Every once in a while my daughter starts crying. From then on in, the battle begins. My wife and I have an ignorance contest. Who can lay the stillest for the longest without getting up? The trick to winning this battle is to learn how to tune it out. If I can somehow stay in a sort of semi-consciousness without really waking up - then after a while my wife will finally get up - and I’ll be able to fall back asleep - which is where I wanted to be in the first place. Then, I’ll wake up the next morning and ask my wife innocently, “did Maia get up last night?” After she says yes I respond, “I thought I heard something, but I didn’t realize it until you got up.” The reality is that I have learned how to tune it out, because I didn’t want to hear it, so even when I did hear her, I didn’t listen. That’s how we all too often approach God’s Word. We’ll listen when it’s convenient. We’ll listen when we have the energy. We’ll listen when we want to. But when God’s Word tells us something that we don’t want to hear - that we don’t want to believe - then we somehow train ourselves to sleepwalk through it as if God never said it - or as if He really wasn’t talking to us. In reality, the problem is that we don’t like to hear God talk about our sins. We don’t like to hear about a holy God who punishes sins. So many people don’t listen to it. They go to places that talk about how special they are and how important they are. They gloss over the Bible parts that talk about sin and punishment and perfection and hell.