenness to the ears, and opens the eye of the eye.  Ears and eyes are very sensitive organs.  If their messages be not faithfully attended to they sulk and pout and refuse to transmit messages.  It is a remarkable fact that habitual inattention to a sound or sight makes one practically deaf or blind to it; and that close attention persisted in makes one’s ears and eyes almost abnormally keen and quick.  Love’s ears and eyes are proverbially acute.

One may be so wholly absorbed in something that he absolutely does not see the thing on which his eyes are turned.  He does not hear the sounds that are plainly coming to his ear because his thought, back of that his heart, is elsewhere.  Hearing, seeing is with the heart back of ears and eyes.  God is spoken of as silent.  Yet His silence may be simply our deafness.  The truth is He is speaking all the time, but we are so absorbed that we do not hear.  He is ever looking into our faces with His great, tender, deep eyes, but we are so wrapped up in something else that the gaze out of our eyes is vacant to that Face, and with keenest disappointment, so often repeated, He gets no answering glance.

Let anybody in doubt about the strict accuracy of this do some experimenting on himself, either with outer things or regarding God.  Let him obey the inner voice in some particular that may perhaps cut straight across some fixed habit, and then watch very quietly for the result.  It will come with surprising sureness and quickness.  And the reason why is simple.  The man is simply moving back into his native air, and of course all the powers work better.

This truth about the nerves of the ears and eyes running down into the heart is constantly being sounded out in the old Book.  A famous bit in Isaiah puts it very clearly, and becomes a sort of pivot passage of all others of this sort.  That fine-grained, intense-spirited young Hebrew was caught in the temple one day by a sight of God.  That wondrous sight held him with unyielding grip through all the after years.  With the sight came the voice, and the message for the nation:  “Tell these people—­you are continually hearing, but you do not listen, nor take in what you hear.  Your eyes are open, they look, but they do not see.”  Then the voice said, “Make their heart fat, and their ears heavy, and their eyes shut.”