A Word from the Word
Open My Ears!
Psalm 40:6–8
Sacrifice and meal offering Thou hast not desired; my ears Thou hast opened; burnt offering and sin offering Thou hast not required. Then I said, “Behold, I come; in the scroll of the book it is written of me; I delight to do Thy will, O my God.” NIV
When the psalmist speaks there about burnt offering and meal offering and sin offering and so on, he’s speaking about the externals of religion and he’s saying, in essence, “That isn’t what God is really after. We may give all the externals and yet miss the real point.”
He says, “My ears Thou hast opened.” We need to be able to hear God speaking to us personally. It’s the voice of God that we need to hear and for that our ears need to be opened. When we hear the voice of God, it reveals the will of God.
The psalmist says, “In the scroll of the book it is written of me, I delight to do Thy will.” I believe that’s true for every person that turns to God. There’s something written there in the scroll of the book which is God’s will in each of our individual lives. And when God opens our ears and we turn to Him and surrender our lives to Him, we’ll make the amazing and glorious discovery that God has got a special plan for each one of us – something that’s written in God’s eternal book. Something that’s in the scroll for each one of us individually.
God never makes one person a carbon copy of another. God has a specific, individual plan for each one of His children. If He can but open our ears and we turn to Him and yield to Him, He’ll reveal it to us.