“Today if ye will hear his voice, Harden not your heart”

(Psalm 95:7-8)

I’ve picked a text from the ninety-fifth Psalm that goes with the Scripture lesson in Ecclesiastes about there being a time for all things.

The text sounds a note of urgency and warning: If today God speaks to you, offering you his goodness, his gracious salvation, don’t refuse it. Don’t be like Israel in the wilderness, whose distrust and disobedience in refusing God’s offer of his Promised Land condemned the Israelites to forty years of wilderness wanderings and ultimately to death in the desert.

Much of the urgency to respond to God’s offer of salvation has dropped out of modern theology, preaching, and church work. The old cliché “Preach the gospel as a dying man to dying people” is an interesting but archaic exhortation for young theological students of a far-off day. Few of us get worked up over that slogan now.

The time was when people were moved to accept the salvation of God in Christ through the preacher’s proclaiming the brevity of life or the certainty of judgment. “Brother, you may be dead tomorrow. Are you ready to meet your Maker today?” or, “The world is soon coming to an end. Are you ready now for the final Judgment of God?”

But modern people have registered resounding revulsion toward too crude a proclamation of such a gospel urgency for decision, because everybody didn’t die yesterday and the end of the world did not come last Thursday. And yet, the reaction of a sophisticated modern world to the claims of the Christian gospel has really been very unsophisticated. For there is a time factor that operates in the struggle and the salvation of souls, perhaps not as simply as sometimes suggested, but nevertheless as inexorably. How foolish people have been when they have acted as though there were no time factor, just because it did not always operate for everyone precisely as outlined by the fire and brimstone or end-of-the-world-a-comin’ hot gospellers.

But everything, yes, everything, is caught up in the time form in this world in which we live. That old cynic Koheleth noticed the invariable operation of the cycle of time: There is “a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up … A time to weep, and a time to laugh.” Who doesn’t know as much and apply Koheleth’s ancient wisdom to every realm of our worldly affairs?

There is a time for race horses to run, a span of just so many short years and then they are turned out to graze. There is a time of maximum perfor­mance for big-league ballplayers, and then the reflexes slow down. There is a time for peak capacity leadership that mature men and women can give to their business, their church, their community. For there is a time, a season for all things, a period when men and women can respond to opportunities for service and a time when they cannot. The time factor is a reality in our existence and we are caught in it.

Why won’t we recognize that this inexorable time factor also operates in our opportunity to respond to God’s call and his offer of salvation to us today? One afternoon as I was walking out of the Peabody Hotel, I heard the screaming siren of a cruising police car. Down Union Avenue in front of me the car sped, screeching to an abrupt stop in the next block where a crowd was gathering on the sidewalk. My step quickened with my mounting curiosity, and soon I was gazing down at the sickening sight that drew the crowd-the limp form of a man lying on the pavement. My eye followed the upward look of the bystanders until I saw, several stories up, the tilted painter’s scaffold from which the workman had fallen.

Stabbing my conscience was the thought that my fellow citizen’s time to respond to the grace of God in this life had come abruptly to an end, but my time was still to come. He was not less worthy to live than I, but he had died. Why? I do not know. I can observe this fact and know that for me, as well as for him, that time to respond to God’s gracious call is not unlimited. All of life is caught up in the scheme of time. We have a time to respond to God’s grace and goodness, but like all things in this world, that time comes to an end.

Why will we not be smart enough to see that the time factor looms large in the struggle, yes, even the salvation, of our souls and respond today. “To day if ye will hear his voice, Harden not your heart.”

First, consider the time factor in relation to the psychological processes as they affect the struggle of the soul. One basic fact upon which all psychologists agree is that refusal to respond to any given stimulus renders a person less likely, even less able, to respond to the same stimulus the next time.

Charles Darwin, in his later years, confessed that in his youth he had a taste for music and poetry, but he shut his mind to these interests during the hurried, mature years when he gave himself completely to his study of science. Later, in old age, he discovered that the mind he had used so long as a sort of mill for working over and grinding out scientific data no longer would respond at all to music and poetry.

“To day if ye will hear his voice, Harden not your heart,” for there is a time factor in the psychological world at work, and the time will come when your repeated refusals to hear and heed his call will render you insensitive, even deaf, to the entreating invitation of your God. The Eternal will not stop calling, but your time for comprehending and responding will be gone. You may not die tomorrow, the world may not end in atomic fission day after tomorrow, but such is the psychological law governing your life that your refusal to respond to God’s grace today will render you a bit harder for him to reach tomorrow.

Then, too, there is a time factor operating in the social order as it affects the salvation of your soul. God uses other men and women and little children as his agents, his ambassadors of grace. Through them he is now struggling for your soul. Today, if you hear his voice speaking to you in the counsel, wisdom, or appeal of some servant of his, harden not your heart, for you and that person are caught in the time factor. Your messenger may never pass this way again. Refuse God’s invitation through him and your soul may never be sent another ambassador to stir you to such a depth.

And it is not necessarily the eloquent or appealing or attractive person whom God uses to stir your soul to the depths. How often it is the devout but limited servant of God, like that lay Methodist preacher in Colchester Chapel whose halting efforts stirred the great preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon to give his heart to Christ. After the service Spurgeon was heard to remark about the preacher’s sermon: “The fellow had not much to say, and for that reason he kept repeating his text. But the text was all that was needed, at least by me. And his text was that word from Isaiah, `Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth.”‘

Yes, and it may be that in the changing pattern of personalities that God moves about us, his clearest call that stirs us the deepest comes, not in church, not even by way of high inspiration, but rather in an abysmal sense of shame. It was this way that salvation broke through to Saul Kane in John Masefield’s poem “The Everlasting Mercy.” Kane, coming out of a drunken stupor, hears first the poor widow Jaggard upbraiding him for his evil influence upon her boy, and then Miss Bourne, the mild little Quaker, speaking her cool but scathing words to him:

“Saul Kane,” she said, “when next you drink,
Do me the gentleness to think
That every drop of drink accursed
Makes Christ within you die of thirst.”

And it was under such tongue-lashing that old Kane’s spirit came to birth, responding to the merciful call of the Father, and reverently Kane said:

“The water’s going out to sea
And there’s a great moon calling me;
But there’s a great sun calls the moon,
And all God’s bells will carol soon
For joy and glory and delight
Of someone coming home to-night.”

And so, Saul Kane came home to God. But however or by whomever the call of God comes, the point is, don’t let it pass without your heeding, for the time factor looms large. Never again may you be stirred to such depths.

And finally, there is the time factor operating in the historical situation as it affects your soul’s salvation. That is what was in the Psalmist’s mind as he spoke prophetically to Israel: “To day if ye will hear his voice, Harden not your heart.” God had wrought mighty acts of salvation along the tortuous path of his people’s history. God had showed his hand as the Lord of history in their deliverance from Pharaoh’s slave labor battalions, in leading them safely through the parted waters of the Red Sea, in feeding them on manna and quail in the desert. Now they stood on Jordan’s bank, the border of their Promised Land, and the voice of the Lord came commanding them to march in and take it.

But in that day the Israelites showed an amazing lack of trust in their God, who had proven his power of deliverance. They did not respond obediently. In distrust and murmuring they turned aside, and God gave them up to what James Baikie in his The Story of the Bible called “the aimless years” of wilderness wanderings when for forty years this was the weird enchantment that lay upon them: They must be ever striving but never achieve, ever be traveling but never arrive at their destination.

Such also is the oft-repeated experience in the spiritual pilgrimage of many a man and woman. God in his mercy shows his hand of deliverance in the very events of our experiences — that desperate illness, that financial catastrophe, that season of crucial temptation. We faced serious and dire calamity. We cried with all our hearts to God for merciful protection and escape. He responded more wonderfully than we dreamed possible. Then came, too, his voice calling us to cross over the border and dwell always in his kingdom and be ruled completely by the will of our Eternal Father. But we refused. Then inevitably came the aimless years when we cut ourselves loose from the purposes of God and existence lost its meaning.

My friends, the only way to get the best of the time allotted to us is to seize the purposes of the Eternal in the midst of time. Time begins to take on a new and more glorious dimension when the human spirit is synchronized into eternity by an act of human response to the grace of God as it meets us in our own experience. Haven’t you spent days and days — years even — that seemed aimless, meaningless, wasted? Always striving but never achieving, always journeying but never arriving? Then comes the moment when in obedience to the divine voice we walk where Jesus walked, we take up the burdens he took upon himself, and the moments pulse with power; they gleam with eternal meaning. There is life, vitality, exhilaration in the flow of existence. We know we are caught up in the eternal purposes — and it is not just at the moment of decision for confession of faith, nor of accepting for the first time the forgiveness of our sins, but in obedience to God’s call to a new opportunity for service, a new outpouring of sympathy, a new response to his will in the depth of our sorrow or loss.

Limitless, unbelievable, beyond man’s imaginings are the mercy and grace of our God. But we are mortals. We are creatures. We are finite, limited beings. There is a beginning of our days and an end. We are caught in the time scheme. We know we must conform to it in laboring hours (“the night cometh, when no man can work”) and in keeping social engagements (the party is set for an appointed hour, and if we arrive two hours late, the banquet is over). And we are fools if in the area of our most crucial relationships, in our spiritual salvation, we persist in acting as if we were infinite and had all the time of eternity yet waiting for us to respond to the mercy and grace of God.

^“To day if ye will hear his voice, Harden not your heart…. Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.” Delay not. Now is the time.