See What You Believe Series

Sales were stagnant at the insurance company where Daniel P. Amos worked as the chief executive. So, he decided to take a huge risk with a novel ad campaign that poked fun at the company’s name. Take a look (show Aflac—Barra at the Barber, www.youtube.com/watch?v=VS83HdpzxDU).

This was one of Aflac’s early TV commercials, which featured an obnoxious white duck quaking “Aflaaaac” several times throughout the commercial. The little-known business soon became a household name. Aflac’s stagnant US sales doubled between 1999 and 2003.

Recently (March 2022), Amos told The Wall Street Journal that leading a company always involves taking risks. He said, “I like to manage risks [since] everything we do is risk related. [If you avoid risks] you are really not taking a broad enough perspective for a company to succeed.”

But, he said, “Never risk a lot for a little.” Now over 70, Amos says this is a principle by which he lives every day of his life—Never risk a lot for a little (Joann Lublin, “The Aflac CEO Who Ruffled Feathers With His Duck Ads,” The Wall Street Journal, 3-19-22; www.PreachingToday.com).

Life is full of risks, which require a certain amount of faith. It certainly takes faith to serve and follow Jesus, especially these days when our culture has become more hostile to Christian values. However, with Jesus you never have to worry about risking a lot for a little, because He always gives back more than you put in.

The question is How do you gain enough faith to risk following Jesus? How do you acquire enough confidence to take a chance on Christ? Well, if you have your Bibles, I invite you to turn with me to John 4, John 4, where we see how a government official came to trust Jesus also in a culture that was hostile to Him.

John 4:43-45 After the two days he departed for Galilee. (For Jesus himself had testified that a prophet has no honor in his own hometown.) So when he came to Galilee, the Galileans welcomed him, having seen all that he had done in Jerusalem at the feast. For they too had gone to the feast (ESV).

Jesus has just returned to his hometown area from the Passover feast in Jerusalem. There, he drove out the merchants in the temple, which turned the Jewish leaders against Him. Then He passed through Samaria and spent two days in a place filled with people the Jewish people despised. As a result, His own countrymen loathed Him, except for some vulgar Galileans. They saw what Jesus had done at the festival in Jerusalem and they liked it, so they welcomed Him home.

These Galileans had a show-me faith. They believed what they saw. And if that’s where you have to start in your faith, then start there.

BELIEVE WHAT YOU SEE.

Trust in tangible realities. Depend on what you observe to be true. Just make sure you really see what’s there, not just what you want to see.

Kevin Ashton, in his book How to Fly a Horse, describes a study in which researchers put a clown on a unicycle in the path of pedestrians. Then the researchers asked people who walked past the clown if they had noticed anything unusual. Everybody saw him unless they were on their cell phone. Three out of every four people who had been using their phone did not see the clown. They looked back in astonishment, unable to believe they had missed him. They had looked straight at him but had not registered his presence (Kevin Ashton, How to Fly a Horse, Doubleday, 2015, page 97; www.PreachingToday.com).

It’s like my mom used to say: You can’t see for looking.

Please, don’t be so locked into your naturalistic assumptions that you completely miss the supernatural. See the supernatural in a beautiful sunset. See the supernatural in a pretty flower. See the supernatural in the changed lives of those who put their trust in Christ.

H. G. Wells, who wrote The War of the Worlds, once wrote a short story called The Country of the Blind. It's about an inaccessible, luxurious valley in Ecuador where, due to a strange disease, everyone is blind. After 15 generations of this blindness there was no recollection of sight or color or the outside world at all. Finally, a man from the outside—a man who could see—literally fell into their midst. He had fallen off a high cliff and survived, only to stumble into their forgotten country.

When he realized that everyone else was blind, he remembered the old adage: “In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” Wells writes:

He tried at first on several occasions to tell them of sight. “Look you here, you people,” he said. “There are things you do not understand in me.” Once or twice one or two of them attended to him; they sat with faces downcast and ears turned intelligently towards him, and he did his best to tell them what it was to see.