Restoring Sight to the Spiritually Blind

Bob Edens was blind. He had been for 51 years. In a sense, darkness was all he knew for his entire life. He had never seen a sunrise or sunset. He had no idea what the sky looked like, or even what "color" meant.

Yet one day, a miraculous surgery changed everything. For the very first time in his life, he saw.

"I would have never dreamed that yellow was so yellow," Bob said. He also made remarks like, "It's amazing to see a jet plane flying across the sky leaving a vapor trail."

Such little things we typically take for granted, like a plane's vapor trail etched across the sky or the color yellow, were wondrous to him.

"For those of you who have always seen, you'll never know how wonderful it is," Bob said. The profundity of that statement touched my soul, for I'd heard that same idea before — from the Apostle Paul.

Though he was sitting in a prison in Rome — his first Roman imprisonment but not at all the first of his persecutions — he wrote to encourage the young church at Ephesus. Paul reminded the Ephesians of the gift of enlightenment they had received in their faith, and how grateful he was for them and their new "sight":

"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 a spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him, having the eyes of your hearts 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 ... " (Ephesians 1:15-18)

Remember the blind man Jesus healed in Jericho? According to the account written in Luke 18, the man said, "Lord, I want to see."

"Receive your sight," Jesus replied. "Your faith has healed you."

Luke tells us, "Immediately he received his sight and followed Jesus, praising God. When all the people saw it, they also praised God" (Luke 18:43).

As we have been given new sight in Christ through our faith, let us walk rejoicing in the light of God's great grace and mercy. A let us live so others may get a glimpse of God in our lives and pray for him to open their eyes.