Believing is Seeing

I just wanted to share with you something from Pastor David's sermon this morning that really struck me. Again this week we were back in the Gospel of John 8:48-59.

Pastor David again talked specifically about verse 51 where Jesus says, "Truly, truly I say to you, if anyone keeps my word, he will never see death."

Of course, as we've been learning, that is really an amazing statement. Yes, our bodies will die but for those of us who are saved it will be like stepping gently into the next life. No matter how violent are physical death is, our spiritual selves will be transported immediately into the presence of the Lord.

But this was not the thing that really got me today. Instead it was something Pastor David said almost as an aside that really struck me today. It was when he said, "...you've probably heard the saying, 'seeing is believing?' Well actually it should be the other way around. It should be 'believing is seeing.'"

Wow! I never thought about that before but when he said that I thought, how true for the Christian. You know how sometimes your eyes can deceive you? You think you see something one way and it turns out to be something totally different.

Its for this very reason that eye witnesses at a crime scene or accident can't always be used as solid evidence in a court of law. If you think about it, if you have 4 people standing on a street corner and they all witness the same accident, you'll get 4 different accounts. That's probably why when people say they saw a UFO or a ghost, most of the time its really easy to explain it away as some other natural or man made phenomina.

But how true for the Christian that believing is seeing. As Scripture says, before we are born again, we are dead in our tresspasses and sins. Eph. 2:1 This death means we are completely blind to spiritual things and cannot see until God regenerates our hearts and removes the scales from our eyes.

No verse in Scripture speaks to this more clearly than 1Cor 2:14 which says:

"The natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them because they are spiritually discerned."

Exactly! Why can an unspiritual person not see? Because he does not believe. And the only way he will ever believe is if he is first drawn to Christ by the Father.

"No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. And I will raise him up on the last day." John 6:44

"...This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted him by the Father." John 6:65

That's why when any unsaved person reads the Bible, yes they are able to understand the words and grasp the meaning of the text. But they will never be able to see the spiritual meaning behind the text. NEVER - unless God first opens their eyes through salvation.

I'll never forget when God removed the scales from my eyes. I had just recently been saved and I opended up a Bible and started reading a passage I had read many times before and all of a sudden I almost literally felt the blindfold drop off my eyes. All of a sudden I was seeing things in the words I had never seen before. I wept for a long time that night in utter amazement at what I was seeing now that I believed.

Folks, when you read the Bible is it really just words on a page? Does you heart not feel an emotional stirring of joy and a sense of conviction when you look at God's word? If your reading of Scripture is dead as a door nail, let me encouage you right now to come to the Lord in prayer, repent of your sins and ask Him to reveal Himself to you in a new way. If you do, believe me, the next time you seek Him out in His word, you too will be utterly amazed and you'll come to realize that Believing really is Seeing.

May God bless you richly.

Rob