My dear friend shared these somber words with me during a recent visit: “I am legally blind.” She can still see, but barely. “I cannot recognize a person who is ten feet away,” she said. Fortunately, losing her eyesight has not dimmed her faith in her Lord Jesus. “He will help me manage whatever I must face,” she said.
That friend is but one of several older people I know whose eyesight is failing. As we grow older the body wears out; gradually we lose our hearing, sense of smell, eyesight, and physical strength. At 93 I can vouch for the weakening of the body.
As I thought about friends who are losing their sight, I wondered how many people in the world are actually blind. I discovered that there are 43 million people in the world who are physically blind. One million of them live in the United States.
But across the world there are millions more who are spiritually blind. They can see with their physical eyes but they cannot see the grace and glory of God with the eyes of their heart.
The Gospels describe several blind people whose sight was restored by Jesus. One of them was a blind beggar named Bartimaeus. He was sitting by the roadside one day when he heard that Jesus was passing by. Bartimaeus quickly cried out saying Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me. Many bystanders rebuked him, telling him to shut up. But Bartimaeus continued to cry out to Jesus, asking him to have mercy on him. Jesus said to him, “Go your way; your faith has made you well.” Immediately Bartimaeus’ sight was restored and he began following Jesus.
I am persuaded that stories of Jesus healing blind people are in the Bible to help us “see” that only Jesus can cure us of spiritual blindness. He who restored the sight of a blind beggar was crucified and buried in a borrowed tomb. But he was resurrected by the power of God and is available today to cure the spiritual blindness of all who turn to him.
The process for curing our blindness is the same as it was for blind Bartimaeus. We must admit we are blind spiritually and ask Jesus for mercy. Millions of people, who identify themselves as Christians, love the stories of Jesus, go to church and sing songs about Jesus, and admire the teachings of Jesus – but have never gone to their knees in genuine repentance and cried for Jesus to have mercy on them and forgive their sins.
There is a radical difference between a nice church member and an authentic Christian who has a personal relationship with Jesus. The former is nice; the latter is new. Nice is not enough. When Jesus is Lord, the “old” has been replaced by newness of life in Christ. The authentic Christian has an awareness that “once I was blind but now I see,” and the assurance of having been saved by the grace of God.
When a spiritually blind person, who may actually bea church member, asks Jesus for mercy, Jesus will open their eyes to begin seeing everywhere the grace and glory of God. George Beverly Shea expressed what Jesus does for us in his awesome song, “The Wonder of It All”:
There’s the wonder of sunset at evening
The wonder of sunrise I see
