Restored Hearing, My

Introduction: Personal Experience and Sermon Purpose

0:00 I believe it's accurate for me to say that most of you seated here before me in this place are aware of the fact that four and a half weeks ago I lay on an operating table in one of your local hospitals and a doctor went to work on me to stick some things in my skull with the hopes that with the blessing of God it might result in some measure of restoration of the drastic hearing loss in my left ear. Many of you have lovingly and prayerfully identified with me in this experience. It was almost exactly three years ago that I experienced a sudden and dramatic loss of hearing in my left ear. Eleven months later, a sudden and dramatic loss of hearing in my right ear. And after many medical efforts with a world-class group of ENT doctors in New York and much prayer personally, the church back in New Jersey, even having been anointed and prayed over by my fellow elders there, there was a sudden and dramatic loss of hearing in my left ear. There were many factors that indicated that I was really a candidate

1:29 for what is called a cochlear implant. Well, during that three-year period from the initial dramatic loss of hearing in the left ear up until just four and a half weeks ago when I had this surgery, I spent much time reading, studying, consulting, asking questions, seeking to understand the construction and function of the human ear. Furthermore, I tried to look into the causes and the nature of the malfunctioning of the human ear. I studied what is a cochlear implant.

2:13 How does it work? How is it supposed to help this dramatic hearing loss? Well, with the knowledge and consent of your pastors, let me tell you what I plan to do in our time together this evening. I plan to set before you, I don't know how else to describe it other than this, a devotional and instructional lesson related to the matter of my hearing loss leading to this reception of the cochlear implant.

2:48 And I'm going to entitle this lecture slash sermon, slash devotional, slash whatever else you want to put with a slash. I'm going to entitle it God's Amazing Creation and Partial Restoration of the Hearing Ear. We're going to stand back, I trust, with a sense of wonderment at God's amazing work in the creation and restoration of the hearing ear. We're going to stand back, I trust, with a sense of wonderment at God's amazing work in the creation and partial restoration of the hearing ear.

God's Creation of the Hearing Ear: Scriptural Foundations

3:24 We're going to stand back, I trust, with a sense of wonderment at God's amazing work in the creation and partial restoration of the hearing ear. To begin with, I want you to look with me at three very significant texts of scripture which speak about the hearing ear. Two of them explicitly, one of them inferentially. And the first is found in Psalm 94.

3:48 So if you will turn with me, please, to Psalm 94. The title of this sermon is, This psalm indicates its theme, The Lord implored to avenge his people. And in this particular psalm, the psalmist is crying out to God that he would bring righteous vengeance upon the wicked. Much of it like the prayer of the martyrs in Revelation chapter 6.

4:15 And the psalmist asks the question, Lord, how long, verse 3, how long shall the wicked triumph? They speak arrogantly. They break in pieces your people. They slay the widow and the sojourner.

4:29 And then in the midst of all of this blatant wickedness, they speak arrogantly and they say, verse 7, The Lord will not see, neither will the God of Jacob consider. And now the psalmist turns to these people in their blatant, brazen, shameless wickedness, and he says to them, Consider. You brutish among the people, and you fools, when will you be wise? He that planted the ear, shall he not hear?

5:06 He that formed the eye, shall he not see? He tells them they're fools, they're like brute beasts. For surely if there are creatures made in the image of God who can both see, and hear, seeing and hearing did not originate with man, they originated with God. It's because he is a seeing God, he can make the human eye in man who is his image, that man will reflect a seeing God by being a seeing creature.

5:45 And God is a hearing God. And because he is a hearing God, he creates a creature that reflects his image, and who can hear. The one who planted the ear, shall he not hear? So the human ear, a functioning ear, is a reflection of the image of God, and is what this text says, the planting of God.

6:13 It didn't just grow in some kind of evolutionary process, with all of its intricate construction and its amazing function, it was planted. God planned, and God structured it in his mind. If we may use the imagery, God went to the drawing table, and it was God who put down all of the various components of the human ear, that give us the faculty of hearing. Well, what is clearly in this passage is stated even more clearly in our second text, Proverbs chapter 2.

6:53 20 and verse 12 proverbs chapter 20 and verse 12 in the midst of these various proverbs that have no fundamental thematic thread running through them at this section in the proverbs we read the hearing ear and the seeing eye the lord has made even both of them and here's an explicit statement wherever there's a hearing ear there you see the handiwork of god he has made them and then in the familiar words of psalm 139 david is contemplating god's amazing work in putting him together as a human being and he says in verse 13 for you did form my inward parts you did cover me in my mother's womb I will give thanks unto you for I am fearfully and wonderfully made wonderful are thy works and that my soul knows right well and then he likens his prenatal

The Anatomy and Function of the Hearing Ear

8:11 development in his mother's womb to God's work done in a subterranean cave my him was not hidden from you when I was made in secret and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth when david contemplates how God put him together he says I am fearfully and I am wonderfully made and so I invite you to think with me this evening on this matter of God's amazing work first of all in the creation and then in the partial restoration of what the Bible calls the hearing ear. And I'm going to attempt to give this lecture slash devotional slash sermon slash whatever else we call it under three headings. Number one, I want to give a simple explanation of how God has constructed the hearing ear and how he makes it function. I'm so ashamed of myself that though I had picked up a little bit here or there in various courses, in health courses, in grammar school, et cetera, that

9:28 I have lived 70 at the time when I first began to look into this, 72 years, with so little appreciation of how fearfully and wonderfully God has constructed the hearing ear. And I the hearing ear. And the scripture says, the works of the Lord are great, sought out of all those that have pleasure therein. And I hope we'll not sit back and say, oh, this sounds like a biology and anatomy and physiology lecture, but that we'll find sheer pleasure.

10:07 I know, and my dear wife will testify, that as I've been reflecting and reviewing the these matters, making sure that what I was going to present to you was sound and accurate from a biological and anatomical and physiological standpoint, I've had all I could do to keep from getting up in my study and dancing with delight as I've beheld God's fearful and wonderful work in being the God who makes the hearing ear. So I want to give a simple explanation of how God has constructed the hearing ear and makes it to function. Now, it's helpful, and it accords with kosher medical usage, to think of the hearing ear in terms of three categories of the mechanism of a hearing ear. You have the outer ear, the middle ear, and the inner ear. The outer ear, and medical people love to give fancy to the outer ear, and they call it the pinna, or the oracle. That's the thing a teacher used to grab for

11:22 some rascal in a class and yank it to bring him back into life. That's your pinna. That's your oracle. You didn't know you had an oracle. Yes, you do. There it is. That's the thing we generally identify as my ear. I've got an itch in my ear. That's the outer ear that acts like a large antenna. Now, evolutionists say it's a vestigial organ. We could really do without it. They're full of it. It's a very key organ because the way God's made it, it's such that not only does it pick up sound and transfer it into what we'll see in a minute is the other part of the outer ear, but it enables us to help discern whether sound is coming from up, from down, from left, or from right. And the next part of the outer ear is the ear canal. Most of us have an ear canal about an inch long and approximately

12:18 a third of an inch in diameter. And then the ear canal ends at what we call our eardrum, the tympanic membrane. You want to sound very learned, you can tell someone, I think I have a problem with my tympanic membrane. And they'll say, what are you talking about? I'm talking about my eardrum. Now some people classify the eardrum as part of the middle ear. Some people classify it as part of the middle ear. Some people classify it as part of the middle ear.

12:42 Some insist, no, it's part of the outer ear. So we'll call it the barrier that separates the outer ear from the middle ear. We'll be a compromiser and we'll please both sets of people. Then we have the middle ear. And the key elements of the middle ear are three little bones, the hammer, the anvil, and the stirrup, the malleus, the incus, and the stapes. And it's a fascinating thing. Some of us who are old folks, some of you who have reached the maturity of your years, some of you, 14, 12, 5, 6, 7, these are the only three bones in the human body that are exactly the same size when you're 30 as they were when you popped out of your mama's womb. Think of it. When God was engineering the mechanism of the human ear, he said, look,

13:42 this mechanism is so delicate that I don't want any part of it be disturbed by bones growing in the midst of that mechanism. So he programmed into our genetics only three bones in the whole of our body that don't grow a smidgen from the time we're popped out of our mama's womb till the time we're laid in our grave. Isn't that an amazing thing? Isn't that amazing?

14:12 God put those three bones there in the middle ear. But then you have the inner ear. And the key part of the inner ear as far as hearing. For balance, we've got the labyrinth, a couple of spaghetti-like loops on top. We're not going to be concerned about that. But we have the cochlea. And that's a little bony organ, about so big, shaped like a seashell. And if you were to be so brutish as to find a cadaver somewhere and dig it out, you're going to dig in and cut out a cochlea and take it home and with a knife slice down through it, you would see that the cochlea has three chambers all the way through its curved construction. And in those chambers, without going into a lot of detail, there is fluid and then this amazing element. Tens of thousands of microscopic little hairs. They can only be seen under

15:12 the most powerful microscopes. Tens of thousands of little hairs inside the cochlea along with some fluid. And then you have the base of the auditory nerve that comes down and meets the cochlea. From there, makes its way all the way up to the brain. That's what you have in the inner ear. So you've got the outer ear, the middle ear with the three bones, the inner ear with the cochlea. Now, how does all of this function? Function in such a way that we have what the Bible calls a hearing ear. Well, the answer is that by an amazing

15:59 interaction and complex interplay of air, of a thin membrane, of three bones, of physical pressure on some fluid, on some hairs that create electrical current, you and I actually hear. Think with me for a minute. Here's an accomplished violinist. He or she takes the violin, tucks it under the chin, takes the bow with the horse hairs on it and begins to run it over the violin and these most beautiful sounds come into our ears.

16:40 What has happened to bring the sound from that instrument into our ears and brain and fill us with delight at the beauty of that music? Or you're in your bedroom as a mom and there's suddenly that piercing baby infant cry that awakes you out of your sleep and you run into your little one. What has happened that that cry coming out of the throat of that little infant is so powerful that you can hear it in your ear and up into your brain? Or maybe you're in the bleachers at a ball game in the left field bleachers and you're watching and the batter's in the batter's box and you can tell that he's really hit the sweet spot. There is that clean, crisp clack when a real wooden bat hits a baseball and for a moment it upsets you because the ball is about over the pitcher's head before you hear the crack. But you saw him swing, you saw the contact, but there was this just little split second delay between the time you saw him swing and hit it and the time you heard it. What has happened that there's been that delay and yet you hear that lovely, crisp crack of the

18:01 bat upon the ball? Well, in all of those cases, something very similar has happened. And what has happened is this. When that ball is drawn over the violin, vibrations are made. When the little baby cries, vibrations come out of its larynx and out of its mouth and out of the echo chambers of its nose. And when that man swings the bat and hits the ball, vibrations are made and those vibrations begin to bump all of the air molecules in front of it. And so you get these air molecules being bumped and bumped and bumped and bumped and bumped. until they bump into your pinna and go into your ear canal.

18:48 And they bump along at a rate of 1,100 feet per second. That's why there was a delay between the time the batter hit the ball and you saw the ball fly off his bat. It was about over the pitcher's head before you heard the crack because you are about 400 or 450 feet from the place where the vibration started and those air molecules, but by the time they hit your ear, there was this discrepancy. Now, what happens that those air-bumped molecules or bumped air molecules become recognizable sound in our brains? Well, that's the amazing thing. When some of those bumped air molecules get into the ear canal, they go as far as they can and lo and behold, oops, they hit the eardrum. They hit that little thin membrane and you know what they make it do?

19:57 They make it vibrate. And on the inside of that eardrum is the first of those three bones. So when the eardrums...

20:05 When the eardrum vibrates, it vibrates. And when it vibrates, it's rubbing against the middle bone and it vibrates and it passes on its vibration to the smallest of those three bones that looks like a stirrup and it has a plate that is plastered in the cochlea. And here again, it's amazing. There is a 20 to 1 ratio of increased pressure.

20:30 The difference between the size of the eardrum and that little... The little head of the stirrup against which the middle bone vibrates, it's about 20 times smaller.

20:43 So all the energy that was in that eardrum is now transferred to this 120th surface which has increased the pressure that the air brought on the eardrum and now has worked through the bones and when that little thing called the stirrup, the stapes, it acts like a piston on the cochlea and the water says, oh, somebody's knocking on my door and it gets disturbed and it moves. And when it moves, it can only move by passing over all those thousands of little microscope hairs and lo and behold, when it does that, you know what the hairs do? They emit electrical signals and the auditory nerve says, hey, we're getting messages. Let's carry them up to the brain. And so the auditory nerve picks up those electrical signals, carries them up to the brain and this amazing mass of gray matter then begins to sort out all of those signals and says, in the first case, that's a beautiful violin concerto.

21:59 That's the wail of my baby. I need to get in and see what's wrong. That's a sweet sound. That's the sound of a well-muscled ball player hitting that ball in the sweet spot and it's making its way out over the left center field wall.

22:16 And the brain sorts out the distinction among all of those sounds.

22:24 Now let me ask you, if with his limited knowledge of how God knit us together in our mother's womb and as Solomon says, how God made the hearing ear, if David said, I will praise you for I am fearfully and wonderfully made, if David could come back from the dead and sit here and listen to what you're listening to tonight and know, yes, he was indeed fearfully made, I think we would know firsthand what the Bible means when it says, David danced before the ark. That's a simple explanation of how God has constructed the hearing ear and how he has made it to function. Tens of thousands of times, every second that I'm speaking to you, that process is going on in you.

23:30 Whether we think about it or not, we just listen. Listen is like the heart beats and we live. We just listen. But dear people, that's how God has programmed this amazing faculty of the hearing ear.

The Loss of Hearing: The Impact of the Fall

23:45 Well then, secondly, let me speak very briefly to a simple explanation of the loss of ability to hear. What in the world would cause that mechanism to be upset and malfunction? Well, the answer to that question takes us right back to Genesis chapter 3. The answer to all of life's question is fundamentally theological.

24:12 And if Adam and Eve had not disobeyed and had fulfilled the mandate to replenish the earth, to multiply and replenish the earth, every human being populating the earth would have perfectly functioning hearing ears. There would be no attrition in the ability to pick up the full range of sound, all of the volumes of sound that the human ear is designed to pick up, different from the deer's ear. The deer's ear can pick up frequencies that are outside the range of our need to pick up. So God says, I'm not going to give you the ability to hear what a deer can hear.

24:57 And so, had man not sinned, but the result of sin is, dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return. And it means that all of the degenerative processes in the human constitution are ultimately rooted in Eden. Without the rebellion of our first parents and the sentence of death passing upon us all in Adam, there would be no malfunctioning ears. But now, because we live in a fallen world and we are fallen creatures, hearing impairments are a part of human existence.

25:42 And as I gave a simple explanation of the common causes for the loss of ability to hear, I'm not mentioning congenital construction abnormalities, the presence of tumors, but just the common stuff that I am quite certain some of you are familiar with. You can have problems in the outer ear. It can be as simple as an accumulation of wax. What we call wax, wax in the ear is a wonderfully divinely designed creative cleansing agency to keep the ear canal clean, free of bacteria.

26:18 And sometimes it accumulates and it acts like insulation against the thin little membrane that we call the eardrum and the vibrations can't get through. So, you do a home remedy or you go to the doctor and he suctions it out and you're fine again. You can have a perforation or you can have a perforated eardrum so that that can cause problems in the outer ear or infections that affect that part of the ear. And then the problems in the inner ear, most commonly, the bones, those three tiny bones, they can calcify.

26:56 And when they calcify, the calcification keeps them from vibrating at the appropriate speed. And when that happens, then there's, there's a degree of blockage in the sound getting from those three little bones into the cochlea, into the fluid, into the hairs and up the auditory nerve into the brain. That was the problem that our brother Ken Cook had in one ear that's been corrected by surgery. It's called otosclerosis.

27:29 They always come up with big fancy names. You got little bones in your ear that got calcium in them. That's otosclerosis. And in Ken's case, the surgeon went in, it's an amazing thing with very powerful magnifying equipment and was able to take out that tiniest bone in the human body and replace it with a piece of titanium.

27:52 It's unbelievable. When I look at him, I just want to shake my head and say, it can't be, but it is. So those are the problems in the outer and the inner ear. But now, I mean, in the middle ear, but what about the inner ear?

28:06 Well, the main problem, is what is called sensory neuro hearing loss. That simply means the hairs in the cochlea kick the bucket. The hairs in the cochlea die. So every other part of the ear may be functioning very well.

28:26 Sound is coming in. The eardrum is vibrating. The little bones are all scraping one another. That little stirrup, like a piston, is pounding on the cochlea and the fluid is moving, but the hairs, instead of standing up and alive and waiting to receive the signals, they die.

28:45 And when they die, no electrical signals go out into the auditory nerve, no signals to the nerve, no signals to the brain. You have serious hearing loss. And it's one of the mysteries, the best of doctors who've written books on it. When you ask what causes this, the only authoritative answer is Eden.

29:08 Eden. Eden. It's one of those things they scratch their head. Sometimes it can be viral.

29:15 Sometimes it can be autoimmune. Sometimes excessive noise over a long period of time. In my case, they don't have a clue. I can take you to the place, the day, the hour, when it was like someone took a syringe filled with concrete and squirted it into my left ear.

29:37 11 months later, sitting in an elder's room, in an elder's meeting, it's like that guy with the syringe with concrete came and squirted it in my right ear. And the best of doctors I could track down in the New York metropolitan area said, Mr. Martin, we don't have a clue what's caused it. They shake their head.

29:58 Well, I know what caused it. I'm a fallen son of Adam. And we that are in this tabernacle do groan. The outward man decays one way or another.

The Cochlear Implant: God's Common Grace in Restoration

30:09 We're all going to carry on. We're going to carry about in our bodies the echoes of Eden. So that's a simple explanation of the loss of ability to hear. Now then, we come heading number three to a simple explanation of God's amazing work in the partial restoration of the hearing ear, particularly that partial restoration that can come not with surgery.

30:40 As in the case of our brother Ken Cook, but by means of this device called a cochlear implant. And remember, we are witnessing the work of God in his common grace in the medical field. What the ear was originally constructed to be is a manifestation of the wisdom and power of God in creation. What God has allowed men to discover, to develop, and to implement is a manifestation of God's common grace to alleviate human suffering and disease.

31:23 So you want to know what's going on with me going around like a bionic man? Why have I got a button on my brain? Some say, well, I think Pastor Martin, anything would help you. Maybe that's going to help.

31:36 Well, with regard to this matter of how all of this is working, in which we see the wisdom and care of God in common grace, I have components that are both external and internal. The external components are right here. I got enough hearing going the natural way with the help of the hearing aid that I've got good signals going to my brain. I can hear my voice.

32:03 I can hear my words. But this one's operating in a kosher way. This is the natural one. All of this is very natural.

32:10 Very unnatural. What I have here is my external unit. It has an ear hook. It helps me to hang this on my ear.

32:21 That ear hook has a microphone that picks up sound. And then I have a battery. That's a rechargeable battery, and that helps the whole thing to function. And then here's the amazing heart of the unit.

32:36 That's a highly sophisticated called sound processor. Sound processor. Sound processor. Sound processor.

32:42 Sound processor. It's a very complex computerized mechanism. And then there's this little wire, and that goes to this transmitter. The transmitter's got a little black button in the middle.

32:55 That's a magnet that likes to go up and hug a magnet that's buried in my brain up here, you see. And so that's the external unit. And so to use it while I continue to talk to you, I'm going to stick it back together, and that red light lets me know that my battery is fully charged and working. So first thing in the morning, I reach to the nightstand, and I stick in this.

33:25 And I say, thank you, Lord, for that ear. And then I reach for this, grab this. And when it goes up and finds the right spot, oh, boy, it grabs on, and it holds tightly to the internal unit. Now, what's on the inside?

33:44 Well, there's something buried in my skull, something buried in my bone, and something buried in my cochlea. I got a buried head. And what I have buried in my head, the basic unit, the implant, looks like two quarters back to back, and they are laminated in a sort of silicone material. I took Scotch tape and took two quarters to give you an idea.

34:12 And that's flexible, and the thing in my head is so that it can follow the curvature of my head. And what the surgeon did was he took a drill, and he drilled out a nice little pocket in my skull in order to put that in there so it wouldn't stick up and look like a lump. Well attached to this is an electrode about that long, and so they got to find a place to put that. So he drilled a hole through the mastoid bone all the way down into the middle of the middle ear and inner ear open area.

34:46 And he put this electrode right down through there, and at the end of that electrode, there are 16 little highly conductive pieces of metal. They're like little beads embedded in that electrode, and they go through the two and a half curls of the cochlea. So what I have in my head right now is something that looks like that. A wire.

35:12 It goes down, and then they call it the electrode array, where those 16 little highly conductive pieces of metal are embedded in my cochlea. Now that's what I got in me. How does it function? And here, dear people, again, I have worshipped more than once as I think of how this thing functions.

35:37 This is what happens. When sound comes into my left ear, it goes down. When sound comes into my left ear, it goes down. When sound comes into my left ear, it goes down.

35:41 When sound comes into my right ear, it goes in the ear canal, vibrates the ear drum and the little bones, but nothing else works. So sound coming in there never gets to my brain. What happens now is the sound comes in to the processor, a microphone here, a microphone up there, and then it is immediately converted into digitalized signals that it sends out through this little wire. Through this little wire and up to this transmitter.

36:16 And that transmitter then transmits across the skin on my scalp that digitalized signal, and the top half of my implant is a receiver, and it receives it, and then it sends it down to the bottom half that has an array of highly sophisticated electronics that converts that into electronic signals that go down through the head, and when they get into those 16 little beads of highly conductive metal, they shoot out pulses, electrical pulses. And when they do that, my brain says, uh-oh, we're getting pulses again. That pulse sounds like the P in the word pulse. That sound is like a G in the word gone, and without any delay, because remember, I've got normal hearing in this ear, signals going to the left side of the brain, I've got this artificial hearing in this one going to this side, and there's no delay between them. Think of it.

37:34 Think of it. And this is what will blow your mind. This thing can discharge up to 83 volts. 83,000 pulses per second.

37:45 Yes, 83,000 pulses per second. If that were needed to help give the most accurate reproduction, to put it as simply as I know how, dear people, in trying to explain how a cochlear implant works to help those with damaged, dying, or dead hairs. Beyond the help of the natural. Beyond the help of the natural.

38:12 help of a hearing aid, this instrument seeks to mimic God's handiwork. God made us so that the hearing process comes to its culmination when the electrical impulses go up the auditory nerve to the brain. It's at that point that I've had a breakdown. This device seeks to mimic what God did in his creative wisdom. Now, they cannot exactly duplicate what God did, but they give approximate replication, partial approximate replication, so that over a period of time, by many visits to the audiologist, who will continually tweak the sound processor, that lovely little microprocessor, she will hook it into her computer and she will say, what do you hear here, Mr. Martin? What do you hear with this? Let me try this.

39:20 Let me try that. Because she can't hear what I'm hearing, and I have to try to give back to her what I'm hearing. She will work to tweak that sound processor to its optimum benefit for my particular hearing problems. And this, again, is amazing.

39:37 I'm doing brain training. My brain must be trained to receive and to interpret those electrical signals it's receiving. And that's going to take time. And that's why a number of you asked me this morning and said, can you hear a lot better yet? No, not a lot better, but enough to be very encouraged. Let me give you an example. A good example of that, when Dorothy and I sat in the audiologist's office, and after the first speech, after they had calibrated volume and pitch, et cetera, when the audiologist began to speak, it sounded horrible. It was .

40:26 Oh, I said, oh my, my, my, my, this is worse than just doing without. But it wasn't long before I was able to hear her quite well. And I said, Dorothy, go sit in that chair over there about six or seven feet away. And with the help of the hearing aid here, I closed my eyes and said, now talk to me.

40:48 And without reading her lips, I was able to understand her well. And I said to myself, thank you, Lord. That's a token of hopefully much better things to come in the days to come. So most of the reading I've done, the DVDs I've watched, the instruction I've received, that it would be unrealistic for me to expect dramatic improvement before at least three months.

41:18 And generally speaking, the counsel I've received is that maximum benefit is not realized until a full year. People have asked me, can you process music? I haven't even tried yet. And the audiologist starts out very modestly.

41:34 She's only activated one microphone. She didn't want me to have overload at the beginning. So she will, by increments, she will increase the amount of input I'm getting. And hopefully my brain will be adjusting.

41:48 And by degrees, there will be a great measure of improved hearing. They do not hold out any possibility of getting back to where you were before the mechanism. The mechanism broke down. That's an unrealistic expectation.

42:05 But there are many who have had such a measure of restored hearing ability that they are able to function well in almost any kind of a situation. And not a few have actually received back the ability to process music. So we continue to pray. And I'm seeking responsibly to do what I need to do when I had surgeries that required post-op, physical therapy.

42:31 I would always tell the therapist, generally, the surgeon would make out a prescription for six weeks of therapy. I'd go to my first visit, and I'd say, ma'am or sir, I'll be done in three weeks. All I do, I said, I'll be out of here in three weeks. Mark my word.

42:49 And I'd be out in three weeks. I'd go at it with all that I can, believing God will bless those means. And I would covet your prayers that I may be faithful in the things that I should be doing. And I would covet your prayers that I may be faithful in the things that I should be doing.

43:01 Now then, with having that simple explanation of how God made this marvelous instrument called the hearing ear, the simple explanation of what causes the loss of ability to hear, and what I hope has been a simple and reasonably clear explanation of how a cochlear implant works, how should we as God's people respond to these things? Well, at this point, I am going to preach. I am going to preach and say that I believe, as we have been together privileged to think on these matters, that there should be a threefold response from us as God's people, a response of worship, of gratitude, and of holy longing. It should be a response of worship and of praise. As I said earlier, the psalmist said in Psalm 111, verse 2, the works of the Lord are great. Sought out of all those that have pleasure therein.

Response 1: Worship and Praise for God's Wisdom and Power

44:07 And in the book of the Revelation, one of those marvelous passages that describes true worshipers in the act of worship, expressing what it is they are particularly focused upon in their worship. We read in Revelation 4, 10 and 11, the four and twenty elders shall fall down before him that sits on the throne and shall worship him that lives forever and ever. And they shall, I'm sorry, and cast their crowns before the throne, saying, Worthy art thou, our Lord and our God, to receive glory and honor and power. For you did create all things, and because of thy will they were and were created. They worshiped. Worshiped God as the God who is creator. And his creative activity was the expression of his wise and loving and sovereign will.

45:13 And I say when we've had opportunity to consider the intricacy of the hearing ear, this is a manifestation of the wisdom and the power of our God. And it is a call to worship. Amen. And to praise.

Response 2: Gratitude for God's Common Grace in Medicine

45:31 But secondly, things I've shared about this amazing instrument called a cochlear implant, I believe should cause a response of gratitude. The first cochlear implant was developed about 25 years ago. Now we ask the question, who put it into the heart of a man to get so concerned for the hearing impaired who couldn't be helped by surgery? Who couldn't be helped by hearing aids?

46:03 Who did not want to be locked up in the world of deafness, which cuts you off from people? As Helen Keller said, blindness cuts you off from the world of things.

46:16 Deafness cuts you off from the world of people. And I know that to the pain of my own spirit. It's a horrible thing to be shut up in a world of silence. Now, who put it into the heart of a man to be concerned enough who himself was not in that world of deafness to say, I'm going to do something to see if there's any way to help those who have sensory neural hearing loss, whose problem is with the hairs in the cochlea.

46:52 How can we help them? Who put it into a man's heart to do that? Would the devil do that? To relieve human suffering?

47:00 To be an occasion of praise and thanksgiving to God? No. That's what we mean when we speak of God's common grace. We were reminded by Pastor Chansky this morning, this man, Bezalel.

47:13 The first reference to being filled with the spirit is not Moses to lead Israel, but it's Bezalel to build a beautiful tabernacle. God filled him with the spirit of wisdom and coming craftsmanship. Well, it's God who put into the heart of someone to think and think like that. To think and think like that.

47:30 To think and think like that. To think long and come up with the concept and then to secure the funds from people who were well healed, who had some legitimate hope perhaps of gain if something were developed that could be marketed, but who put it in their hearts to be altruistic and to risk their wealth and make the investment of tens of thousands of dollars in the research necessary. It's God who places that in the hearts of men. And who is it that puts in the heart of a man by the name of Dr. Robert Daniels of Grand Rapids to go through med school and the long days and nights of mastering all the baseline techniques and things that he needed to know to be an MD and then go on into his specialty of otolaryngology, an ENT specialty, and then go on further into a subset of neuro, otology, the only certified neuro-otologist in western Michigan. Who puts that into a man's heart? It's God who does. And when we see God's common grace operative in everything from the initial conception to the final production,

48:52 and then when I read the post-op report, for you who've not had any surgery but may yet have some, always ask the doctor or his nurse, for a copy of the post-op report. By law, every surgeon, as soon as he's done cutting you up, sewing you up, and sending you out to the recovery room, he's got to take his dictating machine and say everything he did to you from the time they rolled you in and rolled you out. I got the post-op report. And when I read what that man did to me in two, two and a half hours, I wept and I broke out in praise to God.

49:31 What that man was able to do, go inside my head drilling holes and making pockets for things and sticking things in my cochlea, taking bits of muscle, facial muscle, buried back here, cutting it, shaping it, to plug the hole that he drilled in my cochlea. I've read and re-read with amazement and with gratitude to God. Now I know the medical community gets a lot of bad press because you've got some scoundrels. You've got some scoundrels.

50:02 You've got crooks there like you have everywhere. But dear people, you will not see, in my judgment, more concentration of common grace than you will see in competent medical people. I've said to Dorothy more than once from the time of my first visit with the audiologist and with Dr. Daniels all the way through to the visit on Tuesday, I don't know how any one of these in that medical community, could treat me more professionally, more kindly, more compassionately, if they were all spirit-filled Christians.

50:44 I don't know how they could. Who puts that in them? The devil doesn't. God puts that into their hearts.

50:53 The God who puts it into the heart of Cyrus to send the people of God back to the promised land and gives them all the stuff they need to get there. Who puts that in the heart of a Cyrus? God does. And God does it in such a way that he even calls Cyrus, my servant, Cyrus.

51:13 Dr. Daniels doesn't know it. He's God's servant to minister to this God's servant. And we ought to have a disposition of gratitude and thankfulness.

Response 3: Holy Longing for Full Redemption

51:27 And then thirdly, these kinds of things should fill us with holy longing. The longing for the time when the effects of Eden will no longer be present in us. That's why the Apostle Paul could say the whole creation groans and travails in pain waiting for what? Waiting for the adoption.

51:53 I mean, the creation is groaning and travailing, waiting to be released from its bondage. And when will that come? It says, when there is the adoption, that is, the redemption of our bodies. Every morning when I reach out for this and for this is a call to remember even so come, Lord Jesus.

52:18 A time coming when I won't need to be sticking something in this ear and on this ear to have a modicum of ability to hear. I'll hear as well as the angels. As sure as we now feel these present afflictions. Paul could say, the troubles, the afflictions of the present are not worthy to be compared with the glory that shall be revealed in us.

52:48 And I settled when that first ear went and then the second ear went and I faced the prospect that I was being brought into the world of deafness. I love music, particularly classical music. I love my art, my arias and my symphonies. I haven't listened to one in close to three years.

53:11 I can't process it. It's horrible. It's a form of torture. And I've said, well, Lord, if you're going to so work that the first music I will hear and appreciate is the music of heaven, so be it if it gives me greater longings for heaven.

53:32 You see, these afflictions that press us down and become cards, arcing companions in life, should all of them constantly be gendering within us, wholly longing for the voice of the archangel, the trump of God in the open heavens, when, as we were reminded a few weeks ago, Philippians chapter 3, Christ will fashion the bodies of our humiliation like unto the body of his glory by the power wherewith he is able to subdue us, to do all things unto himself. Well, thank you as my new church family for bearing with me in doing something that I never thought I would do. You've been very attentive. I hope you found it helpful and encouraging and that by God's grace it will be a spur to worship, to gratitude, and to holy longing. We're going to sing in closing a portion of Psalm 136, 39, from which I quoted earlier.

Closing Prayer

54:41 We're going to sing number 34.

54:45 Let's stand together as we sing.

57:40 Be seated.

57:43 Now let us pray together.

57:46 Our Father, we would bow in fresh acts of worship, saying with the psalmist, we are indeed fearfully and wonderfully made. We thank you for your wisdom, the intricacies of your mind, now manifested in the complexities of the way you have put us together. We are grieved and angry that though you have smothered man your handiwork with your fingerprints, there are those who aggressively would seek to obliterate your fingerprints and say that who and what we are is justness. Just something that happened over eons of time. Lord God, we pray, bring down that horrible Christ-denying, God-defying disposition of mechanistic, evolutionary thought, and we pray that men will joyfully acknowledge that they are your creatures. We thank you that you have worked in us, that we gladly own who and what we are in our identity as image of Yourself.

59:10 We thank You for the privilege of thinking upon some of the aspects of that tonight. And yet we are also humbled at the thought we are fallen men and women, boys and girls, and we carry about the burden of our fallenness in our bodies. And yet we thank You for the hope that is ours, the hope of the glorious return of our Lord Jesus and the resurrection from the dead and the full glorification of our bodies when these will be deathless bodies inhabited by sinless souls in Your presence forever. Thank You for these little foretastes of that glorious prospect, Your day. We thank You for this day, for the ministry, of Your servants to our hearts this morning and the privilege of our time together tonight. We pray now You would dismiss us with Your blessing resting upon us. We plead these mercies in Jesus' name. Amen.