A RECIPE FOR BLINDNESS (2 OF 10)
by Craig Smith
Scripture: John 7:44, John 8:20
This content is part of a series.
A Recipe For Blindness (2 of 10)
Series: Real Jesus
Craig Smith
John 7: 44- 8:20
Big Idea: Unless we work hard to keep our eyes open, we will default to spiritual blindness and miss what God is doing.
I. Introduction
Welcome to Mission Hills for week number two of our Real Jesus series. I hope you were able to join us last week for the series launch, but just in case you weren't, let me catch you up real quick. Last week we looked at a claim that Jesu made that kicked off a firestorm of controversy. And that claim was that: Jesus says he can satisfy our deepest longings and make us agents of transformative hope. It's not just that Jesus can give each of us what we most need, but he can make each of us agents of hope who can join God in his work of transforming lives through the hope we've found in Christ. And we asked the question, ''do you believe that?'' there's only three ways to answer: ''yes'', ''no'' and ''I don't know''.
Today, we're going to be looking at a group of people whose answer was ''no.'' They didn't believe it. They didn't believe Jesus was who he said he was or that he could do what he said he could do. But what we're going to see is that they didn't arrive at that conclusion by considering the evidence. Instead, they assumed that conclusion and shut themselves off to the evidence.
What John gives us in his description of these people is a kind of recipe for spiritual blindness. We're actually going to encounter four ingredients that produce a spiritual blindness that can keep us from seeing truth.
And I think it's important for all of us to understand what these ingredients are, because the truth is that spiritual blindness is not the exception, it is the norm. In fact, I believe that, unless we're on guard against it, spiritual blindness will be our default setting. I think that's true for non-believers, but I think, even for believers, there's this old habit of spiritual blindness that we can so easily return to if we'r ...
Series: Real Jesus
Craig Smith
John 7: 44- 8:20
Big Idea: Unless we work hard to keep our eyes open, we will default to spiritual blindness and miss what God is doing.
I. Introduction
Welcome to Mission Hills for week number two of our Real Jesus series. I hope you were able to join us last week for the series launch, but just in case you weren't, let me catch you up real quick. Last week we looked at a claim that Jesu made that kicked off a firestorm of controversy. And that claim was that: Jesus says he can satisfy our deepest longings and make us agents of transformative hope. It's not just that Jesus can give each of us what we most need, but he can make each of us agents of hope who can join God in his work of transforming lives through the hope we've found in Christ. And we asked the question, ''do you believe that?'' there's only three ways to answer: ''yes'', ''no'' and ''I don't know''.
Today, we're going to be looking at a group of people whose answer was ''no.'' They didn't believe it. They didn't believe Jesus was who he said he was or that he could do what he said he could do. But what we're going to see is that they didn't arrive at that conclusion by considering the evidence. Instead, they assumed that conclusion and shut themselves off to the evidence.
What John gives us in his description of these people is a kind of recipe for spiritual blindness. We're actually going to encounter four ingredients that produce a spiritual blindness that can keep us from seeing truth.
And I think it's important for all of us to understand what these ingredients are, because the truth is that spiritual blindness is not the exception, it is the norm. In fact, I believe that, unless we're on guard against it, spiritual blindness will be our default setting. I think that's true for non-believers, but I think, even for believers, there's this old habit of spiritual blindness that we can so easily return to if we'r ...
There are 19128 characters in the full content. This excerpt only shows a 2000 character sample of the full content.
Price: $5.99 or 1 credit
