“Be Thou my vision, oh, Lord of my heart. Naught be all else to me, save that Thou art. Thou be my best thought by day or by night; waking or sleeping, my vision, Thou art.”
Spiritual blindness abounds in the body today, and in many varying forms and degrees. One of my favorite passages of Scripture is John 9, when Jesus heals the man born blind. After the healing, the man’s fallout with the religious scholars, and his removal from the synagogue, Jesus comes to find him and makes this radical statement: “For judgement, I have come into the world so that the blind will see, and those who see will become blind.”
See, it’s only when we know how blind we are that we have the humility to let Jesus give us His eyes.
Why make those who ‘see’ blind? Because they only think they can see. Their pride has blinded them to the wonder and awe of the Gospel. They’ve gotten lost somewhere along the way. They can’t even identify Jesus for who He is.
“Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding,” Proverbs 3:5 admonishes us. “Trust.” Don’t “Lean on your own understanding.”
It’s so easy to rely solely on our own experience and understanding of how the world or the Kingdom is supposed to work. We think we’ve got it all figured out. Those who disagree with our theology are “wrong.” We might even label them “deceived,” “demonically oppressed,” or “narcissists.”
That’s not to say that deception, demonic oppression, or narcissists aren’t out there – they most certainly are. But I think that one of the greatest deceptions out there is that we can see when we’re really blind.
In Jesus’s time, blindness didn’t mean quite the same thing that it does today. Blindness essentially meant that you couldn’t see well enough to perform normal tasks. Because there were no such things as corrective lenses, that meant if you had astigmatism or were near or farsighted, you were labeled blind. For example, I wouldn’t have been blind because my vision isn’t that bad (though I wear corrective lenses). My mom, on the other hand, can’t function normally without her glasses, and in Jesus’s time, she would have been considered blind.
As I said earlier, blindness comes in varying degrees, just as it did in Jesus’s time. The same principle applies here: we’re all suffering from one degree of blindness or another. “Now we see dimly, as in a mirror,” Paul said in 1 Corinthians 13. Our understanding of the Kingdom – of anything – is fuzzy at best.
Blindness isn’t (obviously) desirable. But in our quest for sight, let’s not forget that it is only the revelation of the Holy Spirit that can give us true sight. He’s the only one who can help us understand, and He gives us knowledge so that we can see.
From this story of the man born blind, one might almost infer that this man’s faith and thankfulness (his worship) were what gave him his spiritual sight. Doubt and unbelief were what blinded the religious scholars. They put too high and emphasis on proof and not enough on trust. I love how an ignorant, blind beggar knew more about the Kingdom of God than the scholars did. One touch from Jesus and this man knew who’d touched him. He may not have known who Jesus was or that Jesus was the Son of God, but he knew that God had healed him. I wonder if this was when he received the revelation of who God is.
Ask God to show you where you are blind – where you have doubt and unbelief that will prevent you from seeing clearly. Often, we can’t identify them ourselves because we can’t see them. We have to have the humility to admit those places when we ask, thought. Admitting that we’ve been wrong takes considerable humility – and it’s an area that I think that most people are still working on. I know that I am!
God, open my eyes to see the truth. Don’t let me be too proud to admit that I’m wrong. Help me to identify areas of blindness. Give me light to illuminate those places. Help me not to judge others for their blindness since I know that I’m in the same boat. We’re blinder than bats without You. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
All photos courtesy pixabay.com