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| The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me [Moses] from among your own brothers. You must listen to him. |
| —Deuteronomy 18:15 |
Have you noticed that in our lives we occasionally encounter someone to whom we absolutely must listen? I have felt that way on a number of occasions during my professional life. Here’s just one example:
Early in my career as a fire protection engineer for a major Highly Protected Risk (HPR) property insurance company, I was assigned to oversee the training of new engineers for the Eastern Regional Office that stretched from Maine, along the east coast, all the way to and including Texas. We had thirteen field offices in that region and accounted for 70% of the company employees, including nearly 270 fire protection engineers.
Part of my responsibility was to oversee the field trainers. Each newly hired engineer had been assigned to a more experience engineer who served as a field trainer. The advantage to this particular portion of the assignment was that I became very familiar with a large number of our very best engineers throughout the Eastern Region.
One field trainer came to my attention very soon after I began my new assignment. His name was Larry Davis and he worked out of the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, office. I can use his name in this account because, sadly, Larry passed away several years ago from lung cancer. I still feel his loss both deeply and personally.
Larry had begun his career in fire protection as a very enthusiastic volunteer fire fighter in western Pennsylvania. Following graduation from high school, he joined the U.S. Air Force during the Viet Nam War and became an Air Force fire fighter. Once his military career ended, Larry joined the Pittsburgh office and quickly became one of its most valuable fire protection engineers.
In every way, Larry stood out. He had a very friendly personality. He was distinctly sure of himself. He had a great deal of knowledge. He had a unique ability to share his knowledge with others. He was decisive. And, perhaps most importantly of all, he had the ability to motivate others to do the right thing.
I soon became exposed to all of these traits and began to wish that other field trainers had some, if not all, of the qualities that marked Larry’s life. As a result, I began to channel newly hired engineers to the Pittsburgh office for their training, hoping that Larry would give them such a solid foundation that these new hires would become excellent employees. This strategy certainly worked.
A few years later, I had the opportunity to recommend that Larry receive a promotion to the home office of the insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut, to assume the role of instructor in our nationally recognized fire safety training laboratory. It was a wise decision on my part. Larry blossomed in this role of added responsibility.
Now, all of our newly hired engineers had the opportunity to learn from Larry and become influenced by his work ethic, attention to detail, and vast knowledge of the science of fire protection engineering. In addition, countless thousands of individuals from our insured facilities and numerous governmental agencies had the opportunity to learn from Larry’s extensive background.
On one occasion, a newly hired engineer asked to meet with me in my role as Director of Loss Prevention Training. It seems that he had an encounter with Larry that had left him confused. This new hire had been taught some procedure in his field office that Larry insisted was neither efficient nor correct. The new hire wanted to know what he should do.
My answer? I told the new hire that he needed to listen to Larry. And, I explained some of Larry’s background, his superior knowledge of the field of fire protection engineering, and his significant number of years in implementing the procedures in the field office setting.
You may wonder what point I am trying to make with this account regarding Larry Davis. There are times in our lives when we need to understand that when certain people speak, we need to listen carefully to what they say.
The Scripture verse at the beginning of this blog post records a time when Moses spoke to the people of Israel. Moses told them that God would raise up a prophet like himself from among the people and that the Israelites should listen carefully to what that prophet said.
Bible scholars offer varying opinions as to whether Moses was talking about Joshua, who would succeed Moses as the leader of the people, or someone else whom God would raise up at a later time. Some scholars believe that God had prompted Moses to speak about someone that Moses would not even know, namely God’s one and only Son, Jesus. Whomever Moses was speaking about, the point is clear. The people were to listen carefully to whatever this prophet had to say.
In our modern 21st century world, God has given us His written Word. The Bible contains the words of God Himself, the words of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the words of God’s annointed Prophets, Priests, Kings, and Apostles. In each case, when we read the words from these God-ordained leaders, we should listen very carefully to what they have to say. And, all the more so, we should do what they instruct us to do.
How blessed we are! How very fortunate we are to have such a great number of individuals who speak to us today of the mysteries of God. May we show our thankfulness for these great gifts by giving careful attention to what we read in God’s written Word.
