covered ears

I walked into my boss’s office the other day with bad news. He saw the expression on my face and said, “I don’t want to hear it.”

That’s how we often are about things we don’t want to deal with. When the doc says we should change our habits, or our accountant warns we’re not on a good path, sometimes we want to ignore what we hear.

But we don’t ever want to be like the church leaders in Acts 7:55-57: “ But Stephen, full of the Holy Spirit, looked up to heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. “Look,” he said, ‘I see heaven open and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.’

“At this they covered their ears and, yelling at the top of their voices, they all rushed at him, dragged him out of the city and began to stone him.”

Honestly, those leaders sound like schoolchildren, covering their ears and yelling because they hear something they don’t like. It would be funny but for how serious it is. 

But imagine this. Imagine you’ve put on trial one of God’s servants, a man filled with the Holy Spirit. And imagine, as you accuse this man, he is granted a vision of Jesus himself. Wouldn’t that seem like affirmation of his mission? Wouldn’t you stop and think?

They didn’t. Instead, their rage and hatred at this suggestion they could be wrong was too much. Stephen had to die.

It’s a warning to me never to become so invested in my position that I can’t hear the truth, to never become so convinced of my own rightness that I let my pride kill me.

Because that’s what these leaders risked. They put themselves in opposition to God’s kingdom. Unless something changed before they died, their intransigence cost them everything.