Have you ever tried to fall asleep in a hotel room or a different house, and every creak or hum keeps you awake? Enter the sound machine. Over 10 million Americans use them nightly. The science is simple: your brain can’t rest when it’s on alert for random, jarring noises. So the machine pumps out steady “white noise” — waves, rain, a fan humming — and suddenly you sleep because the disruptive sounds get drowned out.
Here’s the thing, though. That same trick works against us spiritually. We can train ourselves to filter out voices — even God’s — until they fade into the background hum. Church can become like a sound machine: predictable rhythms, familiar phrases, steady enough that it lulls us to nod along without really noticing. “Amen.” “Good sermon.” And then we walk away unchanged.
But the Hebrew word for “hear” won’t let us off the hook. Shema (שְׁמַע) isn’t about soundwaves brushing past your ears. It means to listen and to respond. To obey. To act. In Hebrew, if you didn’t do something about it, you didn’t actually hear it. Period.
That changes everything. Because when Moses says, Shema, O Israel, he’s not saying, “Catch these words in passing.” He’s saying, “Let this reorder your life.” James echoes the same truth centuries later:
“Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says.” (James 1:22)
We can deceive ourselves into thinking hearing equals transformation. But God’s dictionary has no category for passive listening. Hearing and doing are welded together.
So maybe the better question isn’t: What noise am I letting into my ears?
It’s: What am I doing with what I’ve already heard?
Takeaway
God’s voice isn’t meant to be background noise. Shema means tuning your whole life until it plays in harmony with God.
Grace and Peace,
Andrea