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Amos 8:11

The days are going to come, declares the Almighty Lord,
when I will send a famine throughout the land.
It won’t be an ordinary famine or drought.
Instead, there will be a famine of hearing the words of the Lord.

Thought for the day – A Famine of Hearing

One of the joys of being in a new part of the world is learning the different stories. I recently heard a story about a young lady named Mary Jones. She was 15 years old at the time and lived in North Wales around the 1800s. Mary saved for six years to buy a Bible. The story goes that she walked some 25 miles from her home to a place called Bala to find Thomas Charles. When she got there, she discovered that his copies had all been sold out. Charles was so moved that he found one for her. And her journey is said to have helped inspire the founding of the British and Foreign Bible Society a few years later.

You might be thinking, what's that got to do with today's reading? Well, in Amos 8 the chapter opens with a basket of ripe summer fruit, a sign that Israel is ripe for the end. God says the people can hardly wait for the Sabbath to finish so they can get back to cheating with rigged scales and treating the poor like goods to buy or sell. Then comes a famine - not of food or water but of God's Word. We might think, "That never happens here," but I want us to stop for a second. How many of us have Bibles on our shelves? I look across my bookshelf and I've got at least ten Bibles. I have at least three different apps on my phone, Bible apps on my phone and my iPad. And yet, look again at what Amos says, because the famine that's coming isn't a famine of printing, it's a famine of hearing.

You can own a Bible, but if you don't read it, you still starve. Hearing in the book of Amos means obeying. The Word has been spoken for years, and Amaziah had told the prophet to be quiet. We read that in our last chapter. People can ignore God for so long that the silence finally arrives. That little girl, that 15-year-old girl, Mary Jones, would walk 25 miles for what we will leave on the shelf. And I find myself asking the question when last did you hunger for God's word so much that you would do the same? Or are we having a famine in the midst of plenty? 

This blog post is part of the Walking the Way Podcast series. All views expressed in this essay are those of the author. This essay is freely available under Creative Commons License with Attribution-ShareAlike, allowing users to share it in other mediums/formats and adapt/translate the content as long as an attribution link, indication of changes, and the same Creative Commons License applies to that material.

This work is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0


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