94-90 Short Sightedness - Mark 8

Let's pray. Father, we come to you this evening, we're glad of an opportunity of gathering together to look into your word, to come around this table to think of our beloved Lord Jesus. And as our subject matter compels us to think in the areas of our sight and spiritual deficiency, we ask Lord that we might know what it is to have our spiritual perception refocused.

We pray for a clearer vision of your beloved Son and we ask that our wills may be so responsive that they may buckle to the authority of the Holy Spirit, that we might be the people of God, acting and living for God in a world which has lost its moorings from God. Hear us and make this service special for Jesus' sake. Amen.

Let's turn to 191, but this is in the supplement. It'll come up on the overheads. The original version of Crown Him with many crowns, the Lamb upon His throne, which has that wonderful third verse, Crown Him the Lord of love.

Behold His hands and side, those wounds yet visible above in beauty glorified. It's a hymn which extols our Lord Jesus and the third verse needs to be sung enthusiastically but thoughtfully and it will be sung without the musical accompaniment. Let's stand.

Crown Him that makes all things divine, all things, and carry as thy branches be to all eternity. Crown Him Lord of life, whose triumphs all appraise, and was victorious in the strife, for us He came to save. His glory shall we sing, to die and come alive, to die eternal life we bring.

Behold His hands and side, those wounds yet visible above in beauty glorified. Thou angel in the sky, and for the e'erless light, of Thou who raised this early night, that history so bright. Crown Him Lord of peace, whose love has set us free, from foes to all that walk, and round His feet set free.

The flowers of paradise extend, their fragrance never ceasing. Crown Him Lord of peace, Lord God and King of kings. Creator of the holy truth, live and love is the life.

All hail Redeemer, hail! All thou hast died for me. Thy praise shall never, never fail, throughout eternity. All hail the Lamb, and crown Him high.

His praise shall be a battle cry. He reigns victorious, forever glorious. His name is Jesus, He is the Lord.

And He's here now, standing in our midst. Two or three gather together. Jesus said when that happens in His name, He will come.

And the important thing this evening is not just to meet with one another, that's not dishonorable, but it's secondary. The important thing, the supremely important thing, is that we might meet with Him. When He was on earth, He taught the disciples a prayer.

We say that prayer together and then remain standing, and we have two further songs that speak about us seeing, beholding, experiencing the presence of the risen Christ. Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come.

Thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us.

And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, forever and ever. Amen.

If you can remain standing, we're going to sing from Mission Praise, number 547, Open Your Eyes, See the Glory of the King. And then we're going to go into the supplement, number 42, For We See Jesus. Open your eyes, see the glory of the King.

Lift up your voice and His praise we sing. I love you, Lord, I will obey. Hallelujah, I bless your name.

Open your eyes, see the glory of the King. Lift up your voice and His praise we sing. I love you, Lord, I will obey.

Hallelujah, I bless your name. I love you, Lord, I will obey. Hallelujah, I bless your name.

For we see Jesus, Emperor of light. Loved in His righteousness, we worship Him. Glory and honor we give unto you.

We see you raise your holy head and bow before your throne. You are the Lord, your name endures forever. Jesus the King, high above all.

For we see Jesus, Emperor of light. Loved in His righteousness, we worship Him. Glory and honor we give unto you.

We see you raise your holy head and bow before your throne. You are the Lord, your name endures forever. Jesus the King, high above all.

Do be seated. But what if you can't see? I mean, what if you don't really have that spiritual perception of which our songs have made mention? You see, this was a problem for the disciples of Jesus, and for Jesus in particular. He sometimes got to the verge of frustration.

Let's turn to Mark's Gospel in chapter 8, and you'll understand what I mean. You see, Jesus has been with His disciples for quite some time, and they're just like you and me in as much as, well, they're not naturally spiritual. They're not naturally spiritually sighted.

And I think that the ministry of Jesus for the three years that He was publicly engaged in teaching was really directed more towards the disciples, the bunch of twelve men, than what it was towards the crowds of thousands of people. They were a rarity. The disciples were with Him all the time.

Jesus wanted to pour Himself, His ministry, His life, the stimuli that caused Him to be who He was and to do what He did, He wanted that to be poured into the disciples so that when He was corporeally, that means bodily, no longer around, they would continue His work. Well, He had difficulty, because the disciples, they were defective with their vision, their spiritual vision. I mean, in this eighth chapter, and just preceding the eighth chapter, Jesus has performed just a catalogue of miracles.

He's healed a deaf man in a most dramatic fashion. You get that at the end of the seventh chapter. He's made spittle, and He's touched the man's tongue, and He's cried that the man who is mute and deaf, that He might be able to speak, and He might be able to hear, and the disciples have witnessed it all.

Then 4,000 people have been fed, and that was only counting the men, so you can zap the number up considerably to take in the whole crowd that were present, and then Jesus, with His disciples, gets into a boat, and He starts to speak to them, and they're a little bit concerned, because Jesus, they think, has implied that they've been careless in not taking with them enough bread, and so they have a discussion on the side. Verse 17, Jesus, aware of their discussion, asks them, why are you talking about having no bread? Do you still not see or understand? Are your hearts hardened? Do you have eyes but fail to see, and ears but fail to hear? In other words, have I been with you? Have I been giving you all these dramatic visual aid lessons? Have I been doing all these miraculous events, all these miraculous acts, and you haven't yet picked up who I am and what this gospel that I'm explaining is all about? And then something very strange happens in terms of the method with which Jesus heals. Look at verse 22 of Mark 8. A man comes into the picture, and he's blind, and Jesus has two goals at healing him, or so it seems.

In fact, He doesn't just seem it. He does have two prayers directed to the Father on behalf of this blind man. They came to Bethsaida, that is, the disciples and Jesus and some people, and they brought a blind man and begged Jesus to touch him.

He took the blind man by the hand and led him outside the village. When he had spat on the man's eyes and put his hands on him, Jesus asked, Do you see anything? He looked up and said, I see people. They look like trees walking around.

Once more, Jesus put his hands on the man's eyes. Then his eyes were opened, his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly. Jesus sent him home, saying, Don't go into the village.

You know, I have problems physically, not generally my health. In the grace of God, I've been very blessed over the years I've been in Worthing. I can't think if you put all the days off for sickness together that it could amount to much more than four or five weeks.

But I do have one aspect of my body that is not quite as I wish ideally it should be, and that is my eyes. Now, that's not obvious to many of you, but if you were to see me at 5.30 or thereabouts in the morning or about midnight when I retire, you'd appreciate that I have difficulties. I am dependent on lenses to help me to see, at least to help me to see clearly, because I suffer from a short-sighted condition.

The nature of my problem is such that if I was driving without lenses, I would advise you not to get in the car. I don't think the policeman would be very impressed if I said, Officer, the reason why that person is spread-eagled across the bonnet is that I haven't yet seen them. I mean, they're there as a blur, a sort of tree walking, but I haven't actually got so close to them that I could tell you who it is I've knocked down.

You see, there's this problem of myopia, of short-sightedness. The cornea, the lens, the various bits and pieces of that wonderful organism that we call the eye is not quite functioning properly for me. Mercifully, with the miracles of modern optical helps, I'm all right.

I mean, I can read this book here, and most people my age have to have glasses, so I'm really coming clean this evening. And I can drive my car without glasses, because one eye is geared towards reading and the other eye is geared towards distance, and provided I don't shot one eye when I'm driving, I'm okay. My brain can pick up the signal from my eye and respond appropriately.

It's a terrible thing to be spiritually short-sighted. You see, I believe that this sort of two-stage miracle that's being performed by our Lord Jesus not only gives us some idea as to the problem of this blind man who wasn't congenitally born in that condition. That means to say there was a time when he could see.

That must be the case, or else how would he have been able to say, when Jesus helped him to the first degree, I see trees as men walking. He'd obviously got some recollection in days when he could see as to what trees looked like. But it seems to me that our attention is not just to be centered upon this man, but behind this man are the disciples of our Lord Jesus.

And what this man is, how this man is being helped by our Lord Jesus physically, he has been trying to help his disciples spiritually. You see, he wants them to see. He wants to see the truths of the gospel.

And they are so dull. They've got some limited understanding, but their understanding is like that of a semi-blind man, a myopic man, a man who's short-sighted. Yes, I see, but I can only see trees as men walking around.

I don't have full perspective. I don't have full and clear vision. And as this man is further improved by our Lord, so he has designs on the understanding of his disciples that they too shall come to a clear comprehension of what the gospel is all about.

You know, it really is quite an embarrassment to be short-sighted physically. I mean, it can get you into some scrapes if you don't have the attendant helps of glasses or contact lenses or laser treatment. I mean, there's a story of the cricketer who probably was the best batsman that Revelation 11 had got.

If you're not in the know, that's a team that takes a number of its members, God bless them, from the tab. And this cricketer, he was given out LBW, and he disagreed with the umpire. So he walked across to the man with the white coat, and he said, you need your eyes testing.

The man with the white coat said, not as much as you need your eyes testing. I'm only selling ice cream. You can be embarrassed at a physical level if you're not seeing properly and you don't have recourse to the helps to make your vision that much better.

And our Lord Jesus Christ does not want to leave His disciples embarrassed. He does not want to leave you and me embarrassed. He does not want to leave us in a semi-seeing condition.

All right to be able to see even with short sight is better than being blind, but how superior it is to have full vision and full comprehension. So when our beloved Lord engages in miracles, He does so for two reasons. One, obviously to bless the sick person, in this instance, and in several instances indeed, a blind man, but also because enshrined within that miracle is a parable.

Now I believe that Jesus heals today through His church. I think that often this nature of miracle is unusual rather than normal, but I do believe that He can heal through His church today. But I think that even more wonderful in the ministry of our Lord Jesus was not bringing physical sight to blind men and women or bringing repair to the body of paralyzed individuals.

Jesus on one occasion said to His disciples, greater miracles than these that I do you will do. Now as far as the miraculous, literally speaking, is concerned in the experience of our Lord, He was in the First Division, wasn't He? I mean, He walked on the water. He turned water into wine.

He multiplied loaves and fishes. He brought back the dead people, obviously from the grave. And I don't find that quality of miracle very often substantiated here in Western Christendom, though within the grace of God I believe it can occur and probably does more so in the frontiers of Christianity and in places where the church is persecuted.

But the greatest miracle of all, surely, my logical application of the teachings and the logic of our Lord Jesus is bringing a man or a woman to a state where spiritually they see, spiritually they are healed, spiritually they are set on course for heaven. For however many healings literally you may go through in your body this side of eternity, you will still bow to the authority of death. You will still leave your mortal remains on this earth unless our beloved Lord comes back before your departure.

And you will move into eternity. And the most important thing, and therefore the greatest miracle of all, is to ensure that when the tremendous hour of death comes, you are prepared to enter into the presence of God, having known your sins forgiven, and you can comfortably and with expectation look forward towards that day. And Jesus said to His disciples, as you prepare men and women to go to heaven, as a result of your ministry they are converted, so you will be engaging in even greater miracles than these physical miracles of bodily healing.

So game, set, and match. As far as the logical argument of our Lord Jesus is concerned, He is trying to show these disciples that this poor blind man who He leads by the hand outside the village of Bethsaida not only represents physical need, but illustrates the needs of the disciples who have a degree of understanding as this man, as a result of Jesus' first intercession, has a degree of sight restored. But, oh, He wants them to see more clearly.

And time and time again in the New Testament you will find that the beloved Christ and the apostles make reference to this business of seeing with spiritual eyes. Here is the apostle Paul in prison writing to the Ephesians and he says in the first chapter of that letter that he would, that the eyes of their understanding might be opened. Here is another man who is in prison.

His name is John. He writes the last book in the New Testament. And within that book there are certain letters encapsulated within the whole treatise.

And he's writing to the church of Laodicea. And these Laodicean Christians, they've defaulted in terms of their discipleship and the apostle John is very concerned for them. And so speaking on behalf of the Lord Jesus Christ, he said, I would that you asked of me and I would allow you to buy eyesalve whereby your spiritual sight shall recover.

And when he talks about buying, he uses it in a metaphorical sense because there is no way in which you can buy spiritual blessings. But Jesus is prepared to make available to all who will come to him the necessary blessing that they require in order to have fullness of vision. You see, the most important thing in your life is to apprehend truth as it is in Jesus, to embrace that truth, to respond to that truth, and to say of our Lord Jesus Christ that he is your savior.

Now that cannot come about simply by you allowing certain truths from this pulpit to be sifted by your mind and received or rejected in your spirit. You are brought into the kingdom of God. You are given spiritual eyesight as a result of God graciously working upon you.

Here, by way of example, is the apostle Peter some while after the healing of the blind man of Bethsaida. And Jesus is putting a question to his disciples and Peter answers. The question is the most important question that can ever leave the lips of any man.

Jesus says, Who do you say that I am? And Peter says, You are the Christ, the Son of the living God. And Jesus said, Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah, flesh and blood has not revealed this unto you, but my Father who is in heaven. Happy are you, Peter, because you have been given spiritual contact lenses.

Happy are you, Peter, because God has placed on your spiritual eyes spectacles so that you can perceive who I am. And the way that you respond to the gospel of Jesus Christ is not as a result of your own ingenious thinking. It's a result of the working of the Holy Spirit within your heart, within your mind, driving you inexorably to the conclusion that Jesus is the Lord and Savior, that his death on the cross of Calvary is the means whereby your sins are forgiven, and that outside of the grace of Jesus Christ in this world there is ultimately no hope for humanity whatsoever.

So you say, then how can I make any contribution whatsoever towards the recovery of my spiritual vision? And the answer is, you cannot make any contribution at all. All you can do is to acknowledge your blindness. Here is Bartimaeus and a friend, a blind man, both blind men, living in Jericho.

And Jesus is passing by. There's a great crowd as Jesus, with his retinue of disciples, makes his way from Jericho towards Bethany and then on to Jerusalem. And Bartimaeus is convinced that the only one who can help him is Jesus.

So although not encouraged by the crowd, he pushes himself forward and he starts to shout, and he shouts as loudly as he can. And Jesus will always pick up the cry of someone who is desperate. And Bartimaeus asks Jesus to have mercy on him.

And Jesus puts what seems to be an unnecessary question to Bartimaeus. What is it that you would have me to do? And Bartimaeus says, all that I might see. There's nothing he can do towards the recovery of his physical ability to see, apart from asking the Lord Jesus.

And don't you see, that's exactly the same at the spiritual level. The only thing you can do is to ask Jesus. You say, well, Mr. Preacher, I'm not exactly in the condition of an atheist.

I really do have some hazy understanding as to who Jesus is. But I don't completely see. I'm not absolutely convinced.

I have faith, but it's such a little faith. I have sight, but it's such a little sight. Don't you think that this is one of the reasons why Jesus performed this miracle, going back to the blind man and Bethsaida, in two stages, with his disciples nearby.

He had some sight at the end of the first ministry, but not total sight, as the disciples had some understanding, but not total understanding. It's not always the case that a man is stopped on the equivalent to the Damascus Road, and confesses Jesus as Lord and Savior, and has a full assurance and a full awareness of who Jesus is, and what he has done. Sometimes you grow into spiritual vision.

Sometimes your apprehension of the Lord Jesus comes week by week and month by month. Sometimes your growth is like Bartimaeus, but imagine him standing by the roadway, and Jesus going down, time after time after time, and Bartimaeus receiving successive ministries from the Lord Jesus. You see, what I'm arguing is this, that another way in which, having taken that first step, having some measure of spiritual vision, that clarity which you have can be improved, is by being in the presence of Jesus, by listening to the words of Jesus being explained.

That is the reason why we advocate from this church, though not necessarily coming here, that people regularly come under the sound of the Word of God. Because the Bible is not an ordinary book, and preaching is not just an ordinary method of communication. The Bible contains God's prescription for humanity, and preaching is the way that the message of the Bible is explained.

And when you constantly come under the sound of the Gospel, and hear the Word of God expounded, so the possibility is that your little faith will become a greater faith, and your greater faith will become a superlative faith. The possibility is that seeing a little, you will see more, and having seen more, you will see even greater. This is the natural process of Christian development, and Jesus Christ is willing to give you the eye salve.

Jesus Christ is willing to clear up your vision. The Lord Jesus would encourage you in His school to develop a greater understanding of who He is, and what He has done, and what His intentions are for you in your life. He does not pass a blind man or woman who calls for help.

And having rendered first aid, He will not stop at that. You can come, and come, and come, again and again, for your vision to be made that much more clear. I would be exaggerating upon this theme if I was to tell you that you would get full vision this side of glory.

There will be always things that you do not understand. There will be those twilight zones where some things that happen in your life will cause you a puzzle. The day will come in eternity when you will see clearly as God Himself sees.

You will understand comprehensively as God Himself understands. But this one thing I guarantee you in the name of God, as you ask Jesus Christ for spiritual sight, you will be on the road to recovery, and you will move to that point in eternity where you will have a complete understanding of the purposes of God throughout time. And some of you dear friends who have known a lot of buffeting in your lives, and you are Christian people who still have areas where you wonder and you've got questions.

Why did this happen? And why was that allowed? The Bible tells you that when you stand before God in His eternity, all the unknown will become known, and the inexplicable this side of glory will be explained. Short-sightedness is something I will have to go through to the end of my days. Mercifully, it's not so great a handicap.

But I tell you on the authority of God, there is nobody here who needs to remain spiritually blind. There's nobody here who needs to remain static in terms of the recovery of spiritual sight. The Apostle Paul, who prayed that the eyes of the understanding of the Ephesians should be improved, can have that prayer taken from his letter to them and reprayed on behalf of people in the 20th century.

I close. When our beloved Lord was with His disciples, after His death and His resurrection, He accompanied two men from Jerusalem to a little village. It was a Sabbath day's journey.

And when they got to the end of the time with Him, He opened their eyes. That's what the Bible says. That doesn't mean to say that they were blind physically.

Of course they were not. They'd been walking along until Jesus came alongside them and the duet became a triplet. What it means is this, that as they benefited by the presence of the Lord Jesus Christ, when He left them, the spiritual advantage of being in His company prevailed.

And their eyes were opened and they saw things they'd never realized before. Jesus, crucified on the cross, had been raised from the dead, dying for their sins, raised for their justification. May God grant that spiritual recovery to each one of us here and improve our spiritual vision.

You know, one of the best ways alongside hearing Scripture to focus your vision is to sing hymns that actually take you as it were to the ministry of the Lord Jesus. Hymns that are personal, that cause you to sing as though you were there, to evaluate as though it advantages you all that Jesus Christ has achieved on your behalf. And right now we do that.

As we turn to number 33 in Mission Praise. And can it be that I should gain an interest in the Savior's blood? Died He for me who caused His pain, for me who Him to death pursued. Amazing love, how can it be that Thou, my God, shouldst die for me? Here's Wesley with his bifocals on, bringing us to a full, a fuller understanding of the meaning of the death of our Lord Jesus.

We'll stand and sing, and as we do so, we receive an offering for the work of the Lord here. And can it be that I should gain an interest in the Savior's blood? Died He for me who caused His pain, for me who Him to death pursued. Amazing love, how can it be that I should gain an interest Amazing love, how can it be that I should gain an interest in the Savior's blood? Died He for me who caused His pain, God bless America, God bless America, God bless America, God bless America, God bless America, God bless America, God bless America, God bless America, God bless America, God bless America, God bless America, God bless America, God bless America, God bless America, God bless America, God bless America.