The Divine Crash

Today’s sermon was good, Jesus’ miracles keep getting bigger and now we get to something that has never been done before.  A man who was born blind is now healed.  You can check out the audio here or on iTunes by searching for Tanoma.

John retells this miracle of a man born blind begging at the temple gates.

Immediately after telling this miracle (or any miracle) people generally fall into two categories.

1. says this is simply a story to teach good morals and didn’t actually happen.

2. says this is fact and actually happened.

I wouldn’t dare tell you which group to be in but I would push you to think about your situation.

If you are in the first group and you believe that miracles don’t happen and everything is simply reducible to what we can explain and everything fits into a nice little box.  Sometimes life doesn’t.  Sometimes there are things in life that can’t fit into our prescribed boxes.

If you are in the other group and the miracles are true and exactly how they happened.  Sometimes we spend so much time trying to figure out exactly what happened we miss what the miracle is saying to us today 2,000 years later. Recently , we changed our clocks ahead one hour and I hate it but I resign myself to it.  I get used to it and look forward to a day when it will change back but I don’t do anything about it.

This is where we find the blind man.  He was born that way and no one had ever been healed of being born that way and so he resigned himself to his situation to the point that when Jesus came by he didn’t even ask to be healed.

How often is this us, or our friends?  We resign to the situation we are and we hope that someday the situation will get better but not actually willing to do anything about because it is hard or because “we’ve never done it that way before.”

The disciples don’t help, they are more concerned with the intellectual problem of why the man is blind than helping the blind man.

Jesus tells the disciples that not all pain and suffering is because of sin, some of it is so that God can be glorified.

This doesn’t make me feel good. How much suffering do I see in which I am like the disciples and I wonder why a person is in the situation they are in, instead of helping them.

Jesus then heals the blind guy and then he gets hauled to the Pharisees.

How often does that happen? We finally have something good happen in our life, we finally get our blessing and all of a sudden these people who only want to keep the things as they are come in and like dogs and leave their mark in our territory.  They make us feel bad because we finally got something good.

The newly sighted man then sees Jesus but doesn’t know who he is but believe in him and then confesses him and then worships him.

This is what it is to be a Christian.  To believe in Christ.  To confess what you now believe and then to worship Christ.

Again, you can listen to the audio on iTunes (just search for Tanoma) or click here.

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Sermon by RevBT