Heal Our Land // Eyes That Heal

Welcome to the Lookin'out Weekly Podcast.

The Church of the Lookin' Out is in the whole of Colorado, and our vision is Jesus abiding in his presence, growing in his family, and living on his mission to transform the world with all-inspiring love.

Visit us alive at the lookout.church.

So good to see you.

It's a good day to be alive.

We all made it.

You survived, gotta say.

We did it.

We did it.

We're here.

Um I know it has been a big week uh for for everyone, for everyone in our nation.

And uh and probably today it's left left uh many of us feeling all kinds of different ways.

Um yeah, big week.

We're coming into the room uh feeling lots of different ways, and we want to just acknowledge that.

That's okay.

Uh that's what election seasons do.

We talked about that last week, that that was going to happen this week, right?

So everyone can take a big breath.

Everyone take a big breath with me.

Okay, and just like we're singing, uh the reason we we're here is because we we already have a king, and his name is Jesus.

And we're working that out while we walk this land.

But we do want to take a moment to pray.

See, and Paul, when he was writing to Timothy in 1 Timothy chapter 2, he says, First of all, then I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions.

1 Timothy 2 · chapter mention

And every election, we take that opportunity to do that.

Um, on the Sunday after four years ago, we we prayed for President-elect Biden and President Um Vice President-elect Kamala Harris.

And I want to take a moment to pray for our leaders, our elected officials, President-elect Donald Trump, uh JD Vance, and our our sitting president, as well as they make this transition.

And I want to invite you to join with me.

Can we do that together as a body?

And we're gonna pray for all of our elected officials together, uh, even outside of the presidency.

Uh, we need the grace, the mercy, and the favor of God in our nation.

And our job as the church is to pray on their behalf.

And uh and for some of us, that requires us to dig into a source not of our own in order to extend what we would normally not be able to extend on our own, because we are sourced in love.

We are sourced in the person of the work of Jesus Christ.

And so would you join with me in heart and in spirit this morning?

Father God, we lift up the leaders of our nation.

We thank you for the United States of America.

We thank you for the nation and we bless this land, we bless this nation and its inhabitants.

And God, this week, after coming through uh what felt like a long season of an emotional roller coaster, God, we do remind ourselves of the instructions in your scriptures to pray for those in places of leadership.

And so we lift up President-elect Donald Trump, J.D.

Vance, God, and those that they are currently appointing for this new administration.

God, we pray your favor, protection over them, God.

We pray for, we thank you for a clean runway over the next uh few months as their administration um takes takes the reins.

And God, we pray that you would go before them, Lord Jesus, and wherever they are right now, that you would encounter them with your love.

I thank you, God, for wisdom.

We need your wisdom in our nation.

I thank you, Father, for in this next season that you would expose wickedness, God, and that you would allow us, Lord Jesus, to see what you are doing and to align our lives with how you have taught us to live.

And that includes even our leaders.

And I thank you, Lord Jesus, for righteous laws in this land.

We thank you for a season of righteous lawmaking, God, that you would lead all of our leaders as they surround themselves with men and women, as they make decisions about the future of this country.

We thank you, Father, to go before them and to lead them through the wisdom of the Holy Spirit.

God, I thank you for President Biden, Vice President Harris, Lord God, as they are, as they will now conclude their term.

We thank you, Father, to continue to surround them.

We thank you for their service to our nation.

We pray that you would bless them and their families, that you would protect them, Lord God, that you would also come to them.

And we thank you to minister to them, Lord Jesus, and everybody around them in this season ahead.

God, we thank you for all in our Senate, House of Representatives, all of the elected officials, governors of God across our land.

Um, and again, we pray the same thing, Lord Jesus, that you would continue to come to our nation.

You would lead us, Lord God.

You would allow us to turn to you, not to our own ways, but to turn from our ways and turn to you.

We thank you, Lord Jesus, that this week was not full of violence.

We thank you for the lack of interference in this election that we can tell.

And we pray that that would continue, God.

Would you dismantle the spirit of violence and fear in our land?

Let that not be the case.

And we pray blessing over the transition.

It's in humility we pray these prayers, God, not that we have the answers.

But we thank you, Father, that you are involved in the affairs of the earth.

And so we put our trust in you, Jesus.

We worship you as King.

And we come here rejoicing today, knowing that you can be trusted.

God, we pray that you would meet hearts that are heavy this week, even for a variety of reasons.

Or for hearts that are maybe gripped by fear and confusion.

And we thank you, Father, for your nearness over every person.

We love you, Jesus.

And it's in your name that we pray.

Amen.

Amen.

Yeah.

So if you have your Bibles, let's open up to Luke chapter 10.

Luke 10 · chapter mention

That's where we're gonna go today.

And before we get there, I'm just gonna have you thumbnail that.

Just put your bookmark there, Luke chapter 10.

Luke 10 · chapter mention

Um just share some opening thoughts here.

The last few weeks we have been a little bit more political.

I know some people have asked, why are we up political all of a sudden?

Uh, which is not necessarily like my hot button, you know, it's not the passion of my heart to do that.

It's just as a church, it's important that we have we open up conversations to talk about these kinds of things because this is the water we're all swimming in.

And we we are a collection of individuals all coming at this from a lot of different angles and life experiences, right?

Um, and but but the reason it's important that we hold open space to kind of talk about navigating these seasons, even as a nation, is because we have to remember our distinct purpose as a church, uh, as the people of God.

Um and a question that everybody is asking right now is what is the way forward?

I think there is a sense among everybody, churchgoers and not, that there's something kind of broken in our nation right now.

I think there's a sense everybody can can uh can talk about that.

Even last night I was talking to somebody I love very deeply, and uh and we get in political conversations often, and and he he no longer um uh considers himself a Christian.

And so, but but he he he sees uh he he he also sees that we're in a we're we're in a broken time right now.

So he's asking me, he's like, so what do you think we need to do?

How do we heal as a nation?

And it's like, well, I I I think we we look to Jesus and we put our faith in Jesus.

He said, okay, okay.

He said, but what if I'm like I'm not a Christian or like I don't want to go to church?

So like how do we how do we do this uh without having to go to church or believe in God?

I'm like, okay, well, uh you're probably going to have to, you're probably going to have to find a source of complete pure love that is completely self-sacrificial and forgiving and full of mercy and grace.

Um, you're gonna have to find that source so that you have something available to overflow, so you have a well from which you can draw from uh to be able to extend love and mercy, both to receive forgiveness for your own for your own brokenness, but to extend that same forgiveness to your enemies.

So, whatever that looks like, you're gonna have to find a source of complete and pure sacrificial love.

I'm like, I don't know how to do that outside of the work of Jesus.

I don't know how we heal outside of love finding its home within us and healing us from the inside out.

And a lot of people ask, you know, so so what is that gonna look like?

And part of part of the thing within our nation right now is everyone's looking to our leaders to fix us.

We want a leader who can unify us, we want a leader who can make things right, we want a leader who can make everything better, we want a leader that can heal us.

But can I remind us, church, there is no politician that can heal us from the inside out.

Only God can heal this nation, only God can heal division, only God can heal what is deeply broken inside of us.

First Chronicles chapter seven, maybe the foremost passage in the scriptures about prayer and about a people turning to God.

It's a foremost passage about intercession and what happens when a people collectively move towards, move our orientation towards God, what the result of that is.

You guys know this, you probably have it on a coffee cup at home, all right?

First Chronicles 7 14.

If my people who are called by my name humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land.

Come on, anybody?

If my people who are called by my name humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, and I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land.

Now, in this particular passage, the healing of the land is interesting.

It it does refer to physical land in this in the context here.

Refers to the physical land that had been ravaged, but uh but we should be reminded that the Hebrew perspective of land was never just the land, it was always completely integrated with the spiritual inheritance that God, because for the Jews, land was also about the promises of God that he would make for himself a people, and those promises wouldn't be robbed.

And so when when the the people in the Old Testament scriptures, when they were praying for the land, it was not just an object.

It had to do with well-being and holistic life and health.

It wasn't just a poetic image, it was deeply woven into their faith, their identity, and their livelihood.

It was both physical and spiritual inheritance because God's covenant with Israel is tied to the land of Canaan, the promised land, which is more than geography.

And so, and another way of saying heal their land, it's as if he was saying, I will restore your life from the ground up.

When you turn to me, I will restore your lives from the ground up.

Healing of the land was about the restoring of everything they needed for flourishing as a people.

And can we remind when we turn to God to heal our land, that's not just our land.

The prayer isn't just for God come and heal Christians.

When a Christian, when the people of God turn to God, everybody flourishes.

Can we just settle into that for a second?

When we pray to the Lord and we turn to God, it's that all men, all races and and genders and ideologies, it's that all who are sinners and strangers and saints all alike, that all would experiencing the flourishing of God if a pe if a group if a people are willing to fast and pray and seek the face of God on behalf of a nation.

He promises to bring flourishing to the entire land.

And that's what we're in it for.

And I want to remind us this morning, I just really felt impressed, kind of moving forward, that in a time like this we turn to God for healing, but we also reclaim our identity as followers of Jesus to be agents of healing in this world.

Do you realize that you are called by God to be an agent of healing in this world?

Healing in this world.

That means we extend what God has extended to us.

And healing happens in all kinds of ways.

We we heal with the way that we see, we heal with the words that we speak, we heal with the deeds of our lives, we heal with the extending of hands, we we heal minds and hearts, we extend to the degree that we've experienced the healing touch of God in our own lives and the transformation of God.

But but but this morning I just want to remind us that we are agents of healing in this world.

We take up the ministry of Jesus.

And what is the ministry of Jesus?

Very simply put, Isaiah 61 prophetically declared what the ministry of Jesus would be.

Isaiah says, the Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.

He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and the opening of prison to those who are bound.

The ministry of Jesus is about the Holy Spirit coming upon you, that the degree to which you receive the grace of his presence in your life, it empowers you for the kind of life that you live the rest of the week.

And in particular, what that should look like is your life should be good news to the poor.

It should minister, bind up the brokenhearted, means we are going to find the broken hearts and even the broken bodies.

We're gonna wrap them with the gauze of the mercy and compassion of God.

We're gonna put the ointment of Jesus, the healing presence of Jesus, on hearts that all may be whole and well and full of the light and the love of Jesus.

Do you guys know that Jesus, his very name, his very presence, is a healing balm.

The sound, I didn't know we're doing sound effects now.

I kind of like it actually.

Let's work that out for next week.

Um so the ministry of Jesus is our ministry as well.

How do we minister in the world?

I just want to take a cue from Luke chapter 10 this morning.

Luke 10 · chapter mention

So if you have your Bibles or you just want to read on the screen behind me, I just want to share this parable of Jesus this morning.

And we'll explore together what we can learn about being agents of healing.

So Luke chapter 10, verse 29.

Luke 10:29

But he, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, And who is my neighbor?

And Jesus replied, A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, and stripped him and beat him, and departed, leaving him half dead.

Now by chance a priest was going down that road, and when he saw him he passed on the other side.

So likewise a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, pass by on the other side.

But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was, and when he saw him he had compassion.

He went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine.

Then he set him on his own animal, and brought him to an inn and took care of him.

And the next day he took out two dinari and gave him, gave them to the innkeeper, saying, Take care of him, and whatever more you spend, I will repay you when I come back.

Which of these three do you think proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?

He said, the one who showed him mercy.

And Jesus said to him, You go and do likewise.

Amen.

So many of you who are familiar with this passage, you kind of know the point or the moral of the story that Jesus shared his this parable in response to a pretty pointed question, who is my neighbor?

Which wasn't really the question.

The real question this person was asking is who do I have permission to not have to love?

Who do I have permission to just leave across the street?

Who do I have permission to distance myself?

That was the actual question.

It's always funny because we we think we know what questions we're asking.

There's always a question underneath the question, and Jesus always knew what it was.

The question under the question is, what's the least amount I can do and still be a faithful follower of God?

Right.

So Jesus saw through that of someone who was trying to qualify who was worthy of love and attention.

And we know that the main thrust of this particular parable has to do with pointing out ones who should have stopped and would have, would have been celebrated in culture, who would have been the virtuous ones in culture, and they they failed to stop to help somebody who was in need of mercy and compassion.

And yet there was one who came on the road.

He was the most despised of the three.

A Samaritan, as we know, was not particularly liked or loved in this in this culture, but something shifted in the the being of the Samaritan, which allowed them to participate in what Jesus essentially refers to the work of God in this passage, the one who extended mercy.

So Jesus, as he normally does, is kind of trying to poke and to prod.

He's ruffling some feathers, he's pushing on some stuff just to get people out of our grooves, right?

Because that's what he does with us.

Don't you love him?

He just pushes us.

He asks us the questions we don't want to be asked.

But what I want to point out in this particular passage, what I want to zero in on is what was the cue that caused the Samaritan to stop?

It says that what a Samaritan as he journeyed came to where he was, and when he saw him, he had compassion.

Say it with me, when he saw him.

When he saw him, he had compassion.

And there was some capacity within the Samaritan to be able to extend mercy, but it was predicated on his ability to see.

And what I want to offer today is when we talk about being healing agents of God, healing begins with seeing.

Healing begins with recovering the ability to see again, to see the people around us, to see with compassion the ones who are in need of God's mercy and favor.

Healing begins with seeing.

And one of the difficult, one of the difficult difficulties in our current climate is we've lost our ability, I think, in a large part, to see each other deeply.

People have become voting blocks, categories, ideologies, which are all important to talk about in their own right.

But when we see people through the lens of categories and boxes, we actually objectify them versus seeing them in the divine image of God.

We begin to see them, as Martin Buber would say, we begin to see people as it's and not thou's.

Are you an it or are you a thou?

And so Jesus challenges the way that we see.

And the way we see makes all the difference.

For us as followers of Jesus, we know that the way we see doesn't initially start with us.

It starts with having been seen by the Father.

You would not be a follower of Jesus if there wasn't something in internally inside of you that that realized that you were found in your core.

Do you realize that the mission of Jesus was to seek and save that which was lost?

Who was lost?

I better see every hand in this room.

Lost.

Me, Lou Combrecht.

You were lost.

Jesus came to seek out and to save.

The Christian journey doesn't start with me finding God, it starts with him finding me.

Woo! Oh, if we just got that.

He found us.

He found you.

Thank you, Jesus.

And so he finds us.

And there's something that happens when he finds us that it changes our demeanor.

It changes the way that we see from a fundamental level.

And the difficult and difficulty in our culture for a lot of reasons, we've lost an ability to see.

Now, there's a lot of reasons we can point out that are very probably, as you know, we've we've talked about even uh here in our community for a while, but I think in an age of technology and distraction or eye contact has actually decreased because we spend about three hours a day on devices at least.

Kind of the average is about three hours a day on mobile phones and devices, we we begin to get what we call screen gaze rather than face-to-face gaze.

And so we're more used to staring at screens than we are eyes.

And the loss of habit of having to look at faces on a regular basis has affected us from the inside out and actually discourages the desire to want to do it even further.

Social anxiety and performance are continuing to rise.

And so there's a lot of people who have a hard time making face-to-eye eye-to-eye contact just because there's an internal anxiety that prevents that from happening.

And so approximately 7% of the U.S.

population are experiencing heightened anxiety in situations that require direct eye contact.

But eye contact can make people feel seen in ways that trigger self-con it's because eye contact can make people fe feel seen.

And for some people, that triggers self-consciousness or fears of judgment, leading us to avoid it altogether.

You guys tracking with me?

But you know, there's another really interesting phenomenon in our culture, and it started in the 1950s.

Um Donald Horton in 1956 coined this term called parasocial to describe the emotional connection people feel towards fictional TV characters and news anchors.

So when TV first entered the scene and we got used to spending our evenings as a culture with kind of new shows and scripts and stories, uh we we got used to developing emotional relationships with people that we would never meet.

Right?

And this is can I just remind you, this is before the internet.

This is before YouTube, this is before podcasts, this is before everything.

And so, as a culture, it's a it's a very new thing in human history.

You just need to understand this.

This is very recent.

I mean, 67 years is very recent in human history, but what's happened is you picked your favorite show, it's easy to develop an emotional connection with that main character, whoever it is.

Uh George Costanza, Kramer, you know, like you can you can develop an emotional, and you just get excited showing up every week, and we can almost depend on that.

And there's nothing wrong with that, by the way, of connecting with characters in a story.

In fact, I think it's it's probably a good thing.

But what happens is we begin used to getting into emotional relationships with people who demand nothing of us and need nothing from us, and when there's no interaction, the relationship requires no risk and no vulnerability, which means we're used to being in relationships that don't require us to move towards them in any particular way.

And so the reason that that is important is because we've developed the ability to experience pity but not empathy.

Pity is it looks like you have a problem there, and I that requires nothing of me because there's nothing I can do about that.

That's pity.

Pity is the recognition, the emotional connection with somebody else's problem, but removing ourselves from any responsibility to have to interact with that problem.

Empathy, as we know, is kind of that word has experienced a resurgence over the last 10, 15 years, but empathy, or more I think more biblically, the word compassion is the ability to be see and to be moved.

And I think it's one of the issues in our society, and I think that we have to point the finger first at the household of God.

Have we experienced have we experienced pity but not empathy?

Have we experienced, have we seen problems but removed ourselves from responsibility to address problems?

We see this all the time.

We even see it in the church.

If there's a an ability to serve, uh it always shocks me the amount of people who uh see a need but have removed themselves from any feeling of responsibility to go move towards the meeting of that need.

Now we have our church is very generous and very servant-minded, but this still affects us on a deep level.

We still have to confront the fact that we can experience a problem or a need and remove ourself from responsibility.

And but part of reversing that, part of making headway towards becoming healing agents again is again the ability to see and to be moved.

We can't heal if we can't connect.

And we cannot connect if we can no longer see.

Because the the the the connection that we so crave in those conversations can't get deep enough when it's only happening in a comment thread.

And so one of the things that we have to recover for the sake of civilization, this isn't even about the church, this is about this is about saving civilization, is recovering the ability to see our uh the the first uh the generations coming up behind us have are gonna have way more difficulty with this because they're being raised to uh to not have to have they don't they have to relearn it's be it's now a new discipleship thing.

We have to disciple our kids how to actually have eye contact and sustained eye contact with each other.

This is actually a discipleship issue now.

Because if you can't have physical eye contact, you will never be moved to compassion.

When you see someone face to face, the eye contact, the nature of that conversation, it j it changes dramatically.

See, the thing is the power of being seen.

It's a biblical thing, but it's a very studied sociological, psychological thing as well.

Eye contact actually releases oxytocin, sometimes called the beloved the bonding hormone or the love hormone.

Oxytocin is a brain that God or a chemical God has given to your brain in order to move towards and to connect.

And so eye contact actually releases that.

Mutual gaze can increase oxytocin levels, which foster trust trust and strengthens relational bonds.

Um other neuroscientific studies reveal that making eye contact activates brain regions associated with empathy and the prefrontal cortex.

Um that's why uh it's found that people who make eye contact during difficult conversations are likely more uh more likely to feel heard and understood.

When you're having a difficult conversation with somebody, there's a reason why you break eye contact because it's difficult to access your being and stay connected with the person.

But if if you're able to keep eye contact, they can meet you within that difficulty.

And you can meet them within the difficulty.

Okay?

Um eye contact actually uh increases attention and validation.

It signals to the person that you were fully present.

Um eighty percent of participants, according to one study, showed that eye contact is the most meaningful indicator that somebody is listening to them.

And it makes sense in the scriptures why the psalmists, when they refer to the presence of God, they would ask, they would say, God, let your face turn towards me.

God, I need your face because you're present to me when I can see you in the eyes.

We look to the Father face to face.

Face to face Moses stood before the Father.

And now with unveiled faces, we behold his glory.

We're changed by the face of God.

And faces change us.

Uh psychologists, Christian psychologist, awesome author Kurt Thompson, this is what he he um he points out as well.

He says that when you are born, uh your eyes open, and the first thing as a baby, the first thing you're looking for is someone looking for you.

You're scanning the room to find out who is looking for me.

It's so deep inside of us that it changes at a fundamental level.

It impacts healing and relationship eye contact.

Research shows that prolonged eye contact even for a little as four minutes can lead to improved uh connectedness and it can heal relational wounds just by eye contact.

Do you realize that?

And actually heal you relational wounds.

I don't know the last time you looked at somebody for four minutes in the eyes.

We're gonna do that right now.

Turn to your neighbor.

No, we're gonna watch some other people do it.

Seriously.

Um so there was a uh Amnesty International, they actually um invited strangers from different countries to sit in a room and say what would happen if you if you looked each other in the eyes for sustained period with a stranger.

What could happen between the two people?

I want to show you this video.

It must and are you alone or with your family?

Life sometimes nice sometimes.

I can't even see.

We're just gonna move into a short time to respond to this.

But the reason why we do this is because we believe that healing starts with seeing.

Healing starts with seeing, healing starts with seeing sinners and strangers and the hurting and the wounded.

Can we see each other through the eyes of love?

Can we see each other in the divine image rather than in the preconceived notions that lead us to judgment?

Can we see beyond, can we see into somebody's life experience?

And this could look a lot of different ways.

It might just be lingering a little longer with the cashier at the checkout and just saying, hey, I see you calling them by name, making eye contact with them.

It could mean with your spouse, spending time beholding each other.

Or with your friends, even you know, men, you can do this with other men without it getting weird, okay?

You can you can stare face to face and behold the image of God in each other.

It doesn't make you weak, it actually makes you strong.

The ability to stare into the eyes of a child and to help them see that they are seen and they are loved.

This is the work that we've been given to.

And I think it's some of the most important work because it reflects what has happened and transformed from the gaze of the Father.

And I just want to pray for us this morning.

Just across the room.

Just let's just close our eyes.

It could be that that's something that you haven't yet experienced in your relationship with the Father in heaven.

When you picture God, do you picture a face?

Do you picture eyes?

Or do you picture something else?

Is God an idea or is he a person?

I want to remind you today that when the Father sees you, when he opens his eyes at you, he calls you beloved, you are cherished, you are treasured, you are known.

The things that make your heart come alive, he's with you and he loves that.

The places where you feel crushed, defeated, stuck.

He's with you and he sees that.

He's not left you alone.

So I bless you to receive the eyes of the Father today, the eyes of Jesus, the eyes of compassion.

I thank you, Holy Spirit, even now, I thank you to minister the Father's heart.

We thank you, Jesus, that you came to seek and save that which was lost.

And this morning, we we thank you for your eyes, your gaze upon us, and we behold you as you behold us.

We thank you for the love of the Father.

We thank you for a baptism of the love of the Father in this place.

We need it, God, and our world needs it.

Our nation needs a baptism of the love of the Father.

So would you take us in again, God?

Take us in again.

And God, we ask that you would change the way that we see.

Where we harbor judgments, where we harbor accusation, God, would you expose that?

Because when we accuse, we are actually partnering with the enemy of our souls, because that's what he's already doing.

I thank you, God, that we get to be agents of healing, that when we move out, every person we meet, we get to see with the eyes of love.

To ask questions, to be deeply moved with them, to extend grace and mercy, to invite them to know you, God.

And so I just pray that you would heal us, heal our eyes so that we can see with your eyes, God.