Isaiah 42:16-20
Blindness is a powerful metaphor of our spiritual condition. It is impenetrable darkness. It is ignorance. It is hardness of heart. And it cannot be cured by oneself or by one’s teachers. It can only be cured by a miraculous touch from Jesus: “The man they call Jesus… put mud on my eyes, then I washed, (and) now I see,” (John 9:11, 15 NRSV). This sermon will introduce the fourth level of the Seeing Pyramid – seeing what others don’t – and show how the assumptions of our present culture keep us blind to the reality of things unseen. We’ll discover what it means to see the unseen and how this miracle affects every area of our lives.
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Sermon Summary |
In the center of all things unseen is One who holds all things together, Jesus Christ. Thus, to see clearly is to see Him as he is, and not as we imagine him to be. It is to see the end of all things before they are upon us and to fall on our faces in worship of him whose face has changed (Luke 9:29), the First, the Last and the Living One (Rev. 1:17-18).
The prophet Isaiah promised a day when “the eyes of those who see will no longer be closed… when the fool will no longer be called noble, nor the scoundrel highly respected,” (32:3, 5). This revolution has come in Jesus Christ but everyone looking can see it. Jesus invites us into this revolution, this reversal of things, and as we practice these new things our eyes are slowly opened to the new world order.
There is nothing in this world that bears witness to things unseen like the Word of God. Yet many who are familiar with their Bible are blind to things unseen. The trouble is not in what is written, but in how we read it. Those who see clearly read it differently and they consistently obey what they read.