Professional wine tasters and wine stewards have a highly developed sense of taste. Called sommeliers, they can often tell which herbs were in the ground where the grapes grew. They may even be able to pinpoint the country and region of the vineyard without looking at the label.

How do they get so good? It doesn’t happen overnight. Maybe the first time they test sampled some wine they could say only whether it was dry or sweet. But they trained their taste buds to be ever more discriminating. They concentrated their sense of taste, achieving more subtle nuances of distinction as time went by.

Can we get as good about hearing God’s voice as some people get about tasting wine? Jesus was perfect at it. He was always listening and doing whatever the Father said to do. At the pool of Bethesda, why did Jesus only approach “a certain man…who had an infirmity thirty-eight years.”? (John 5:5) Why did he speak a word one time to heal a blind man and another time use spit and dirt? Sometimes they were healed immediately and other times it happened on their way.

I don’t know if we can get as good as Jesus but I know we can get much better than we are. We can develop our spiritual senses just as we can develop our natural senses. The main thing is: do we want to? Desire will push us to filter out all that is not conducive to hearing God’s voice.

God is speaking to us all the time all around us. He wants us to hear him. Listen hard.