Tuesday, August 1, 2017

Praying to be Healed of Spiritual Myopia

This week as we gather together to pray together with and as God's people, we continue our study through Paul's prayer in Ephesians 1:
For this reason, because I have heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love toward all the saints, I do not cease to give thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers, that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of Him, having your eyes enlightened, that you may know what is the hope to which He has called you, what are the riches of His glorious inheritance in the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of His power toward us who believe, according to the working of His great might that He worked in Christ when He raised Him from the dead and seated Him at His right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that in named, not only in this age but also in the one to come. And He put all things under His feet and gave Him as head over all things to the church, which is His body, the fulness of Him who fills all in all.
Last time, we noted that the gist of Paul's prayer for these believers is that the Spirit would "reveal" to them a greater and growing "knowledge of God."

Prerequisite to this, says Paul, is the necessity of "having the eyes of our hearts enlightened." 

Of course, at regeneration, this is exactly what the Spirit did to us and for us. Before this, we were spiritually blind (2 Cor. 4:4), and as Paul will say in the next chapter, spiritually dead in - and because of - our willful rebellions and sins against God (2:1). The "eyes of our hearts" were set on the things below, and thus we, with all of our "hearts," gladly followed the course of this fallen world; we willingly followed the god of this evil age; and thus we passionately pursued what the culture and commercials said we should. 

But when we were sovereignly "born again from above" by the Spirit, the "eyes" of our hearts were enlightened.* In Paul's words elsewhere, we were made a "new creation" (2 Cor. 5:17), which includes "seeing" people and things differently (5:16; cf. Col. 3:1-2).

However, the Greek employed by Paul also teaches us that as necessary as this initial 'conversion' of the 'eyes of our heart' is, we also need to have our eyes progressively enlightened by the Spirit if we are to know our God rightly and live in His world accordingly.

Simply put, we need more of the Spirit's "eyes" to see things as they truly are. The natural person - that is, the unregenerate, worldly person devoid of the Spirit of God - sees things with 'natural' eyes, that is, a carnal and worldly perspective (see esp. 1 Cor. 2:6-16). And, as Jesus says, our "eyes" - how we see things - determine our desires and passions and therefore what we spend our time looking at (Matt. 6:22-23).

Our hearts naturally seek after and fall in love with whatever we set our eyes on. And so Paul prays that God would enlighten our 'heartly' eyes and remove the glaucoma that muddies and distorts our perspective. We need the sun of the Spirit to burn away the darkness that veils us from seeing the world as God would have us, for how we use our time, our talents, or our treasure is always in relation to what we set the eyes of our hearts on. 

As Paul makes clear in the rest of the letter, believers need to see that the world that so allures their hearts is not their friend, but rather a fierce and ruthless foe that wants us to waste our lives here by focusing our eyes on things below (cf. Col. 3:1-4). The world (i.e. this fallen "age") is the primary tool Satan uses to blind the eyes of people's hearts from seeing the glory of God in the face of Christ (2 Cor. 4:4). He wants us to live as spiritual myopics; to live with a temporal focus; to live with such a short-sightedness that renders us no different from the world we are called to be set apart from (cf. Matt. 5:13-16).

And so we, like the believers in Ephesus, need "eyes" to see aright if we are to be of any earthly good in our short time here.

It is alleged that the famous American evangelist D.L. Moody once quipped that some believers could be so spiritually minded that they ended up being of no earthly good. According to Paul's prayer in Ephesians 1, nothing could be further from the truth! The only way we who are believers will be of any earthly use is to have our eyes progressively enlightened, and our hearts subsequently enflamed, by the beauty of God in the face of Jesus Christ as seen in the glorious gospel of grace. Only the Spirit of God can do this, and so let us ask Him to.

Holy Spirit, please, we beg You, open the eyes of our hearts! For the sake of Jesus and His church, and thus the glory of the Father, please open the eyes of our hearts! Like Elisha's servant**, open our eyes to see the world through Your eyes, for if we do not, we will not live any differently from the people we want You to draw to King Jesus.

Next week, we will look at the three concrete examples Paul lists of what it will look like for us to have the eyes of our hearts enlightened by the Spirit.

In Christ, and for the sake of His glory in the church,
pastor ryan



* The NET translates the perfect participle this way - that is, emphasizing more of the initial transformation of our heart, whereas other translations, like the NIV, emphasize more the ongoing transformation - enlightening - of our hearts to help us "see" things from God's perspective.

** See the account in 2 Kings 6, especially verse 17.

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