Eyes to See

Thank you, Bruce. What a great idea. Come and worship the holy God. And that's the reason that we're gathered today. If you have your Bibles, would you turn with me to John, chapter nine?

John, chapter nine. Now, if you're here today, would you raise your hand? If you're here, would you raise your hand? Good to see you on a day where a lot of people are not here. But I'm glad that you're here.

And it is Labor Day and beginning of the fall season. Now, I love that I started to call and have our service today at Cracker Barrel because Cracker Barrel is really designed for fall. They've already got Halloween costumes out and Christmas trees out and everything like that. And I just love the fall. It's a great time of year.

I'm a pumpkin. I love pumpkin anything. Pumpkin is exciting to me. So I've got pumpkin this and pumpkin that. But as we begin a new season, you have given Susan and I one of the greatest blessings that we could have and that you have invited us to be your interim pastor and wife.

And we've seen God work in situation like we were here last time. And so we're looking for God to do some great things as you get ready for the pastor that you have in the future and the one who will come and lead this church to do great and mighty things. Amen. Are you there? All right, let's look at chapter nine.

And as you look at chapter nine, I've been going through all the seven signs that John has as he puts forth. John is growing in his relationship, which all of us do. It's called progressive revelation. And he starts off with when he saw Jesus at this wedding in Cana of Galilee. And he moves to the fact he gets to the one where I preach on last sign is where he sees the Lazarus come forth from a grave.

And it was just a beautiful kind of thing. And it builds in him a sense of losing his anger, which had a dominant place in his life, to being the fact that Jesus is love. And the love writer of the Bible is John. And John writes more about love in the Bible than any other person writes. So as far as Susan and I are concerned, we're looking forward to being with you and seeing what God is going to do in this church.

But I have to, if you look at your bulletin, I'm supposed to preach next week, but I'm not going to be here. So you invited me to be your interim pastor and I'm not going to be here next week. So that'll start things off but John Fain is going to be here and Susan and I have accepted a invitation even before you. We were invited here to preach at Judson and they have same graduates that come back every year at Judson and they represent all of their things. So I'm preaching in Siloam next week for Judson and John's going to be here.

And I thank God for John. He got a great ministry. And that ministry is in the hardest place to bring people to Christ and that's in the northeast of this United States. There are harder people to win to Christ in that place than any other place. Now as you have your Bible in honor of God's word In John chapter 9, if you would begin with verse 35 and would you stand in honor of God's Word, Verse 35.

John 9 · chapter mention

Jesus heard that they had cast the blind man out. And this is, this whole chapter is about a blind man who's able to see and seeing people who are not able to see because they refuse to see. So John talks about a man who was born blind, but he talks about how Jesus made a difference in his life. So they'd cast him out of the synagogue, which is a big social event, being part of the synagogue. It was what they all, every Jewish community drew from that synagogue.

So he is now an outsider. So he is outside the synagogue. But Jesus found him. Jesus heard that they had cast him out. And when they, when he had found him, he said unto him, do you believe in the Son of God?

And some of you have your translations like do you believe in the Son of man? Which is same idea. Jesus used that more than any other identity that he used of himself, Son of Man, because it comes all the way from Daniel. And it's a self identity. It's the one who is the Messiah.

Do you believe in the Messiah? He answered and said, who is he, Lord, that I may believe on him? And Jesus said unto him, thou hast both seen him, seen him in your mind, seen him as he's talking to you. You have both seen him. And it is.

And it is he who talks to you. And he said, lord, I believe. A beautiful verse. Lord, I believe. That's in the.

I think it's in the perfect tense, maybe in the aorist tense. And he worshiped him. The word there for worship is prosuke, which means he fell down and worshiped him. And as we have the Lord's Supper day at the end of our service, may it be a time where you worship the Lord not only in your Heart in your mind, in every part of your being. Now you may be seated.

May God bless the reading of his word. And you may be seated.

There was a lady that came to me one time, and she was worried about her mother. Her mother was about 95, 96 years old. And she came to me and said, she's worried about her mother smoking. And so I said, you know, well, you know, if she's 95 or 96, why don't you just let her keep on smoking? As long as she's not smoking cigars, it'd be okay to let her smoke.

And she said, well, here's the problem. Every time she lights a cigarette, her sight is so bad that she ends up lighting her nose. So she sets her nose on fire every time that she lights. And I said, well, that may be a different problem because there's a lot of danger when you set your nose on fire. And because of sight.

Sight not being able to see sight is something that's physically a problem.

Fanny Crosby did not have sight, but she had so much insight. She was physically blind as she was born. There was a doctor who they knew she had some kind of eye disease, and so they applied the wrong kind of application to her eyes, and she was blinded for the rest of her life. And yet her grandmother would not let her go without God's word. And her grandmother would take words of scripture and put it into her heart day after day after day, so that after a while, she could memorize so much scripture.

And when someone would come with a tune that they. When they say, they would ask her, what do you think this reminds you of? And she would reach out and grab a scripture and put it in that place. And he was. She was so good at knowing God's scripture, even though she was blind, she had insight that helped her to see.

Blindness is physical. Blindness is emotional. Sometimes we're kind of miss the point. Today, as I was driving, I pulled out in front of. I was about to pull out in front of this Walmart big church truck, and as I was about to pull out, this car came along beside me.

And the warning sign said, hey, there's a car coming beside you. And so I pulled back into the lane. We need some kind of warning device to help us see our places where you're blind and I am blind. But the worst kind of blindness is spiritual blindness.

And there are so many people that know what they ought to do and know what needs to be done, but they remain spiritually blind.

Now, often our blindness or blind spaces that we have blind spots that we have. We don't even know that they're there. We kind of push them behind and keep them back there in the background and we hold them out here. It's something called confirmational bias that the psychologists say. We, we have this bias inside of us.

But oftentimes that bias is kind of hidden in the background and usually we like to hold it back there. But there are people who will tell us of our blind spots. Do you have blind spots? There will be only one place that will be no blind spots and that will be in heaven, because the sun shines all the time in heaven. But until that time, you and I have blind spots.

So why don't you turn to somebody and ask them what your blind spots. No, we're not going to do that, but that'd be a good thing to do. But there are those who will tell you what your blind spot. We keep a list of people in the church office who have blind spots and go get one and you tell them what their blind spots are. What are your blind spots?

Your mother in law will tell you what your blind spots are, or your wife will tell you what your blind spots are. The ones who tell us who our blind spots are are usually teenagers. They let us know where our blind spots are and we think we got it all together. But here comes this blind spot. But we all have blind spots and we struggle with them.

And one of the reasons the Bible is there and Christ leads us is, is to help us see our blind spot. What do you think is the place where you're most blind?

People tell us about those blind spots, but we need somebody to help us with those blind spots. Scripture's a way that tells us about what those blind spots are. There was a man, and his name is Stephen Covey. And Stephen Covey puts it like this. He said he was on a train, a subway that was in New York City on Sunday morning.

It was kind of a quiet time there. And so this guy got on this train with his kids.

And the kids were so rambunctious. They were running here and running there, running there and seeing this.

And he was thinking to himself, Stephen Covey, he ought to do something about those kids.

And so he reached over to the guy and says, why don't you calm your kids down?

And he said this. I'm so sorry. I've just come from the hospital where my wife has just passed away and I don't know how to handle these kids. I'm trying to deal with my own self and I'm struggling with handling them and would you forgive me for the way they're action? And all of a sudden he began to see this man in a very different way.

And he turned to him. Instead of condemning him, this is what he did. He. He put his arm around him and said, can I do anything for you? Can I help you?

And so often we begin to seize up situations and put our own meaning on those situations and how different they are from sometimes the way we see them and the way they really are. Stephen Covey says, try to understand before you try to be understood. And I think that's the significance of Jesus. I think Jesus would give us that same kind of thing. And he was so good at that.

When he came to people, they would say, this is a man like this. But he would turn it around and say, well, let me give you my way of seeing this person.

Now, if you have your Bibles, would you look at chapter nine, verse one? And here's the situation of the man that's there on the streets of Jerusalem. Jesus had a way of showing up in different places in different times. Sometimes they were out of the way places. He went to the pool of Bethesda where they had all these people who were sick and diseased.

It like being in the emergency room in a hospital. And he found a man who had a disease that had been paralyzed for 38 years.

And he said, get up and walk. Take up your bed and walk.

And the man got up, took his bed and walked. But here's the problem. He did it on the Sabbath.

If you and I want to find something wrong with somebody, we will find something wrong with somebody. If you're a Trump follower, you will find something wrong with him. If you're a Trump agreeer, sooner or later you will find, well, we need to put his face on Mount Everest or somewhere, wherever he needs to be having his faith. But there's this confirmational bias inside of us that wants to find whatever we're looking for and contradict or call part something that we're looking for to find something wrong.

Where's your blind spot today? And where's that blind spot that wants to find some things wrong? If you want to be a critic, you can be a critic. If you want to find something right, you can find something right. This week I was in Tampa, Florida.

This past week I was in Tampa, Florida. And let me tell you, the love bugs are bad there and they're coming up this way. So everywhere we get in our car, we got love bugs all on the front of our car. But I went there to Susan. I went there to see our son Rusty.

He's back from the middle east, or at least for a while. And then they're sending him to Paris, France. And we don't know why he's going to Paris, France, but he's going to Paris, France. He won't tell us why he's going to Paris, France, but he's going there. But also, I got to baptize my grandson, which is one of the greatest things you get to do.

I've baptized three of my grandsons, but this one I probably needed to hold under the longest. Amen. Do you have a grandson like that?

We've been praying for him for a long time. I mean, he's got his own personality. He's his own person, and how much we love him and care for him very much. And each morning when I go out in my backyard to pray, I have been praying for him as well as other people in our family, because we can't make that decision for him to be baptized. That's a decision only he can make.

I mean, when you baptize babies, there was no. No idea of what should be done about that. I mean, it's not the leading of the baby. It's the leading of the parent.

So as we prayed for our grandson, we prayed with our hearts because our hearts were in it. And I hope that you're doing the same thing for your children and your grandchildren, that they will come to that point that they will make now. He accepted Christ earlier, but he just didn't see this need to be baptized.

And so we couldn't press that on him. He had to come to see that himself. And so we prayed for that to happen. And so when I baptized him, I took him real deep.

And I almost wanted to say, now, when you take care of me in my old age, okay, you don't send me some old nursing home. You send me to the right kind of place. Condominium, maybe on gov shore.

God works through prayer. It's something we cannot force on anybody. But they got to see that themselves.

There's a young man that Susan and I are also praying for. His wife told us about how she wished that he would change some of the things that he was doing.

He's got this personality, this very good personality, but he also has this drinking problem, and the drinking problem is running deep in his life. He can't see that it's not only destroying him, but. But it's also destroying his family.

That alcohol has this pull on him that keeps him from being that person that God made him to be. And he has all this possibility of being that kind of person that God made him to be. But he has this alcohol pull that's still pulling on his life. And he can't see what's there and what needs to be changed in his life.

So we're praying with her that he would see his need to do something about his addiction. God, be with him, help him to see. Because he has time with his kids. That is such a valuable time.

And that time will go by so fast that it's almost lost.

Now, if you have your Bibles, look in chapter nine, verse one. Let me just tell you about. Set up this situation. We're not going to go through this, one of the longest chapters in John, so we're not going to go through all of this. But let me say he was walking down the streets of Jerusalem instead of being at the place of Bethesda pool.

He's at the side of another pool. And the other pool is a pool of siloam. And the word there means sent. And as he passed by, there was this blind man. And the disciples looked at him and they said, who sinned, Master?

Who sinned? Because they want to put their meaning on this situation. This is obviously a sin situation to them. If you were Buddhist, you would say it was the karma, the bad karma. Because that's the way Buddhists look at bad karma.

And when you have bad karma and it outdoes your good karma, then you come back as another form. That's what you keep reincarnated and reincarnated. So Jesus could deal with the blame. Who's the blame situation? The parents.

And there are a lot of consequences that come our lives that they're a result. Because something we've done past it has consequences to it. But that's not every situation.

And so when Jesus looks at the man, he says, but there's a time here where God can do something. This is a time. And instead of laying so much blame here, let's go to see what we can do with the situation that we have. Because we can spend our time throwing out blame and throwing out blame and throwing out blame.

Jesus says so much. Before you start judging somebody else, Look at that old law, your own eye.

First. Deal with me before I deal with somebody else or if I were to say it, mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the biggest hypocrite of them all? So look at the person next to you. No, we won't do that. Okay, before I point to you, Lord, point to me.

It's not my brother and it's not my sister who's in the biggest need of prayer. It's me. Oh, Lord, I'm standing in the knee of prayer. Our blind spots are there, and your blind spots are there, and others have blind spots. But before we cast accusation against somebody else's blind spot, the Bible is very clear.

First, let's deal with this. This is a place we go to first. And it's amazing how God can take that and Christ can take that and do something different. It's significant here that Jesus immediately saw the man. The problem, and why he did it, we don't know.

There had to been other blind people along the road. But he has this push from the Holy Spirit that kind of ignites something in his heart and say, here, do this.

And so Jesus took mud and he spit on the mud and put it on the man's eyes. And when he put it on the man's eyes, he all of a sudden could see and hadn't been able to see all his life. He just didn't. It wasn't in the part of sometimes later on in his life. He was always in the darkness in his blind time in his life from the very beginning.

That's something like creation. It's almost like Jesus did a creative moment on this man with the mud and the spittle that came from his inside, and all of a sudden he could see. But now the blind man being able to see was really a problem. He showed up, went back to his home and his neighborhood, and they said, we don't know who he is. He's the same man, but he's so totally different.

And he says, I'm the same man. So they had to take the miracle to the Pharisees who would say, is this a miracle from God? And so the Pharisees showed up, and when they showed up, said, he's just like healing that other guy. He healed on the Sabbath.

He healed on the Sabbath.

They had rules and regulations about the Sabbath. It wasn't God's rule, but it was their rule. This is the way you keep the Sabbath.

But Jesus rule was to heal people on the Sabbath. They called him a Sabbath breaker, but he was a Sabbath maker.

But here's what happened. They got so caught up in secondary issues that they failed to see the primary issue.

And we can do that too. We can get so caught up in secondary things that they help us. They keep us from seeing the primary thing.

I had a girl to Come see me one time. And she said. She said, I've got a problem with my mom. And I said, okay, what is the problem with your mom? She said, well, we go to a denomination that believes it's not Christian to wear makeup.

And so she would come to school, a mom would bring her to school, and she would go in the girl's bathroom and put on makeup. And then when it was time for them to leave school, she would go into the girl's bathroom again, take off her makeup and get with her mom. And I said, why don't you talk to your mom about that? She said, I can't. She is so set on not having makeup that she won't let me wear makeup.

Now, I want you to know that this church encourages makeup, okay? And we want to do that. And I think we ought to bring it to the deacons to say, is it all right to wear makeup? Okay. We believe in makeup.

I believe you ought to use as much as you can.

So we affirm makeup, okay? I won't ask for a vote of that on the emotional. We ought to have one Sunday where we don't wear makeup. Anybody for that or anything that may happen.

Secondary issue became a main point, and it took the place of a main point.

And I have seen secondary issues destroy churches and destroy families and destroy people.

Secondary is not the primary. The primary is Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior. Now, that's that primary. If you have your Bibles, look at verse 25. Here's what the blind man or sight man now saw in his situation.

He answered and said, because they are accusing Jesus of being a sinner. Whether he is a sinner or not, I know not one thing. I know that, whereas I was blind. Now I see. That was a great testimony.

But he hadn't been able to see yet. He was seeing physically and probably emotionally. And these accusers were telling him he was not seeing, that there was a wrong person that came and lead him another way. So he stood up his place and he said, all I can tell you is I've had this experience with Jesus, and you can't shake me from that kind of experience.

So they couldn't get him to agree with the Pharisees, so they cast him out of the synagogue. But Jesus found him. And when Jesus found him, he said, do you believe on the Son of God the word there? Believe is a good word. It's pistuar.

It means to trust. It means to trust. So you're not just believing some things about him. It's A matter of I'm trusting him with my life, I'm trusting him with my situation. Do you believe in that Son of God, the Son of man?

And he said, tell me who I need to believe in. And I sat down with a man one time in a cell, in a jail cell. And as I sat down with that man in the jail cell, can I share with you about Christ? And he said, okay. I mean, his life was in a shambles.

And so I wrote out the plan of salvation for him, one of the first persons I ever led to Christ. And I said, do you believe in that? And he said, yes, I do. So I looked at the pamphlet. I had to.

What was I to do next? I didn't know what to do next. So I said, would you pray to receive Christ as your savior?

And he said, yes, I will. I mean, when you share them with somebody in a jail cell, you got a captive audience. Are you with me? Did that go over your head or did it still there? And he said, yes.

And in that jail cell, we worshiped.

The man's name was Jack Daniels.

I don't want you to.

So I want Jack Daniels to the Lord, if you understand who Jack Daniels is, shame on you. Okay, you've been to the Flor Bama. If you've been to that Jack Daniel.

He worshiped. He worshiped because now he not only could see physically, he could see emotionally, but he can see spiritually. I can see. I can see.

That's what Jesus does to our life.

This October, Susan and I are going to Gatlinburg. I believe the Lord speaks louder to us, maybe in Gatlinburg, as he does, especially during the fall. We just love it up there at the fall. And there's a celebrators conference that they have. And we enjoy going to that celebrators conference.

But the main speaker will be David Jeremiah. And I love David Jeremiah's preaching. Put myself after somebody being David Jeremiah. I love his preaching. But he talked about in San Diego that they had a right there where you cross the border right outside San Diego.

He had one of those border guards that was in his congregation. And his border guard told him about one of the cases that they had had. This kid would come to the border and he was riding a bicycle, and they knew that he was stealing things and put carrying them across the border. And they'd search his bicycle, search him, and they never could find it.

So he'd come and they'd do this. And he did this for years and years and years and Years and finally retired in the border guard found the man and said, what is it that you have been bringing across the border? And he said bicycles.

And then David Jeremiah said something I'll never forget. We get so caught up in the obvious that we miss the significant.

The significant was right there in front of the Pharisees. But they were so caught up and Sabbath breaker that they miss the fact he's not just a man who came from God. He is a real God who came to mankind. But you've got to receive him as your savior. That's significant.

Have you received Christ as your savior? Would you bow your heads for just a moment?

I think our invitation hymn is hymn number 506. I think that's a hymn that speaks about so many things about the. The concept of who Jesus Christ is and speaks to our heart. And as we sing that, we'll sing that for just a little while and then we'll have the Lord's Supper. So as we get ready to get into the Lord's Supper, what are the blind spots?

What are the things? Instead of casting accusations against somebody else, we begin to look at that mirror in our own life and say, where are the places that I need to first deal with before I deal with somebody else?

Confirmational bias can hit each one of us. Where are my places that are my blind spots? And if you ask for wisdom, he will give it to you. Father, we thank you for our time together on this morning. What a great time to be together in God's house, in this historical structure that has seen so many people come to know Christ and have been baptized here in this baptistry.

We thank you for that. But for the next generation coming along, we pray for that generation. We pray for the parents and the grandparents and those that are there that they will pray for their sons and daughters to come to the point where they make that decision for Christ. But help us to make those decisions in our blind spots that we may need to ask God to help us. In Jesus name I pray.

Amen. Amen. Now would you stand? Jim's going to come and greet you down front. If God has been placing some decision in your life and Bruce is going to come and kind of lead us in invitation.

So would you stand.