I Want To See

Isaiah 55:9 (NIV) "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways," declares the LORD. "As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.

I. A Picture of Need

He sat with his hands outstretched on the road outside Jericho.

-Crying for a handout.

-Most never gave him a second glance

-They’d seen him sitting there his whole life

- A few heard him, but when they did swing out of their way to drop a few shekels into the cup…it was never enough.

He kept his hand extended…day after day.. Hoping each day would be better than the last.

-He was dirty from what came off the bottom of every else’s sandals

- he was largely rejected by society…the very people Lev. 25 had commanded to care for him.

His name was Bartimaeus…. And he was blind.

He didn’t know the wonder of what you and I experience as the wander of sight

- He couldn’t describe the difference between a storm cloud and a white billowy one.

-He had never seen a sunset that divided one boring day from the next.

-Oh, how he wished he could see! He wanted to see people, and animals, and sunsets.

One day a cloud of dust swirled around him. A crowd was bustling by him. He heard their excited murmurs. Bartimaeus asked what the commotion was about. They told him a healer was coming… His name was Jesus!

Without hesitation he cried out to Jesus. Jesus heard him.

-His request was simple, he was consumed with one request.

- He had never had an opportunity like this and he didn’t intend to waste it.

Luke 18:38,39 He called out, "Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!"

Those who led the way rebuked him and told him to be quiet, but he shouted all the more, "Son of David, have mercy on me!"

Suddenly Bart felt hands reach out, lift him up, and help toward Jesus.

Jesus stopped and ordered the man to be brought to him.

When he came near, Jesus asked him, "What do you want me to do for you?"

"Lord, I want to see," he replied.

I want out of the prison of darkness that surrounds me every day. I want to get off the side of the road and walk the streets of Jericho without running into people and walls. I want to walk into a store. A want to walk in the door of a synagogue. I want to see!

I want to use my hands for something more than feeling my way in the dark. I want to make my own way, I want to learn to read…I want to look into the eyes of my friends… I want to see!

42Jesus said to him, "Receive your sight; your faith has healed you."

Long dormant pupils began to constrict… dead nerves began to tremble then transmit signals to his brain. Suddenly, through his eyes and in to his mind came pictures he’d never seen before. He could see! Jesus had healed his sightless eyes.

None of us here are physically blind. We see so many cloud we don’t see them anymore.. unless they threaten our lives. We look at the beauty of the ocean and comment on the sand in our eyes. We catch a sunset out the corner of our eyes and worry that we wound get home before dark.

I’m not really preaching to you about physical eyesight… I preaching about spiritual eyesight.

II. A Paradigm of Stinking Thinking

A. Lord I want to see!

I want to be brutally honest with you this morning, completely transparent. I’m going to talk to you about my own sin, and then apply what I say to your life. I don’t want any single group to feel too guilty as I begin, because we will all feel guilty before I am done.

I will not, and never have, tried to produce guilt/conviction in us just to make us feel guilty…there’s plenty of others people in our lives who will do that for us each day. I want to dig around where we are all living, produce some conviction, then show us all, including me, the pathway to transformation. My task is to move us out of the darkness and let us really see…clearer than ever before.

I’m going down this trail because of my own personal struggles and search for an answer.

My sin, my primary temptation, that I give in to regularly, which leads me into other temptations, is overeating. Don’t be quick to judge me… I’m going to explain some of what God has given me this week and you yourself may soon feel the heat.

I’m actually in good company in my temptations. The very first temptation of Adam and Eve was about what they would/wouldn’t put into there mouths. When satan wanted to break Jesus down in the wilderness, what temptation did he use??? Food!… and interestingly enough, the Bible says that the Spirit led Jesus there to be tempted by satan.

If overeating is not a problem with you, you may look at me and think, “All he has to do is quit eating so much, just push back from the table, just walk past the refrigerator. If the answer were that easy I would be thin right now and so would millions of others. I’ve had those same thoughts tens of thousands of times only to go right back to the feeding trough for more. Before any in the room think you are off the hook in this message remember what I said last week:

All of us have weaknesses/ areas of sinfulness, they’re just in different areas.

A thin person can look across the room at a heavy person and think how out of control they are… but I guarantee you, we wouldn’t have to look too deep into that person’s life to find other area’s that are out of control…. It’s the human condition. A.W. Tozer used to say that God gave each of us some Achilles heal (area of personal weakness) to keep us from feeling superior to others.

Back to my personal problem… Some of you in this room can’t even fathom the deeply ingrained habit of eating till you are full, then eating some more…. Then an hour later, with absolutely no hunger left to satisfy… eating something else maybe a lot of something else‘s. Waking up in the morning not hungry because you ate too much the evening before…… purposing that this day you were going to carefully watch your food intake, only to end the day stuffed once again, hating the lack of control that got you there.

As I describe myself, some of you are relating exactly to what I say… others are not relating to the grazing pattern in eating but there is a nagging thought about some other action, or activity that seems to control you just as much.

Like the overweight person we all tend to go on diets from our sin. We purpose not to go there again…we wake up the morning after giving in to temptation and purpose that this is the last time we will ever allow ourselves to give in to satan’s lies. We set ourselves up on a system of new responses that will eliminate the errant behavior once and for all…. but it isn’t quite that easy… is it?

Many of us have begged God to help us in our weakness and we wonder why God doesn’t miraculously take away the urges that lead us down the wrong paths.

I shared with you this last week about a book I am reading called Lose it for Life by Steve Arterburn and Linda Mintle. The whole thrust of the book is that in any pattern of sin in our lives the answer is never to simply tell ourselves to stop. If is were that easy the world could quickly become a sinless place. In fact Paul says to the Colossian church:

Colossians 2:20-23 (NIV) Since you died with Christ to the basic principles of this world, why, as though you still belonged to it, do you submit to its rules: "Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!"? These are all destined to perish with use, because they are based on human commands and teachings. Such regulations indeed have an appearance of wisdom, with their self-imposed worship, their false humility and their harsh treatment of the body, but they lack any value in restraining sensual indulgence.

They suggest that in the issue of overeating, the problem goes much deeper than the simple physical act of eating to much. If you overindulge it may be caused by other issues on the inside, emotional and spiritual issues, that eventually show up on the outside as sinful patterns and habits. In fact:

Repeated patterns of wrong behavior on the outside are symptoms of an underdeveloped/ undernourished soul, on the inside.

Don’t get angry at me.

Most/all of us live with some degree of denial, (lying to ourselves) about some weak/sinful area in our lives. We often blame our problem/s on others or our circumstances (rightly?) but the truth is that whatever led us to where we are…. Now it has become our issue.

We can’t expect whoever or whatever hurt us in the past to come and help us fix the present or prepare us for the future.

I am very aware that many here have endured terrible circumstances in your lives, and in many of our lives our past is dictating our present and future. I was shocked this week to start to see how true that is in my own life.

The book Lose it for Life gives a chart of the different characteristics of real physical hunger…. and emotional hunger. I started to high-light the phrases that applied to me and I found myself highlighting the entire column on:

…eating because of emotional hunger within my mind rather than a physical hunger within my belly.

Arterburn says that the only path to figuring out what is really driving your actions is to journal them and look for patterns. I adapted his chart, printed up copies for myself and started using it…. It looks like this:

Food Journal

October 30^th - November 30^th

Date/Time? Where? What? How Much? Hungry? Phys/Emo?

Oct 30^th ______________________________________________________________

Oct 31^st ______________________________________________________________

Notes:

Nov 1^st ______________________________________________________________

I was shocked to see how much of my wrong behavior happened at certain key times, in certain key places, how seldom I was eating from to fill a growling stomach, and how much of my eating was not, at all a product of real physical hunger. In fact;

Overeating, as well as other sinful behaviors, can be used to medicate/ numb/ make us forget the deeper issues in an underdeveloped/ under- nourished soul.

Do any of you ever have the experience of feeling empty? You are not sure what is empty… you just know that something inside you is not full. I happen to believe that most of us in this room experience times when we just feel empty. It doesn’t mean you are not a Christian… We all walk around with certain expectations out of life and other people that are sometimes……often not met.

In many cases somebody in your life has carved a chunk out of you emotions leaving you wounded and empty. In some cases we had expectations of what we thought God was going to do in our life….. And He didn’t meet our expectations!

I’m convinced that when we are empty, emotionally or spiritually we tend to unconsciously reach for the things we think will fill our undernourished insides. If food is your medication of choice, you reach for food. For some it may be television, or computers, or sports, or shopping, or even sinful behaviors, addictions, filling illicit sexual desires, feeding on errant thinking.

Some in this room have lived with yielding to some temptation in your life for years, until you’ve come to simply accept the fact that you will die with that behavior. You’ve begged God to take it away and it is still part of every day.

Could it be that God is actually expecting us to find out what our errant behaviors are, lock in on what is leading down those sinful trails, allow him to peel back the inner motivations that are leading us into these sins, then accept his grace to change us one layer at a time until the void inside is filled and the behavior it caused on the outside have been transformed.

Do you have any idea what triggers you to go down a certain sinful path over and over…. Wouldn’t it be a good idea to try to find out? I actually came up with another chart that I welcome you to use this week to document, before God what is really going on in your life.

October 30^th - November 10^th

Date/Time? What Tempt? Where? Trigger? Spirit/Emo issue?

Oct 30^th ________________________________________________________________

__________________________________________________________________Notes:

What I’m offering you here is not some easy cure for what ails you. If it’s true that many of us are medicating the emptiness inside with some behavior or activity (like overeating)

……. when we realize what we are doing and we remove the numbing effect of our wrong behavior; what we’re left with is….. dealing with the hurts brought on by others, or our circumstances, or God, that left us feeling so empty to start with.

Wouldn’t is be better to allow God to peal back what is really in our soul, cleanse it out one layer at a time, and heal us from the inside out…. Then he’s free to transform the behavior patterns that we’ve been asking him to take away… without dealing with the emptiness inside.

 How bad do you want to see?