That was from the award winning movie, SeaBiscuit. [We showed brief Seabiscuit excerpt before sermon] Our jockey could win many races with just one eye, but he couldn’t win the close one, the tough one. One eye still has vision, and because it sees what it sees, it feels like it sees everything. But one eye always misses part of the field, and what it misses can be very important.
I remember when my sister had her eyes tested and was provided glasses for the first time. She was in the first grade. A few minutes after wearing glasses she said, “I didn’t know you could see leaves.” For her first five or six years she saw only a hazy halo of a globe called a tree. But with her vision corrected, she could see actual leaves.
The curious thing is that two years ago she had laser eye surgery and no longer needs glasses at all. I purpose to do spiritual laser surgery on some of us this morning. I want to give you 20/20 two-eyed spiritual vision.
Let’s Pray
My text this morning is from the mouth of Jesus. It is John 6:37: “All that the Father gives me shall come to me; and him that comes to me I will in no wise cast out.” [KJV] "All that the Father gives Me will come to Me, and the one who comes to Me I will certainly not cast out." [NASB]
This was a day of unbelief and rejection on the part of the Hebrew leaders. They demanded more signs from Jesus that he was the biblically prophesied Messiah. V30 – “they asked him, "What miraculous sign then will you give that we may see it and believe you? What will you do?”
In recent hours he had healed many, miraculously fed thousands and walked on water. And still they asked for more signs. Talk about poor vision. A woodsman who couldn’t read sign better than that would soon be eaten by a grizzly bear.
Jesus heard the unbelief and rejection in their voices. They were never going to believe on Him. His answer to those leaders who wouldn’t believe and accept him was this “All that the Father gives me shall come to me; and him that comes to me I will in no wise cast out.”
He was sticking it back to them. “Religious leaders, if you think you have veto power over my life mission, you are sadly mistaken and inept. I will have a kingdom and a people. My Father has chosen some to give to me, and all these will believe on me and will be in my kingdom, church and family. And to any of you who are considering following me, please know that my arms are open. Anyone who chooses to come to me will be received.”
In that sentence, Jesus gives the two eyes of seeing God, two eyes of seeing reality, the two eyes that sensible men and women always perceive, even it they don’t know why.
In that sentence, Jesus was stating that God was sovereign, that he rules and chooses, and no man or group can defeat what he intends. The first phrase says that God has chosen a people, has given these people to Christ, & these people must and shall come to Christ, and so shall be saved.
Yet Jesus was also saying that men and women have a free will, that each of us is responsible for our decisions and conduct, even decisions of faith, and that any one who will come to Jesus will be eternally saved. This is a statement without limitation of any kind. It leaves God’s free grace open, and whosoever will may come and may be assured that he or she will not be refused.
John 6:37 contains the full breadth of Christian doctrine. It contains that left eye, which is called Calvinism, though Calvin did not discover the sovereignty of God, for Moses and David and Paul and Jesus all taught it. Ephesians 1:4 teaches, God “chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blemish before him in love: 5. having predestined and foreordained us unto adoption as sons through Jesus Christ unto himself, according to the good pleasure of his will.” That is a triplicate statement of sovereign election.
John 6:37 also contains the right eye, that school of doctrine called Wesleyan or Arminian, though Wesley did not invent the open invitation to all sinners to come to Jesus. For Jesus said, “Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavily laden, and I will give you rest,” and Paul said, “Whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.”
My favorite preacher is still, C. H. Spurgeon. In 1884 he said of John 6:37, “These are two great truths; let us carry them both with us, and they will balance each other.”
He said, “I was once asked to reconcile these two statements, and I answered, “No, I never reconcile friends.” These 2 passages never fell out: they are perfectly agreed... The grand declaration of the purpose of God that he will save his own is quite consistent with the widest declaration that whosoever will come to Christ shall be saved.”
I think the least profitable of all spiritual activities is to try to remove imagined difficulties in God’s Holy Word. The most profitable thing to do when you don’t fully understand something in the Bible is to accept and believe it.
All of life has its testing points. Why should we expect our faith to be exempt from being tested? Some of my most exhilarating times are when I believe what I don’t fully understand. There are those teachings of Jesus that make me ask, “How can this possibly be?”
One of the greatest trials of a thinking person is, “How can God be sovereign and man still have a free will?” “How can it be true that God elects some to be saved and that whoever chooses may come to Christ and be received?”
A simple reply is that God said these things are both true, and he understands what we cannot. Why should we expect an omniscient God to bring us fallen and limited creatures into the circle of knowing all things?
If I stand on the shore of Lake Michigan I can see to the horizon. But the world is far beyond my vision. There is a horizon for my mind and understanding, but that horizon is not the end of truth or logic or God’s mind.
God has given us these two truths, and I believe they fit together when we look with both eyes. We are not called to express favoritism for the one eye that sees God is sovereign over all his creation, or the other eye that sees that God has given men and women an independence to choose and believe what they will choose and believe.
At some time in your life you will rest your weary head on the loving providence of God who elects his children and then works all things together for their good. At other times your comfort will be the knowledge that no one will be rejected who comes to Jesus the Savior.
I. It takes two eyes, both eyes to see God. Another of my favorite writers is G.K. Chesterton, from early in the 20th century. Chesterton once wrote on the nature of insanity.
“If you argue with a madman, it is probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment. He is not hampered by a sense of humor or by charity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman has lost everything except his reason.
What Chesterton is explaining is that healthy, well-balanced people have both mental intelligence and emotional intelligence. They come to conclusions with their logic and also with their heart and intuition.
Healthy people see life with two eyes.
• What speed to drive on I-94 is influenced by the duality of the legal law and the safety conditions of the day.
• How to respond to a criticism is directed both by the actual words you’ve heard and the amount of love in your heart to cover those words.
• Whether to help a stranded motorist instantly sorts through the firmness of your next appointment, and what may be the nudging of the Holy Spirit to be a Good Samaritan.
• Healthy correction and discipline of children always has a blend of one eye on principle and the other eye on love.
Chesterton calls this two-eyed sanity, “mysticism.” The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic. He has permitted the twilight… He has always cared more for truth than for consistency. If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them. His spiritual sight is stereoscopic, like his physical sight: he sees two different pictures at once and yet sees all the better for that.
Thus he has always believed that there was such a thing as fate, but such a thing as free will also. He admired youth because it was young, and age because it was not. It is this balance of apparent contradictions that has been the whole buoyancy of the healthy man.
So, Christian thought always requires two eyes
• A college student steeped in a Reformed theology told me he didn’t know if he could avoid hell and go to heaven. I began to explain the good news of the gospel but he interrupted me, “I know all of that. What I don’t know if I’m among the elect who can be saved.” This pitiful twenty year old was entering the edge of insanity of one-eyed vision.
• I had lunch with a man at a funeral dinner. He thought it was time to instruct me – I listened to a lecture on the sovereignty of God for 25 minutes. I knew he was looking through only one eye. I asked him about his church and how he served there. “Oh, I don’t have a church – haven’t gone to church for many years.” It was then I knew he was insane. Every Sunday at noon he could tell himself, “I didn’t go to church today, but it was God’s doing. He is sovereign and if he had wanted me in church I would have gone to church.” His one-eyed vision of God and doctrine had turned to rebellion and hard-hearted disobedience to God’s Word, with the blame for his sinful choices going up to God.
• A.W. Pink is one of my favorite writers, when I know I’m reading the two-eyed Pink. In his youthful writing days he was a one-eyed writer. During this period he wrote a book called “The Sovereignty of God.” He included a chapter to explain away such texts as John 3:16.
“God so loved the world." Many suppose that this means, the entire human race… Not necessarily.”
Then he argues that God limited his love for only the elect. That was the young one-eyed Pink. Two decades later with both eyes open, he wrote his famed commentary of the Gospel of John. He said,
"For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved" (John 3:17)… When God sent His Son here it was not to "condemn the world," as we might have expected. There was every reason why the world should have been condemned. The heathen were in an even worse condition than the Jews. Outside the little land of Palestine, the knowledge of the true and living God had nearly vanished from the earth. And where God is not known and loved, there is no love among men for their neighbors. In every Gentile nation idolatry and immorality were rampant. One has only to read the second half of Romans 1 to be made to marvel that God did not then sweep the earth with the broom of destruction, But no; He had other designs, gracious designs. God sent His Son into the world that the world through Him "might be saved."
Here he declares the love of God for all the world, and God’s readiness to receive these. It seems he had learned to see God with both eyes.
But it is not just the Sovereignty of God people who need to open an eye; it is also the Wesleyans, the Arminians who need two-eyed vision. I’m a lifetime fan of John Wesley, and have read three biographies on his life plus his journal. John Wesley was not as Wesleyan as his followers became.
Some among these wrestle with a weakness of trust in a ruling, holding, delivering God. They see so much the free will of man that they are often insecure in their faith and seek to bolster their faith in many ways. There is often an emphasis of man holding onto God rather than God holding us in his hands.
• Some Arminians know that God’s Word says he will provide for them, but they have difficulty trusting that promise unless they have frequent signs. Seeing a bird, a deer or a rainbow makes them feel more loved for a day or two. These are interpreted as signs of God’s care.
• Some, not all, but some Wesleyans never know if they have done enough for God, for God to be pleased with them. So if a one-hour church service is good, a two-hour service might be twice as good. Maybe God will accept me if I sing and shout for three hours. Maybe God will want me if I raise two hands in prayer, or shake or quake or fall down.
• Every crisis becomes a triple crisis, every trial a triple trial, for these fine people find little peace in the promises of God’s Word. They see his love as conditional, and see themselves as always on the edge of rejection.
I wish for all of God’s people to take their cues from John 6:37, which declares a sovereign God who has all under control, and declares a freedom for each of us to come to Jesus.
One of the fun things for me, these many years here, has been to preach and minister to many who are strong on the sovereignty of God. They hear in me an ally – one who believes that God rules, much as they believe.
And it has been fun to minister to many Wesleyans who recognize in me a compatriot who has never met a lost soul that couldn’t be invited to salvation.
What you need to know is that with me it isn’t fifty – fifty. I believe in both God’s elective sovereign rule, and man’s responsible free will, and both fully at the same time. I believe John 6:37 requires both.
But it’s wider than that one line of thought.
II. Every part of Christian thought requires two eyes
• God is Sovereign - Mankind is accountable and free
• Jesus is the Son of God – Jesus is the Son of Man
Our young Czech Christian Petr is reading a book by John Piper. Peter asked, “What does this mean, “Jesus is very God of very God and very man of very man?” I explained this is a way of saying Jesus is 100% God & 100% human.
• The Bible is God’s Word – the Bible is the Word of man.
After I preached on Psalm 145 last week, I said, “That is what David did, but in poetry, with cadence, meter and melody. What a gift he had. And how the Holy Spirit of God guided his writing.” I was very carefully stating that I read the Psalms with two eyes. That is the way David read his own Psalms, and 1st and 2nd Samuel.
2 Samuel 23:1. David wrote, These are the last words of David: "The oracle of David son of Jesse, the oracle of the man exalted by the Most High, the man anointed by the God of Jacob, Israel’s singer of songs: 2. "The Spirit of the LORD spoke through me; his word was on my tongue. David was in awe of the thought that what he wrote from his own thoughts was actually the very Word of God.
• God takes care of our future – we plan for the future
• God gives us the victory – we must seek the victory
• God gives to us – we give to him
• God provides all our needs – we pray in every need
• Admit you are the chief of sinners – be holy in the Lord
• Husbands are to lead at home – yet submit in everything
• Be strong in the Lord – be meek and gentle
• Live the abundant life – take up your cross and die daily
• Live apart from the world – live within the world
• Love not the world – love everyone in the world
• Fight the good fight – turn the other cheek
All of these are apparent contradictions. G.K. Chesterton had long been an atheist, or an agnostic. But he had some Christian friends. To research material to attack his Christian colleagues, he read the Bible. He said it was the apparent contradictions in the Bible that made him a Christian believer. He recognized that both sides of each contradictory statement were obviously true, but written in a way that man would never publish. After being amazed at all the tension points in the Bible, like the sovereignty of God and the free will of men and women, he realized that the author of this book was living on a plain above us all, a plain where these statements flowed like common sense.
Not only that, he was amazed to read that Christians are blamed for many of the wars of the world, yet Christians are blamed for being too meek, for turning the other cheek. Christians are blamed for being to somber and boring, and yet also for being too joyful and full of praise.
My car battery has two poles – positive and negative. I have power only when I’m properly attached to both poles. And my power as a follower of Christ comes from believing with a firm grip on both poles – God rules over all and I’m accountable for my actions.
So instead of closing one eye or the other, and swinging to Calvinism or Arminianism, let’s see God with both eyes.
And know this, it isn’t just in the arena of Christian thought that we need two eyes.
III. Every part of life itself requires two eyes.
I don’t know what God saw lacking in Adam when he said, it is not good for man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him. But I know what was lacking in me. I’m in great danger when I make decisions without listening to my wife.
• Because I’m colorblind I need my wife’s eyes to pick out my clothes and ties.
• Because I’m an idealist I need my wife’s eyes to see how my decisions impact people.
• Because I’m a workaholic I need my wife’s vision to remind me to reserve time for my grandchildren.
• Because I’m not a detail person, I need my wife’s administrative skills to keep me current with the bank.
It takes two eyes to see God, and so God gave me two eyes – so that I would love Him with all my heart and all of my mind. But my eyes are not enough.
• I not only need my wife’s eyes for stereovision. I have always needed mentors for stereovision. As a young Christian I needed some to disciple me – that was steorscopic vision.
• Getting married is simultaneously a thing that submits to good reason and God’s Word, yet is also carried along by the passions of romance.
• Our Single Parent’s group provides stereovision. The group’s thinking and support provide the double eyes – one’s own vision and the counsel of the group.
• Our small groups provide stereovision. In times of confusion one gains a perspective that one can’t find alone.
All of us need other people, and especially other praying Christians in our lives. I have two eyes, but they are close together. Your eyes will help me see life and God and beauty in a new way.
I sat in a meeting this week with the intent of helping others see the church my way. But an hour before the meeting I decided to be quiet at first and let the others help me to see the church through their eyes. When I saw it with their eyes, I thought – “ah-ha,” and I affirmed them. :)
No one has the corner on vision. God gave you two eyes for a wider field of vision and perspective. God has given many of us spouses and we need to see life through their eyes. God has always placed Christians in groups so each would have in the others, more eyes for a better vision of where to go and how to live.
Now let’s come full circle and finish with John 6:37, “All that the Father gives me shall come to me; and him that comes to me I will in no wise cast out.” The first part of this statement was a comfort for Christ’s own heart; the second a comfort to all who were wondering if they dared come.
Most of the listeners were power brokers who thought they were the official board to decide whether the future of Jesus was lift-off or shutdown. Jesus looked at them in mild contempt and said, “You control nothing. My Father is in control, and he has chosen a people to give me.” And how this thrilled his heart. The Father had chosen a bride for the groom.
So we learn that some will come to Jesus and be eternally saved. Why shouldn’t you be among them? Suppose there is a plague in the land. But it has been determined that not all will die – some will be healed. First you should rejoice that some will be healed. And then you should think, “Why can’t I be among the ones who will live?”
It was a dark day in John 6. The heirs of the prophets were turning against Jesus. Jesus found strength in this, “Though you reject me, the Father will give some to me. And to any potential believers and followers out there, be assured that you will find a great welcome.”
Every part of this was meant to give encouragement and hope. Do not worry about anything. Just come to Jesus. To be accepted, it is only required that you come.
Some come running to Jesus, they are so eager to be his followers. I think of Zacchaeus who climbed a tree to see Jesus, or Peter who stepped out of a boat into deep water so eager he was to be with Jesus.
Some come with slow halting steps, because they feel so beat up with life, or because they are so timid and fearful. Nicodemus would come to Jesus only under the cover of darkness. But when you come to Jesus, you will see his face of love and open arms to receive you.
He will never, no never cast you away. In English a double negative reverses a thought so that it becomes positive. “I don’t want you to not go,” means “I want you to go.” But two or three negatives in Greek make the negation even stronger. We have a very strong negative here.
“In no wise” is an emphatic negative, like I will never, never cast out. It means that Jesus has said, on no account, for no reason, on no pretense, or from no motive whatever, will I ever in time or eternity cast out the soul that comes to me. Those are words to make us shout with joy and also to sleep in peace.
Let me mention one more thing. Our text began, “All that the Father gives…” But when Jesus begins to deal with troubled repentant anxious and eager hearts, he switches to the personal pronoun. He switches from the masses to one needy soul. “Him or her that comes to me I with never, no never, in no wise cast out.” God’s love is as wide as the world. God’s love is as personal as your name. You need to know that when you come, he will receive you, forgive you, cleanse you, claim you, make you his child, and keep you forever. Today Jesus is looking at you, calling your name, and is inviting you to come.
George Needham described an experience he had, walking through a farm. He heard a fluttering and the startled cry of a bird. Glancing up he saw a lark pursued by a hawk. The little song bird dashed wildly through the branches, screaming in fear. Close behind were the fierce eyes and cruel talons of its foe.
What a picture, he thought, of a sinner pursued by Satan when his soul is aroused in spiritual danger.
The bird continued its frantic flight until it seemed exhausted and about to yield in despair. Then it saw George Needham and in an instant flew directly into his arms and nestled there. It seemed conscious of perfect safety. But would George take that bird that trusted him and sought his protection and cast it out to the hawk? Certainly not! He would defend it at any cost.
Jesus will in no way cast you out – on no account, for no reason, on no pretext, from no motive. He will never in time of eternity cast out the soul that comes to him. You can count on him.
Come to Jesus with your emptiness and ask him to fill you up. Come with your shame and ask him to bring honor. Say, “Here is my sin, please cleanse it with your blood. Here is my heart, receive it and seal it. Here is my tomorrow, please guide me. Here is my confusion, teach me. Here is my turmoil, still my soul. Here is my life, save it and use it for your glory. Amen.
