March 28, 2012
Repairs Done Here
The marquee at a local home decorating business reads, ‘Blind Repair’.
Actually, I think the sentiments would be more fitting if they were displayed
on the church marquee. Reading from the scroll of Isaiah the prophet Jesus
said, “The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to
proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to
release the oppressed…” (Luke 4:18 NIV)
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1 comment:
Gail;
-----Life is very complex. Yet, one of love’s basic duties is remaining faithful to the sense in which a person is speaking. Surely some churches operate quickly to repair blindness whenever eyes to see begin seeing what there actually is to see. Some churches preach social salvation instead of individual submission to the Lord. Some empty Christ of His Godhood. Others pour grace into the dirt and reunite desperate souls with cold demands of obedience to law. In fact, I’ll bet if you could think up any critical error there is a church somewhere teaching it. For churches are merely collections of people having their basic interests subjected to common themes. And for a Deceiver greedy to fill his company with the gullible, any idea other than the truth will suffice for keeping blindness in good repair.
-----We must be cautious because there is a little bit of blind repair going on in every church. Nobody is perfected in deed, feeling, or thought until the day the Lord takes him home through death or rapture. Therefore the supply of tools and materials for blind maintenance comes from the penchant of the individual human heart to do its own little projects of keeping blindness in good repair. It just gets worse by people’s drive to aggregate and pool interests even if those interests seem to pool from a common stream of subtle deceit.
-----But you are not talking in the sense of maintaining blindness. You are not talking about the churches that do this well. I only went there to show how tricky blind repair can be. Indeed we are called into the community of believers for the various and many necessities that community provides, including blind repair. Although these necessities are provided through that community, they are not ultimately provided by it. Not in The Church. The Lord through His Spirit abides in each person to influence each to produce a particular goodness into the community of believers. Vision begins to be restored from such proper functioning even in its least.
-----Like your favorite optometrist hangs a testing pattern on his office wall, the church in the sense of which you speak is also the hanging of a testing pattern upon a wall. The Word of God is as printed in black and white as are the neat rows of the optometrist’s chart. Like the answering of the optometrist's test is giving the correct sense of a letter by the sight of the letter until the mind can no longer make sense of what the eyes see, so the test in the church is faithfulness to the sense the Word itself makes of a principle, principle by principle, until the senses we more desire begin to blur those He rather means. At that point the Holy Spirit can straighten and scrub and stitch until once again the sense being made is the sense the Lord would have, if of course, we would have it. The sight repaired is the genuineness of our love allowing Him to make in us His own sense of His own Word.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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