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.
But we can’t give up on reaching out to people in 2020! God can break through the darkness! He can restore our sight! Think of Balaam the soothsayer, who was on his way to curse the Israelites at the request of Balak, king of Moab. As he was on the way he was blind to the angel of God who was standing in the pathway to kill him. Only his donkey could see it, so the donkey kept stepping off the path and Balaam kept beating his donkey. Finally, God revealed the angel to him, and he realized how blind he was. Later on, when Balak asked him to curse the Israelites again, Balaam said in Numbers 24,
the declaration of the one who hears the words of God,
who receives knowledge from the Most High,
who sees the vision of the Almighty,
who is falling down, but his eyes are wide open:
17 I see him, but not now.
I behold him, but not near.
A star will come out of Jacob.
A scepter will rise up out of Israel.
Balaam probably didn’t even realize the depth of what he was saying or seeing at the time. But now we do! The Messiah was coming out of Israel!
Think of Paul, who was on the way to Damascus. Jesus had to confront him with a bright light and blind him for a couple days before he realized that he had blind the whole time. He thought Jesus was a phony: a fraud: until Jesus showed him that He truly was God. Then Paul could finally see the truth. He saw 20/20 after Jesus opened his eyes by blinding him and confronting him.
Thank God for your spiritual eyesight! I thought about it during the baptisms this past week. We confess before the whole crowd that our seemingly innocent children are born in sin and under the captivity of the devil. We confess that we need to bathe that child in water and we claim that by that baptism the children are born again and given a gift of the Holy Spirit. Who would believe this by just looking at them? But that’s how God reveals it to us. We also believe that we are holy in God’s sight through faith in Jesus Christ. Our sins have all been washed away through the waters of baptism. We are forgiven and we stay forgiven as we receive the body and blood of the Lord through the bread and wine. Who would believe this but by revelation from God? God’s Word changes how we look at ourselves profoundly.
2020 doesn’t scare us because of our 20/20 vision from God. Now, as God’s dear children, NOTHING can separate us from God in the New Year. Demons of hell can’t do it. Death can’t do it. Suffering can’t do it. The devil wants us to get angry with God and abandon Him when our lives fall apart. But instead, we refuse to do that. We grow closer to Him and pray all the more! We don’t measure God’s love by how rich we are or poor we are in 2020. We don’t think that our good or bad health means that God is happy or angry with us. We say to ourselves, “If God was willing to come into this world and live in human skin, be damned on a cross for me, and give me this all free of charge - well then I’m pretty sure God loves me. I can see that as clear as day!”
God also promises us this through the Apostle Paul, “God is able to bless you abundantly, so that in all things at all times, having all that you need, you will abound in every good work.” Isn’t that quite the promise, for the new year also? God won’t give you a little bit to get by. He’ll bless you ABUNDANTLY - not with everything you WANT - but everything you NEED. Why? So you will abound in every good work. God opens our eyes to who He is and what He does for us! We could never see this without the Word of God!
Isn’t this a game changer for how you look at life in 2020 and how you see the world? If God is truly in control, if I’m fully forgiven, and if God is truly generous, and if God really does love me that much, then what am I worried about? What do I really have to be disgruntled over, even under the corruption of sin? If God is taking care of everything that I need, then I can take the time to take care of others.
If you’re worried about the new year, ask God to clean your glasses and look back to the Word! Sometimes when I can’t find something at night, I will turn off the lights and seek for the object with the light on my phone. It helps me to concentrate on one thing at a time instead of losing the object because of how much I can see. As times get darker, we have a spotlight that can shine out the truth. You can’t help but think we have a great opportunity to show people something different, something brighter.
Think of Jesus. When nobody else would take the time to spend with the Samaritans or the tax collectors, Jesus did. He saw them as souls that needed to be saved too. He saw the thief on the cross as someone who was repentant of his sins and needed forgiveness too. He saw the Word of God, not through the eyes of the Sadducees or the Pharisees, but through the eyes of God. He preached as it was, and He opened people’s eyes to Himself as the Messiah. When He died on the cross and rose from the dead He became the great beacon of light and salvation for the world. He still shines today!
We know this through the Bible. It is our duty to see it and study it and know it well in 2020, so that we can proclaim it clearly. When we do this, and show people Jesus as their source of salvation, they too will see the light of salvation and hope in Christ crucified and risen from the dead. They will want to be baptized. They will want the Lord’s Supper.
It was about five years ago that I was reading the readings in worship, and I noticed I was having a harder time seeing things. My eyesight was going bad. After over 40 years of perfect eyesight, it was gone. I tried to wear contacts, but it was an epic fail. I went from zero to bi-focals overnight. It makes me all the more thankful for glasses! Without these, I wouldn’t be able to read hardly anything unless it was far away.
It’s easy to lose sight of the Light in this world. We are focused and pointed to so many other things, so that everything becomes blurry and blah! Like a fly, we are directed to look at the world through a thousand different lenses. We are being taught that every perspective is right and none are wrong.
God’s Word is your glasses. It keeps you focused. It shows you who you are as a sinner. It clearly defines sin. It makes a clear distinction between right and wrong. But it also clearly shows you who Jesus is and where forgiveness is found, on the cross and through baptism and the Lord’s Supper. The Holy Spirit opens our eyes to see the Truth found in Jesus Christ.
As our world goes from dark to darker, their conclusions will go from bad to worse: and all under the guise of wisdom and foresight. Focus on this, now that. Twenty years from now they will claim that we were foolish for saying the things we said and doing the things we did. In the name of progression they will claim that these were the dark ages. But their standards always change, because they have no light, and they can’t see anything without the glasses of Jesus on.
Now, more than ever, keep your eyes in the Bible where God clears everything up. Keep reading, so that you have a 20/20 view of the world in 2020, and you are not deceived by Satan’s lies. God, give us 20/20 vision in 2020 so we keep focused on Jesus and we stay in the Light. Amen.
