It's Time for An Eye Test

Thank you so much, wow. Okay, Jesus, where are we going? Let’s just stand together for a second. I believe God’s wanting to do something a little bit messy this morning; at least, it will be for me, because it’s not the normal kind of message that I preach. So, we’re going to need His Spirit in an intensified measure this morning. Holy Spirit, we just invite you. You’re here already, we know that. You’re here in such kindness. Such grace, and mercy. But I ask you, Holy Spirit, that You would intensify Your presence in this room. That You would intensify Your presence. You are the one who leads us. You are the one who brings true revelation to us, not just information. You’re the one who can change everything about our lives in one second. And so, we invite you, Holy Spirit. Come and speak, come and move. Come and have this meeting. The floor is yours, Holy Spirit. Come, Holy Spirit, move amongst us. Flow, living water. Flow within us. (Speaking in tongues). Why don’t you just go ahead and invite Him to invade your space? (Speaking in tongues). We honour your presence in this place, Holy Spirit. We recognise that You are God, and we are not. And so, this morning, yet again, we submit ourselves to Your ways and we say come teach us Your ways. That we would walk in them. That we would see Your glory. In Jesus’ name, amen. 

This is going to be a fun one this morning. I’ve called this message ‘It’s Time for an Eye Test’. There was a little bit of argument about who was going to do this session, and it went back and forth, a little bit. In the second to last back and forth moment, where I handed the session back to George, I said to him, ‘Can’t do it, I don’t have the time to prepare for it, sorry.’ I felt God say to me, ‘It’s really good that you’ve learned some boundaries, thumbs up for that. Now, go and tell George you will do it, because I want to speak something prophetically through you.’ You know, the thing is, for me, I like to have things tidy. I like to have the whole preach mapped out. I like to have the message sewn up. It’s far less risky that way, when you know where you’re going. But, you know, God isn’t so interested in our comfort zones. If you haven’t figured that already in this conference, I don’t know if you’ve been listening, because I’m pretty sure every single message has said that in one way or another. And this morning is way out of my comfort zone, but I believe God has given me something that He wants to speak a prophetic message, and it might not be neat— it might be, because He’s really awesome, so He might do that for us.  But it might not be neat, but I believe it’s something that’s on His heart. 

You know, we talk about renaissance; last year we talked about rebuilding ruins. The thing is, the only way to do that is if you have the correct vision. You can’t rebuild ruins if you don’t know what you’re rebuilding. You can try, you can put it together, but the building you come up with might look very, very different to the original design, unless your vision is clear enough to make you understand what you’re building towards. I felt God speak to me and say, ‘We need to have an eye test this morning.’ He wants to realign our vision. He wants to clear up some perspectives that we have. If not, what we’ll do is we’ll walk out of this building and we’ll rebuild according to our design rather than His design, and wonder why things aren’t being transformed, and why the nations aren’t being changed. And so, this morning, we’re going to look a little bit at having our eyes checked, and I’m going to read a few verses from Luke 11 and a few verses from Mark 8, and then I’ll tell you what on earth I’m talking about. Luke 11:34. “Your eye is the lamp of your body. When your eye is healthy, your whole body is full of light, but when it is bad, your body is full of darkness.” When your eye is healthy, life and light will flood you. But when your eye is unhealthy, when your vision is skewed, when there are dark spots in your vision, the light that is intended to flood you, in and through you, won’t do what it’s meant to do because your vision is unhealthy. Unhealthy vision in the body is a catastrophic thing, because you and I were made to be vessels of light and bringers of light, but it’s a healthy eye that enables that whole process. 

Mark 8:22. “And they came to Bethsaida. And some people brought to him, to Jesus, a blind man and begged him to touch him. And he took the blind man by the hand and led him out of the village.” I love the kindness of Jesus. Let’s just take you away from everyone who’s staring at you. You are not a spectacle; you are not the cruel testimony for the church to feed on. I’m just going to take you into a quiet spot, let’s just have a moment. You know, sometimes, the way we do ministry in our churches is more about what is feeding in us than caring for the person in front of us. I’ve seen moments of demonic manifestations where there’s like 50 Christians who, like, pounce on that human being, rather than kindly say first to the demon, ‘Be quiet’, and then take the person out of the room in a quiet place, in a safe space. That’s what it looks like to care for people, rather than care about testimony, right? And in this moment, we’ve got this guy who is broken and needy, and Jesus is so kind in this moment. It doesn’t always work like this, but Jesus understands the need of the person in front of Him, and He says, ‘Let’s just go away somewhere for a second, away from all the prying eyes. Let’s just do this in private.’ And He takes him out, and He leads him by the hand, and He spits on his eyes— understandable why He didn’t want to do that in front of everybody. “And laid his hands on him, he asked him, “Do you see anything?” And he looked up and said, “I see people, but they look like trees, walking.”” What I love about this man is he had the insight to understand that he wasn’t seeing correctly; O, that more Christians would have such insight.

So many of us are walking around, seeing trees instead of people, and insisting that our vision is correct. And yet, Jesus is wanting to bring a restoration of healthy eyesight to his body, so that what we defend so passionately is actually correct in vision. “Then Jesus laid his hands on his eyes again; and he opened his eyes, his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly. And he sent him to his home, saying, “Do not even enter the village.”” This is a renewing of your mind kind of message. We were laughing, a few of us, yesterday, that this conference hasn’t been the classic ‘Ra-ra, we’re going to change the world, let’s get it out there’, and then Monday morning hits you like a wet fish in the face. This is much more the substance of renaissance kind of conference. And, sometimes, we spend a lot of time just getting super excited and hyped up, and then we enter real life again and we’re wondering why we’re not equipped to do the stuff. And it’s because sometimes when we gather together, not always, but sometimes when we gather together, we just get super excited without talking about journey together, and then we find that we’re lacking in some of the equipping that we need for our Monday morning workplaces. And so, this message might not be your classic conference message, but here we go anyway. This is a renewing your mind moment for all of us: for me, and for you. In Luke 11, where it talks about the eye being healthy, it’s the Greek word ‘haploose’. That word literally means ‘unfolded’; without any folds, without any complexity, without any dark spots, without any confusion. These are all the definitions that you could bring to that word. It basically means to be completely whole, to be completely consistent. 

What God is wanting to bring, as He restores our eyesight in the body, is that we would have such completely consistent vision in line with kingdom vision. That there would be no dark spots, there would be no folds of confusion, no areas that are hidden in darkness, but that He would bring everything into an unfolded wholeness so that we would see completely consistently. In Mark 8, where we’re told that his eyes were restored, that his sight was restored to him, that word means to be restored to the original ideal, i.e. before a fall. That’s what the dictionary definition is: “to be restored to the original idea, i.e. before a fall.” What God wants to do with you and me is to restore our vision to the original ideal, i.e. before the fall. That means that you and I will be able to see as if Adam and Eve had never fallen, as if sin had never entered humanity. All the ways that our vision gets corrupted— through sin, through brokenness, through orphan-heartedness, through selfishness— God is saying, ‘No! Today I’m going to put My hands on your eyes, and I’m going to restore to you, vision to the original ideal, i.e. before a fall.’ And so, what I want you to do is, I want you to put your hands on your eyes, and I want you to say, ‘See, in Jesus’ name’. And I want you to put your hands on your heart, on the eyes of your heart. See, in Jesus’ name. Original sight be restored, in the name of Jesus, that we would see as Jesus sees. That we would see scripture as Jesus sees. That we would see the law as Jesus sees. That we would see the world and sinners as Jesus sees. And we would see the face of the Father as Jesus sees. Okay, here we go. 

In Luke 10, we’re told that a lawyer comes to Jesus, an expert in the law. Luke 10:25. We’re going to jump around a bit, I hope this is okay. And we’re told “And behold, a lawyer stood up to put him to the test.” You know, a focus on law will always make you someone who is putting others to the test, because the law is all about a test. It’s all about weighing people up, to measure them against some line, against some standard. It’s always a test. And this lawyer comes up to Jesus with a test in mind, and he says, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” He said to him, “What is written in the Law? How do you read it?”” That is such an important sentence. How do you read it? Do you know, knowing scriptures and being able to quote them is not enough. You can memorise all the words of the bible until you’re blue in the face; that doesn’t tell me that you know how to read it. We can come to a place, and the Pharisees did, where they memorised the scriptures; that’s how you became a Pharisee, you memorised the entire Old Testament. Think about that. That’s what they did in Pharisaic schools. That’s what they did to become a teacher of the law. That’s what 10- to 14-year olds in Jewish schools do. They would memorise the Hebrew scriptures. You can memorise it until you’re blue in the face, it doesn’t mean you’ve understood it. 

That’s why when the Sadducees come to Jesus and they again try to test Him, because their focus was on the law. And they try to test Him, and they say, ‘Will there be marriage in heaven? What about women who married one husband, and then he died, and she married again, and then he died: who will she be married to?’ And they’re trying to test Him with ridiculous questions, and He says to them this remarkable thing: “You are wrong, because you know neither the scriptures, nor the power of God.” Can you imagine how taken aback they would be. They knew the scripture better than anybody else; they’d been memorising it their whole lives. But memorising a scripture doesn’t mean you know it, because how you read it, what your vision sees as it reads it, dictates whether you’ve understood it or not. And so many of us in the church are so focussed on the law in so many ways, we’re still reading it in so many ways, like the Pharisees did. And, you know, Jesus wasn’t cross with the Pharisees because they focussed on the law; He was cross with the Pharisees because they focussed on the laws that they liked. And so many of us in the church are still playing that game. We pick the moral issues that we think are important, and it tends to be the ones that we don’t think we’ll fall in. those become our hobbies to talk about. Because we know, ‘Ahh, that’s not going to be an issue for me, but that one might be so let’s not talk about that one.’

You know, the Pharisees read the law as if it was designed to draw a line between ‘us’ and ‘them’. That’s how they read it. They read it as if it was the marker of belonging to an exclusive club. That’s how they read the scriptures. Everything that they memorised fed into that eyesight that they had, which was that all of this exists to draw a line between ‘us’ and ‘them’. What they didn’t understand about the law, that it wasn’t about drawing a line between ‘us’ and ‘them’, but about drawing a line between us— all of us— and Him! They didn’t get that. They didn’t understand that the law isn’t the line between the moral people and the immoral people, because all of us are immoral under the law. Every single one of us. That’s the point of the law. If you haven’t understood that, then you’ll never understand grace, because you’ll keep going back to the law, thinking that it’s possible to fulfil it. You’ll think that it’s still worthwhile— ‘let’s just pick up a few of these things, that’s what it was there for’—no! The whole point of the law was to show you that God is so much higher than you. You want to try? Try all of these things, but if you fail at one of them, then you’ve failed at all of them. The point was never, ‘Use this as a line between ‘us’ and ‘them’’, but it was, ‘Understand this as a line between you and God, and then see how He breaks in with grace.’ And so many of us, whilst living in grace, are still using our scriptures, are still reading these rules of morality, we think, as a line between ‘us’ and ‘them’.  He wants to restore to us, healthy eyes. Eyes that see as if we never fell. And those eyes understand the law, that it is for a perfect and impossible Master. Proof that we are fallen. Proof that we need grace. Proof of His kindness at work in our lives. 

That’s what the law is. You know, the New Testament tells us that there’s no way to understand the scripture without the lens of Jesus. This is the problem; the Pharisees read the Old Testament again and again but, when they saw Jesus was the decoder of the Old Testament, they didn’t recognise Him, and so they couldn’t understand what God was all about. There are lots of conspiracy theories about a ‘hidden code’ in the bible, and you’ve got to find it somewhere. I want to tell you: those theories are absolutely right. There is a hidden code in the bible that you cannot access on plain reading. 100% true. The ‘decoder’ is Jesus. If you don’t have the lens— this is biblical. I’m going to read you a verse, because some of you are looking at me like… freaking out. Go to 2 Corinthians 3:14. You guys okay? 2 Corinthians 3:14… if I can get there. Talking about the Israelites, “Their minds were hardened. For to this day, when they read the Old Covenant, that same veil remains unlifted”—a veil, in Old Testament times, wasn’t see-through. A veil in Old Testament times was thick; you could not see through it. That same veil “remains unlifted, because only through Christ is it taken away. Yes, to this day whenever Moses is read a veil lies over their hearts.” Whenever they came to Old Testament scriptures, they read the words, but they couldn’t see the words because there was not a see-through veil, but a thick veil that you could not see-through. Anyone who approaches the scriptures without the lens, the ‘decoder’ of Jesus, will have that same veil over the words. You won’t be able to understand it. It’s why, when people read the Old Testament, and then try to use the Old Testament at odds with Jesus in the New Testament, they can’t understand the Old Testament. They’re not pitting against one another; it’s Jesus who helps you understand the Old Testament. 

There’s no other way of understanding the Old Testament. There’s no other way of reading about Noah and the flood without putting the lens of Jesus on. If not, you will misunderstand what God is communicating about who He is. There’s no way of reading Job as a stand-alone message without putting the lens of Jesus onto Job, because you will misunderstand what God is revealing about His character. Any place in the Old Testament that you find, if you do not put the lens of Jesus Christ, in His fullness, onto that scripture, you will misunderstand the revelation that God is trying to bring. The Old Testament, all of the scriptures, can only be read through the lens of Jesus. Sometimes we read the epistles in the same way that we read the Old Testament, as if Paul was the intellectual and Jesus was just sweet. He was a hippy; He wasn’t too clever, so you don’t want to put too much emphasis on the words of Jesus. So, if you want to understand meaty theology, go to Paul. If you don’t read Paul through the lens of Jesus’s life, you will misunderstand Paul. That’s what we were talking about last year. That’s why I believe so passionately that God intended men and women to be equal, because when you apply Jesus as the lens to read Paul through, you’ll understand everything that he says around what’s difficult in the role of women in the church. Jesus is the decoder; He is the lens through which we see. And for some of you, this is like ‘Boom!’ because you’ve been dabbling in the law and thinking that that increases your godliness, when Jesus is saying to you that you’ve misunderstood the purpose of the law. 

You cannot live in both law and grace. You cannot do it. They are different realms. It’s like me saying that I live on planet Earth and planet Mars at the same time. You cannot physically do it. You are only capable of being in one realm at a time, as a human being. You cannot be in the realm of law and the realm of grace, so don’t dabble in law. And don’t use the law as your line between you and those who are ‘morally inferior’ to you. That’s not what you and I were made for. Okay, let’s keep going. Our lens for these scriptures will determine our lens for other people, and that’s the tragedy of the Pharisees, right? The lens of the scriptures determine their lens of others, and it wasn’t pretty. They were so focussed on the law that every time you see the Pharisees encounter with Jesus, someone who is broken, the first question they ask Jesus is, ‘Is it lawful? Is it lawful to heal this person?’ They’re not even seeing the person in front of them. ‘This person is irrelevant; the scriptures are what we are about.’ It’s like they were so obsessed with being right that they couldn’t understand the value of human beings anymore. You know, sometimes that’s what we’re like in the church. We’d rather kill each other over theology—oh, the irony of that, given that we’re not to kill—but we’d rather kill each other over theology than just agree to disagree and love one another anyway. We’d rather come out with claws and scratch away at each other when, you know, last time I checked, we’re known as His disciples not because of our correct theology but because of our love for one another. 

We are defending our rightness rather than defending relationships, and it has to stop. He’s wanting to restore eyesight to His body. Durban: He is wanting to restore eyesight to His body, in this city. Time to say ‘enough’. Enough on drawing lines between who’s in and who’s out, not only in terms of the world, but in terms of church spaces, based on our expressions and based on our nuances of preaching. Enough is enough. How on earth do we expect the world to recognise Him in us when we can’t even love each other? When we boycott each other’s meetings, how on earth is that godly? I don’t get it anymore. It’s got to stop, right? And it begins with you and me. It begins with our hearts. I’m not preaching out there, I’m preaching in here, because the temptation of the human heart is to set up a platform for ourselves, and if I can prove that I have superior worth to you, because I’ve understood my bible correctly and you haven’t, then there’s such a temptation for each of us to do that— don’t do it! Let’s not give in to that. Let’s be a body, loving one another, honouring one another. Honour is not impressive and you like the person in front of you and agree with them. Honour is impressive when you disagree with them, that’s when honour becomes beautiful. Honour is not honour when you agree with everything and you’re all slapping each other on the back saying, ‘Aren’t we cool?’ That’s just self-enjoyment there. That’s just saying, ‘I’m so awesome, because we’re all alike!’ 

Honour is honour when I’m looking at someone who disagrees with me and I see the value and gift of God in you. This is not intended to draw lines between anybody. Don’t focus on your rightness; focus on relationship. Don’t fight for your rightness; fight for relationship. This doesn’t mean that we flatter one another. Flattery and honour are not the same things. We’re truthful; we don’t lie to one another. We acknowledge disagreements; we don’t sweep them under the carpet, letting them fester there until one day they’re just going to explode. No. But we say, ‘This thing is a disagreement, but this thing cannot ever be powerful enough to cause division.’ Because there is a mandate, that is a primary mandate, on you and me, and it’s not correct theology; the primary mandate is love. You know, sometimes people quote Philippians 4 to me, and actually, more so being the salt of the world in the gospels. Philippians 4 is when our conversation is seasoned with salt, right? “You are the salt of the world”, and people will talk about it. In fact, I’m pretty sure— I was thinking about this— I’m pretty sure that when I was in my teens, I preached a message on being the salt of the world. And there was lots of stuff in there about preservation, and salt is used to preserve, and so we are the preservers of morality in the world. My theology has changed somewhat since then, but anyway. Grace on the old me; we’re all growing. But sometimes, we can be so obsessed with being salty that we make the message entirely unpalatable to anybody. 

You know, Philippians 4:6 says, “Let your conversation be full of grace, seasoned with salt.” I want to ask you, what ratio is your grace to salt? Because some of us are full of salt, it’s questionable whether we’re even seasoned with grace, and we’re wondering why everyone is running away from our message rather than towards our message. It’s impossible to eat. It literally makes people physically sick, your message. Because we’re called to be full of grace, seasoned with salt. You see Jesus, He was overflowing with grace. Overflowing. He was identified with sinners and gluttons and drunkards. He was so close to them that tit was difficult to tell them apart. We sanitise the gospels because we don’t like what it tells us about what Jesus did. Because, for so long, we’ve taught in the church to keep the world at arms-length because you’re too weak to overcome the temptation of the world. And, look, there’s an element of that, please hear me, I’m not saying jump into sin because the more sin you take part in, the more like the world you’ll be— you’re hearing me, right? I’m saying that unless we are so close to people, and walking with people and journeying with people, then our message has no hope of going anywhere near them, because Jesus said repeatedly, “I didn’t come as a doctor to heal the healthy, I came as a doctor to heal the sick.” 

And some of us are sitting in our Christian ghettos, constantly shaking our heads at the reality of the dark world out there. You are made to be a solution to that world; what are you doing about it? And it’s not by going and setting up a podium and preaching at people, that wasn’t Jesus’s methodology. It was primarily eating with people and befriending them and loving them. Loving them out of their sin and brokenness. And, incidentally, God doesn’t hate sin because it’s ‘morally wrong’, He hates sin because it’s brokenness. We see sin as a right/wrong thing, whereas God sees sin as a broken/whole thing. What He’s doing is not taking sin out of us because He’s just a rule keeper and you need to follow the rules, what He’s doing is healing us from our brokenness, so we don’t sin anymore. And the paradigm that we show the world is this morality of right and wrong, where we need to be understanding the state of the human heart which is broken and needs to come into wholeness. You are not the moral police of the world. That is not what you were made for. I read this quote; I really like it, so I’m just going to read it to you, because I thought it was funny. It’s sad and funny. “You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out, surprisingly, that God hates all the same people you do.” Most of western Christianity loves the name of Jesus because He can save me but hates the ways of Jesus because He also wants to save them. Every time we use religion to draw a line that keeps people out, rest assured Jesus is with the people on the other side of that line. 

He wants to restore our vision. Healthy eyes. Healthy eyes. Healthy eyes when we’re reading scripture, applying the lens of Jesus everywhere. Healthy eyes where we’re seeing other people, so that we’re not constantly looking for ways to exclude, but we’re looking for ways to draw people into family. Because, you know, the incredible thing is, the Pharisees consistently looked for division between them and the people; Jesus consistently joined His fate to the people. I love the story of Jesus healing the leper. Where is it, so that you’ll believe me. Have a written the verse? Read the whole of the New Testament and you’ll find it. He touches the leper. Why does He do that? So many moments— the layman, He says, “Get up and walk”; He doesn’t touch him. Why would you touch a leper, except if you wanted to join your fate with his? Because in the Old Testament, if you touched a leper, you had the same level of cleanness as the leper. Jesus is incredibly intentional. He’s like, ‘You’ve drawn a line between you and them? I’m going to go touch that person; now what are you going to do about it?’ What camp are any of us in now? Now He’s clean, so what are we now? 

Haven’t you ever wonder why, when the woman who’s bleeding for 12 years finds Jesus in a crowd after overcoming such incredible difficulty and fear and challenge, and she reaches out to touch the hem of Jesus’s robe and she gets healed, haven’t you ever wondered why Jesus starts announcing and questioning, ‘Who touched me?’ This is Jesus! He knew everything. He consistently had words of knowledge about what was in people’s hearts; did He really not understand who’d touched Him? Are we really that simple and naïve as we read the scriptures? Ad if He was asking the question because He needed the information. We don’t understand what He was doing in that moment; He knew full well who had touched Him. A woman had touched Him, who’d been unclean for 12 years, which meant every single place she went she would have to consistently shout out, as an announcement of her entering the place: ‘Unclean! Unclean! Unclean!’ so that no-one would touch her and become unclean like her. And Jesus stands up and He says, ‘Who touched me?’ What’s He doing? Joining His fate with hers. He’s saying, ‘If you’re going to say she’s unclean, then you need to look at me, because she touched me. But what are you going to do about it? Because now she’s clean. What are you going to do about it?’ And so often, we’re ministering to those ‘out there’— don’t get too close, though, I wouldn’t want to get grubby or anything, so just… I’ll send you my R50 in the mail and hope that it helps you. I’ll do my Christian ‘charity’. 

You know, ministering to the world is part of your identity; it’s not your charity. It’s part of understanding the mandate on your life. It’s part of being an heir to the kingdom. So, if you see ministering to the world as part of Christian charity, please stop it and go back to the start with the Father, because what you are doing is part of an extension of who He has made you to be. You’re not doing anyone any patronising favours; it’s part of the mandate of every son and daughter of God. But we do it with such a ‘you, over there; I’ll still keep in my safe zone.’ Whereas we see Jesus consistently joining His fate with those who were broken. Consistently identifying with them and daring the people. I can see Him standing there, just looking at them like, ‘Call me unclean, if you dare.’ I can see Him. Can’t you see Him? You know, the remarkable thing is He’s joined His fate to me and to you. Ephesians says that He’s joined us with Him. That you are now forever in God, and God in you. He so loved you and me that He didn’t patronise us with a sprinkling of grace. No; He joined His fate with me and you. It’s what gives you hope, regardless of circumstance, because He’s joined His fate to us and He is the one who overcomes all things, which is what makes it so powerful for you, because it means in your circumstance, you are joined with the one who is the overcomer. He has joined His fate to the broken, and that includes you and me. He wants to restore our vision. Restore our vision of the scriptures, restore our vision of the world, and restore our vision of the Father. 

In Matthew 25, let’s flick there. It’s one of my favourite, favourite, favourite passages. It’s the parable of the talents; many of you will know it very well. You’ll hear me say often, because I catch myself doing it, “It’s one of my favourites”—honestly, I have so many favourites, but anyway. Scripture is beautiful if we take the time to look at it. It really is beautiful. There’s this parable that Jesus says, of a man going on a journey, and he gives his servants talents to invest. He entrusts to each of them, and he says, ‘Do something with this’, and he goes off on his journey. And he’s given each of them something to work with. We’re told that the first two servants did stuff. You know, the one with the five talents, he worked with it and here it is: it’s grown; and the one with two, here it is: it’s grown. The one with one says this, verse 24: “The one who had received the one talent came forward, saying, ‘Master, I knew you to be”—say that: ‘I knew you to be’. Bookmark that, it’s crucial. “I knew you to be a hard man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you scattered no seed, so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent.” You know, the parable doesn’t tell us that the master was a hard man. In fact, we see that the master was an incredibly generous man. He gave his servants things to grow, and then he entrusted them even more. But this servant’s perception— his view, his vision, his unhealthy eyesight— told him that this master was a hard man, and when you see the master as a hard man, two things happen: fear creeps in, and paralysis happens. I was afraid, so I took what you gave me, and I hid it. I couldn’t take any risks. I couldn’t do anything with it, I was too frightened to do anything.

How you see God is the most important thing. It will determine everything about how you walk out in your destiny. This is why understanding the father-heart of God isn’t just for the emotional amongst us who aren’t ready to get on with the serious stuff that some of us are spiritual enough to be able to do. No, that’s nonsense. Because you need to understand who your Father is, so that you won’t be afraid, and you’ll be able to do what He’s called you to do. If you don’t understand who He is, you will always live in fear of what He might do, and it will always make you paralysed rather than able to step out in faith. I talked about faith journeys yesterday; some of them go really well, some of them really don’t. I’m being honest. But, you know, when they don’t go well, my comfort is that I have a Father who loves me and is so proud of the fact that I believed that He was speaking to me. That He picks me up, He dusts me off, and He sets me on adventure with Him again. But if you are too afraid of God, who you see as a hard man, then you will never step out in faith because what if I get it wrong? And you’ll never invest that talent, because what if it doesn’t do what I think it’s going to do? And what if He comes back and tells me off? And what if He comes back and isn’t pleased enough with me? And what if…? What if…? What if…?  And today, the Father is wanting to heal our eyes so we would see Him as a good, good Father. That we would understand when Jesus showed us what God was like, He was showing us the fullness of what God is like. When Jesus joined His fate to the broken, He wasn’t acting outside of what the trinity is like; He was working alongside the Father because the Father is the kindest Father you will ever, ever, ever meet, because He is consistently looking to bless you and do you good. He is a good, good Father. And today, He wants to heal our eyes. He wants to heal our eyes, that we would see Him, that we would see His face. And rather than this poor servant who misunderstood the whole thing and ended up missing out on the opportunity of a lifetime, we would be people who see our Father and are able to step out in faith. 

He wants to heal your eyes today. So, won’t you put your hands on your eyes again. See, in the name of Jesus. See, in the name of Jesus. I speak to the eyes of your hearts, and I say see Him afresh. The one who has joined His fate to yours, and your fate to His. The one who isn’t using the law as an excluding line, but is saying, ‘Come, come, there is grace that will bring you home.’ The one who is kinder than we’ve understood. Not a hard taskmaster, but one who is entrusting so much to you and I because He believes in you, and He believes in His empowering presence in you. You know, God is wanting to restore the revelation of His goodness and His generosity from before the fall. You know, at the fall, the enemy convinced Adam and Eve that the Father might not really be as good as He seems to be. That the Father might somehow be holding out on them. And that’s the enemy’s game plan to you and me consistently. Is He really to be trusted as ‘good’? Don’t you think He might be holding out on you? The enemy is a liar. The enemy is a liar. You know, in the smallest way this morning, God reminded me of this; when I came into this building, I was not ready to preach in any way, shape, or form. I had all these lies going on in my head, most of them around the character of God, actually, as you whittle it down. Why isn’t He helping me out? Why is He making me do this, in this way? The question is, doesn’t He care consistently? Maybe He’s not caring enough to help me out in this moment. 

And it was funny because as the first worship song was played, that song is a little bit of an inside joke between me and God. It’s a song that gets played consistently when I’m dealing with lies like that, and God’s used it in the past to deal with those lies. And it’s happened now on a number of occasions; pretty much every single time I get into that crazy spin of enemy lies telling me He’s not to be trusted, He’s getting you to do something He knows you’ll fail at. That song plays. And as it played this morning, it made me cry in worship, because it reminded me again: He really is that kind. It’s a tiny thing, but I want to tell you, He is kind and He is not holding out on you. And when the enemy tells you that, he is a liar, and he is wanting to separate you from the most beautiful person you will ever come to know. He’s calling us to stop using our beautiful bibles to divide. To join our fate with others, understanding that He joined His fate to ours, and to encounter His love afresh. Won’t you stand with me for a moment? We’ve got a few minutes. Can I get someone just to play on the keys? Thanks, Des. This isn’t a big, crazy ministry moment somewhere ‘out there’; this is a crazy ministry moment somewhere in here. 

For some of you, you may well have revelation on every single thing that I’ve said. That’s so wonderful, and so beautiful. Why don’t you just go ahead and enjoy Him. But for some of you, there are a few ‘ow-ee’ moments in this message, a few ‘tug at the heart’ moments where you felt God was showing you something afresh. He’s not doing it because He wants to embarrass us, because He wants to humiliate us. Just like the blind man in the story, Jesus is saying, ‘Let’s just go to a quiet spot for a second. I want to restore something here. It’s been robbed from you, and I want to restore it.’ And so, in this moment, I just want to invite you just to engage with God. Say, ‘God, I’ve been seeing in this other way, and I receive restoration of sight in these areas, and I want to partner with this beautiful sight.’ I ask, Lord, for courage in men and women, to step out in all that they were created for. To step out in loving the broken and the hurting. The courage to rise up, above religion and religious expectations. The courage to ignore religious voices that say, ‘What are you doing, and who are you hanging out with? Don’t you know they’re dirty?’ That’s the point. And such were some of you, and then His grace came and changed everything. You weren’t chosen because you are a moral choice, so you might as well give everyone else a break, too. You were chosen, plain and simple, because He is that kind and He is gracious. There is no other reason. And so, Father, I just welcome you to come and breathe afresh in this place. And some of you have been using the scriptures to beat yourself up for so long. You’ve been using them as a sledgehammer against yourself, to consistently withhold forgiveness from yourself for things that you’ve failed in. And in this moment, Jesus is saying, ‘Come back to grace. Come back to grace; there’s no room in the law for you. There’s no room in legalism for you. Come back to grace.’ So, Father, we thank you for your breath-taking kindness. Let that kindness seep so deep in our hearts. That we would take the talent you’ve given us and run with it, without fear, without anxiety, knowing that our Father backs us, and has entrusted these things to us because you genuinely believe in us. Believe in your work in us. And so, let your kindness rule our hearts. In Jesus’ name, I pray. Amen.