Bible Wisdom For Life's Common StrugglesSample

“Grace” Injuring your eye is never fun. Been there, done that. Yet while damaging your eyesight can be a scary experience, spiritual blindness is far worse, because it prevents us from seeing and experiencing the life-changing grace of God. My brother Jase and I were in preaching school together with about twenty other students. It was one of those intensive seminary programs where we were required to go to class every day . . . all day . . . five days a week . . . for two years. Some of our professors were awesome—and some were dry as baked sand. Whenever Professor Snooze was teaching, we probably spent more time trying to find creative ways to stay awake than, well, actually staying awake. The jury’s still out on that one. Jase claims he can fall completely asleep with his eyes wide open—so theoretically, he could have been asleep most of the time. Part of the drill was to take lots of notes—and I mean massive amounts of notes, which we were instructed to assemble with all our handouts in a collection of big, thick three-ring binders. Since Jase and I were on a tight budget at the time, we were dealing with the cheap-o binders you might find at a discount store. One day, when I picked up my binder at the end of class to close it, somehow I jabbed myself in the eye with the corner of the binder and cut part of my eyeball. The pain was excruciating. Jase rushed me home since juices and whatnot were oozing out of my eye and it sure wasn’t safe for me to drive. I didn’t go to the doctor. Instead, Miss Kay had some stuff on hand that helped numb the pain, the kind of stuff she’d use on us when we’d get tiny bits of grass or twigs stuck in our eyes while hunting. So I just gutted it out for three days, trying to keep it clean and protected by wearing an eye-patch like a pirate. Now, there are a lot of manly ways to get an eye injury. You know, maybe from a street fight, or wrestling a pack of crazed coyotes—the kind of high-octane adventure that would impress Si and Willie. But cutting it in a seminary classroom with a notebook? That has to be the nerdiest way to get a severe eye injury—ever. Yet wearing that eye-patch, no matter how I got it, helped me to gain a fresh appreciation for what Jesus meant when He said, “The lamp of the body is the eye. If therefore your eye is good, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in you is darkness, how great is that darkness!” (Matthew 6:22, 23). You see, our world is filled with things that can cause spiritual eye injuries. TV shows, movies, magazines, video games—our entertainment culture in general—are filled with dark imagery that can blind our souls to the good things of God. This is nothing new. The apostle Paul said of his own time that the “God of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel that displays the glory of Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:4 NIV). In the Old Testament, Noah stood alone against a culture that was blinded to God, looking in faith to the grace of God to save him. Even when no one around him could see the truth, Noah’s “eye was good,” and therefore his body was “full of light” (see Luke 11:34). He also took comfort in the knowledge that God could see him, and He would shine the light of grace, showing Noah the way to life.