When Bill Reed’s family celebrated his 66th birthday, they gave him something very special: a new pair of eyes. You see, Bill was colorblind. To him, the world around him existed in shades of gray and muddy brown. But thanks to a company called EnChroma, that was about to change. EnChroma manufactures glasses that use a special technology that filters out small slices of the light spectrum in their lenses, effectively correcting colorblindness.
While that might sound too good to be true, Bill’s reaction is all the proof you need that it works. A large, gruff man who was once a competitive bodybuilder, he fell silent the instant he began to see what he’d been missing, and slowly started to cry tears of joy as he looked at the colors of the trees, flowers, and sky around him for the first time. As he marveled, his daughter said something that summed up the whole scene quite well: “Papa, now you can see with our eyes.”
It’s a touching story. But as remarkable as it is, it’s nothing compared to the gift of “new eyes” that we’re offered in Christ. Jesus began his earthly ministry by quoting from the prophet Isaiah:
“The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he anointed me to proclaims good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free” (Luke 4:18 NIV).
While Jesus did restore sight to the blind during his earthly ministry, there’s another meaning at work here as well. Christ came to enable us to “see” God clearly and truly in him so that we might come to love his ways, and long to see his rule and reign come in fullness over all the earth. As we come to know and put our faith in God and his coming kingdom, we are given new sight, spiritual sight to see the world through the eyes of Christ.
When we do, it reveals beauty where we never would have noticed it before. We also come to see the desperate need of all to receive forgiveness and hope and put our lives in his hands and come under his new management. We’ll see the need to live by the hope that the merciful judge of the universe will bring about his righteousness and in the end make all things right.
I’m Joseph Tkach, speaking of LIFE.
