John 10 - The Blind Man and The Lost Sheep

 

I’ve been reading through John 10 recently. I find it such an interesting chapter, especially because it’s clearly talking about the man healed of blindness in John 9, but few commentators say anything about this.

What did the blind man have to do to meet Christ? What did he have to do to earn it? Nothing. He sat there with his problem and Jesus came and rescued him… Then the religious people were bent on making him their disciples instead of Jesus’s disciple. In John 10 Jesus spends a great deal of time explaining why this happened to the pharisees.

A couple interesting things stuck out to me here…

• The pharisees weren’t interested really in going out and finding lost sheep. They had the attitude that sheep would come to them.

• The blind man instantly followed Jesus, and knew something wasn’t right about how the Pharisees were doing things. He didn’t join them but rather went back out on the street. How many people are genuine followers of Jesus but they don’t fit the church mold and have decided to stay on the streets?

• Jesus chose the blind man, but it was the blind man’s choice to stand up to the Pharisees. Jesus almost always initiates - our decision is what we’ll do with that… and this unlikely witness was the strongest one in the gospel against the pharisees!

• Jesus made his entire ministry about the One. The one person, the one woman, the one blind man… He treated everyone individually and “calls them by name”. The Pharisees thought in general and were making decisions for the crowd, often worrying what the crowd thought.

Limits to Self-actualization

 

Being in a place where everyone is on a spiritual journey has got me thinking about a lot of things. I don’t want to discourage anything if it IS God, but I want to talk about the limits I’ve experienced to finding truth internally…

My own personal salvation experience. I went on a 5 day fast to find truth - didn’t go to class, just read about Islam, Hinduism, Creationism etc… and on the 4th day I woke up knowing Jesus was Lord. That bothered me so much. Here I was trying to intellectually prove my faith, and I wanted to come out of that time knowing the truth by the strength of my own intellect. But it didn’t happen that way. I didn’t know why I knew, and I didn’t see any proof that was truly the right way to go until after I had been following Christ for almost a year.

I was so bothered when I couldn’t tell people why I believed. And at some level I was bothered because the truth seemed so vanilla… Everyone believes this stuff, so what was special about it? However where I really saw difference was in the action. Yes everyone believes it but few people act on scripture. Few people take the Bible and go look in it for how they should act or what they should do. And therein lies the power.

I have been epically wrong about who I am. Dating sites are a great idea. There’s just one problem… When asked what people want in a future spouse and then polled after they get married, their results are extremely different. It turns out most of us really have no clue what we want in a life partner until it comes along.

I can say the same thing for who I am. I’ve known some things about who I am but have been horribly wrong about others. I thought I was a technical person - you give me a project, I’ll get it done fast and I’ll get it done well. I thought I was a programmer. I thought I was a specialist.I was really frustrated at God when I got kicked out of Peniel - suddenly I had to lead an organization instead of just take orders. That wasn’t me - I hated it.

Or was it? I had never seen myself as a leader, even though everyone around me had. However, the saving grace was that I wasn’t making decisions based on who I was but based on what God said. So I ended up in the right place even when I was completely wrong about who God made me to be.

Identity is in Relationships. This should be a no-brainer but it isn’t… Our most key identities in life are in our relationships… Brother, husband, father, leader, friend, colleague. So much of who we are is actually tied to the people in our lives and our relationships to them. If that is the case, how can we really discover who we are just by looking inside?

Jesus says purpose comes when you lose your life. When you put others first, then you find out why you were created. This is super provable… Everyone else is telling you to do what feels good, treat yourself, live for the moment etc. Jesus says to do the opposite - die to yourself and you’ll find life. Do one or the other for a year then see how you feel afterwards!