Apply your heart to instruction
    and your ear to words of knowledge.

Do you have a silly dog? Let me answer that question for me with a story. The other night, I was happily asleep. I believe I was deeply embedded in slow-wave sleep. I'm not sure what that means, but I was doing the best sleep ever. 

As I was enjoying God’s gift to mankind, I heard a loud yap, bark, howl, woof or whatever you want to call it. At the time, I called it a heart attack. I was jolted into full awareness, catapulted out of the joy of night. Angered by this canine-a-virus (sorry for that one), I was truly arrested by my dog’s cry. One thing is for sure, Stella had my attention. 

What has your attention? Or what is your mind tending to? I get it, our attention is grabbed by many things. I have a wife, five children, two dogs, two cats, and a turtle. I pastor a church. I coach. I do many things. The question needs to be asked: what grabs my attention the most? 

As a believer, your attention should be dominated by the pursuit of instruction and knowledge. Now, I’m not talking about quiz bowl facts. The passage here and what I am trying to encourage is the pursuit of God through His Word. 

My point is, what are you listening to? What is informing you? What you give your attention to is what grabs your heart. If you want to be marked by the gospel, you must be tending to the gospel in your heart by way of your ears. We do this by listening to the proclamation of God’s Word. We do this by listening to others speak. We do this by hearing the Word of God proclaimed. Let me say you are in need of God’s instruction.

Without God’s instruction, you will be primarily informed by the world. With God’s instruction, you will be informed by something that transcends our world, by something that informs us of deeper truths. By God’s revelation, you will not only understand the conditions of this world and the human condition but also be informed of mankind in light of eternity and in front of God. 

Daniel Henderson displays the slide of truth, which speaks to the need to pursue instruction. He writes, "A majority of adults (57 percent) believe that knowing what is right or wrong is a matter of personal experience." This study is truly alarming; if that were true, then reality wouldn't be real. There is a right, and there is truth. Take a car for instance. If you milk in the gas tank, you will find the truth about what the car's truth is: it won't run. Daniel goes on to state, "More specifically, three-quarters of Millenials (74 percent) agree strongly or somewhat with the statement, "Whatever is right for your life or works best for you is the only truth you can know." Our society denies truth because they don't like where truth ends. 

Let me finish the Stella story. Why did Stella arrest my attention? She was barking at a car that passed by the house. My attention was grabbed by the mundane and temporal. Let us tend to that which is substantive and worth waking up for. 

Let us not be foolish and run from instruction. Burying your head in the ground will not change reality's impact on your life; just as it is idiotic to pay attention to a dam's break if you are downstream, it's idiotic to turn your attention away from instruction from the Lord and the truth of the Knowledge of the Lord. Let us go deeper.