God, Give Us 20/20 Vision In 2020

12.31.19 New Year’s Eve Sermon

They say that once you reach fifty you’re “over the hill.” One of the things I enjoy most about hiking is getting to the top of a hill and being able to look over a nice landscape. Life is like climbing a hill. I had an elderly lady give me some of the best advice I ever had in my life. I was joking about how I was turning 40 back in Topeka and she said to me, “These are some of the best years of your life. You still have your health, and you also have some experience behind you. Ages 40-60 are the most productive years of your life.” She used her experience in life to give me a new perspective on my own life. I looked at my life much differently from that point on.

So life can be about perspective, how you look at it, whether you’re going up or down the hill. And I thought that tonight might be a good time to review our perspective on life, because we are facing a new year, and also because tomorrow brings on 2020, which is another acronym for perfect eyesight. The theme for tonight is,

God, Give Us 20/20 Vision in 2020

When you read a book or listen to someone else comment on something, it helps give you a different perspective. Sometimes it’s even good to listen to someone with a completely different viewpoint to at least try to understand where they are coming from. I remember reading on why a modern day Jew rejected Jesus, and it was really opened up some things to me about the offensiveness of Jesus that I had never even thought about.

But good vision doesn’t necessarily come from seeing things from a thousand different perspectives either. A fly has about 4,000 lenses per eye, and they can detect motion very well. But with 4,000 perspectives they can’t focus on one thing well. Sometimes a singular vision is better to focus and see things.

One of the things that makes people so “blind” today is that they are focused on so many things - or focused on the wrong things. All this is a result of the Fall into sin. Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. God said their eyes were opened, and they were. They began to look at and stare at things they never used to before. One of the main things they looked at differently was themselves. They became SELF conscious. Their eyesight shifted from looking at the world from GOD’s perspective to THEIR perspective. They realized they were naked. It makes you wonder, “Didn’t they realize they were naked before?” I’m sure they did, but they didn’t really think about it. They were happy with what God gave them and they weren’t worried about how they looked.

But that wasn’t the worst of what happened to our eyesight. When God came walking into the Garden, Adam and Eve looked at Him as the scary intruder instead of the Loving Creator. They saw Him differently through the eyes of sin.

So do we, even as Christians. You have a full time job, can pay your bills, have a spouse and children, and you get sick the day before Christmas. Then you say, “God hates me.” Really? What are you looking at? You have a God who took on flesh to die on the cross for all of your sins. He doesn’t make you pay a dime for it. He does it all for free. But then you look at how your classmate has such better athletic ability or a nicer personality and you say to yourself, “Why do THEY get all the gifts?” What are you looking at? It’s not complete blindness, because we still see Jesus as our Savior, but our glasses definitely get dirty over time. Lord, forgive us for looking at life so darkly!

It’s so much worse when we see the way our unbelieving society looks at things today. They are refusing to acknowledge the two genders God gave us and be happy with the differences the way God made humanity. They are refusing to see marriage as a gift from God and sex as a sacred act between two married people - a man and a woman. Infants in the womb are being called lumps of cells. What is this but blindness? What kind of hope is there for people who believe we came from an accident and our destiny is nothing more than to feed the worms in the ground? We are living in a spiritual dark age and it’s only getting darker.

But really, this shouldn’t surprise us. With His perfect and divine eyesight, everything is happening the exact way that Jesus prophesied it would through His perfect eyes of God.