How
much of God do we miss in life?
I
remember having a conversation with a girl in high school. I was trying to get
to know her a little bit and I found out on senior survival as we talked that I
had a reputation that I didn't know anything about. Apparently I had gotten this
reputation as a guy who would date someone and then whenever I decided I was
finished with them I would simply leave them behind, love them and leave them
kind of thing. The strange thing was, I was a marathon dater. As a sophomore the
only dating relationship I had lasted 10 months and I was the one who was heart
broken and dumped. It was “mutual” of course, we both knew that we were in
different places and it was over, but she was the one who was ready for it, not
me. And by the time my senior year started I had been dating another girl for
more than a year. So love them and leave them wasn't really my M.O. but that
was the perception among some of the girls.
This
reputation was obviously not based on reality. This girl had never talked with
me before, and she obviously had not been observing my actions either. We do
this so often, we think we know something about a person and we just go with
it, not listening and not seeing we believe what we want to believe because of
hearsay or the little box of understanding within which we live.
The
same thing is happening in chapter 7 of John. Jesus has been teaching, healing,
and acting now for a while and there are those who believe based on these
actions and words because they have been listening and seeing. When the temple guards are sent to
arrest Jesus they come back empty handed because they have listened to Jesus
and tell the Pharisees, "No one speaks like this man." But the Pharisees,
others in the crowd, and even Jesus' own brothers do not believe in him. They
are stuck on where Jesus is from. "No prophet comes from Galilee,"
the council responds to Nicodemus when he tells them that they should listen to
what Jesus has to say before judging him. They are unwilling to listen and they
choose not to see the works of Jesus as miracles from God because they are
outside of their own Sabbath box of understanding.
Jesus
tells them that he comes from the Father; he tells them that he is doing the
works of his father, and he tells them that he is going back to the Father to a
place where they cannot find him, a place where they cannot go. But the deaf
and blind minds of the people say he is from Galilee, doing the works of the
devil because he heals on Sabbath, and he must be going to the people who are
dispersed in Greece or something. There is more to Jesus, there is a need to
believe in order to understand. The people who listen to his words and really
see his miracles conclude his must be from God, “what more evidence do we need?”
The
question for me from this is; what am I missing when it comes to Jesus? What
don't I see? What don't I listen too? In what way am I stuck in my perception
of who Jesus is? What could Jesus do in my life if I was open to him? Jesus
references the man healed on the Sabbath, that his whole body was healed (see
previous blog on john chap 6). This man listened to Jesus and followed his
words, thus he saw the healing in his life.
May
the eyes and the ears of our hearts be opened today so that we may hear with
our ears, see with our eyes and turn so that we might be healed.
No comments:
Post a Comment