Now, it is a very singular instance of the superficial, indolent way
in which people are led away by sound rather than by sense, that
this saying of my text has often been taken to mean that there is a
certain class that can listen, and that it is their business to
listen, and there is another class that cannot, and so they are
absorbed from all responsibility. The opposite conclusion is the
correct one. Everybody has ears, therefore everybody is bound to
hear. Which being translated, is that there is not a man or woman
among us that has not the capacity of hearing in the sense of
understanding, and of hearing in the sense of obeying the word that
Jesus Christ speaks to us all. Every one of us, whatever may be our
diversities of education, temperament, natural capacity in regard to
other subjects of study and apprehension, has the ears that are
capable of receiving the message that comes to us all in Jesus
Christ.
For what is it that He addresses? Universal human nature, the
universal human wants, and mainly and primarily, as I believe, the
sense of sin which lies dormant indeed, but capable of being
awakened, in all men, because the fact of sin attaches to all men.
There is no man but has the needs to which Christ addresses Himself,
and no man but has the power of apprehending, of accepting, and of
living by, the great Incarnate Word and His message to the world. So
that instead of there being a restriction implied in the words
before us, there is the broadest implication of the universality of
Christ's message. And just as every man comes into the world with a
pair of ears on his head, so every man comes into the world with the
capacity of listening to, and accepting, that gracious Lord. That is
the first thing that our Master distinctly declares here, that we
all have ears.