When blind men suddenly see, questions get raised. ‘Where is our neighbour and what have you
done with him?’
John 9:
8 His neighbours and those who had formerly
seen him begging asked, “Isn’t this the same man who used to sit and
beg?” 9 Some
claimed that he was.
Others said, “No, he only looks like him.”
But he himself insisted, “I am the man.”
When God touches a life deeply there is a transforming
effect that may puzzle some. We may expect people to be the way they always
were. If they change, we might grow suspicious and doubt their authenticity.
As people debated over the identity of this man, he had to
chime in and insist that it really was him.
John 9:
10 “How then were your eyes opened?” they
asked.
11 He replied, “The man they call Jesus made
some mud and put it on my eyes. He told me to go to Siloam and wash. So I went
and washed, and then I could see.”
12 “Where is this man?” they asked him.
“I don’t know,” he said.
New creation does not always give us the answer to every
question. He had only met Jesus once and now had experienced a miracle. When
pressed with further questions, the man did not know where to find Jesus. There
is no demand for immediate discipleship in the generosity of the Master’s
touch.
All he knew was that Jesus was the initiator. He was not
asked to become a disciple at this point, but was left with an indelible
impression-- a bewildered, first-time seer.
John Newton wrote the hymn ‘Amazing Grace’. When he wrote
that line ‘saved a wretch like me’,
was he using poetic license or was he really a wretch? Though raised in a
Christian home, John became a sailor and lived a very, sinful life. During one
particular ocean voyage on a slave ship, a storm arose.
Under great conviction, He
converted during the storm, though he admitted later, "I cannot consider
myself to have been a believer, in the full sense of the word."
Newton then served as
a mate and then as captain of a number of slave ships, hoping as a Christian to
restrain the worst excesses of the slave trade, "and promoting the life of
God in the soul" of both his crew and his African cargo.
After leaving the sea
for an office job in 1755, Newton held Bible studies in his Liverpool home. Influenced
by both the Wesleys and George Whitefield, he adopted mild Calvinist views and
became increasingly disgusted with the slave trade and his role in it. He quit,
was ordained into the Anglican ministry, and in 1764 took a parish in Olney in
Buckinghamshire.
In 1787 Newton
wrote Thoughts Upon the African
Slave Trade to help William Wilberforce's campaign to end the
practice—"a business at which my heart now shudders," he wrote.
Recollection of that chapter in his life never left him, and in his old age,
when it was suggested that the increasingly feeble Newton retire, he replied,
"I cannot stop. What? Shall the old African blasphemer stop while he can
speak?"[1]
You may not know much about Jesus when you first begin, but
you sure know when He has touched you. You know what happened, but may have no
clue on how or why it has happened. If it happens to you, hold on to your
experience.
Do not let people talk you out it. There are some that would
insist that you must still be blind. There is no way that you can see.
No one knows better than you what you have experienced at
the hands of God. Hold on to the truth of what has happened to you.
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