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Content type: Sermon Poem / Prayer Service / Tribute Incomplete Biography
Body: Ephesians 1:17-19 I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better. I pray also that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and his incomparably great power for us who believe. That power is like the working of his mighty strength. In the 1999 film, The Matrix, a tall black man dressed all in black, Morpheus, carries the aura of a spiritual master. The younger man, Neo, trying his best to conceal the fact that he is frightened and uncertain, might become his disciple. It all depends on a decision. Morpheus is trying to convince Neo that there is much more to life than what meets his eye on an everyday basis. Now, he has come to a crossroads. Morpheus gives Neo a choice. He says, and I quote, “This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill – the story ends, you wake up in your bed and you believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill – you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.” If you have seen the movie, you know that Neo chooses the red pill. He wants to see what he has been missing. Wikipedia states this about the “Red pill and Blue pill”. The red pill and blue pill represent a choice between the willingness to learn a potentially unsettling or life-changing truth by taking the red pill or remaining in the contented experience of ordinary reality with the blue pill. The terms originate from the 1999 film, The Matrix. All of us here this morning can see. Some of us may need the aid of glasses and some of us just don’t see as well as we used to, but we can all still see the physical world around us with our eyes. However, what if I were to tell you that if we just look at the world through these eyes, we are settling for the blue pill? I want us to step out this morning in faith and take the red pill. Let’s see through a completely different set of eyes that God has made available to us, let’s open the eyes of our heart. This morning, I want us to allow the Holy Spirit to explain to us through the word of God what it means to open the eyes of our hearts. Before we go any further, let’s ask the Lord for His help with our spiritual vision. Almighty God, we gather this morning to worship and praise You and Your greatness. Lord, we ask You this morning to open the eyes of our hearts. We want to see You; we want to experience You! You tell us through Your word that when we gather together in Your name that whatever we ask we will be given and this morning we ask that You reveal to us what it means to open the eyes of our hearts and that these eyes may be enlightened in order that we may know the hope to which You have called us, the riches of Your glorious inheritance, and Your incomparably great power for us who believe. In the name of Jesus we pray, Amen. What Does It Mean? We all have an idea of the difference between book smarts and street smarts. When God tells us to open the eyes of our hearts, he is basically saying that book smarts are only part of the equation when it comes to knowing Him. Paul, right after praying for the Spirit of wisdom and revelation to be given to the believers, adds that he hopes that the eyes of our hearts would be enlightened as well. What does he mean by this? Well, how do most of us get our information about God? We learn about Him by reading in His Word. We learn about his attributes. We learn about his nature. We learn about his character. By reading God’s word, we can know a lot about God, but we cannot move beyond book smarts if we only get to know Him through His Word. We must also experience Him. Let’s all pretend that we are single for a few minutes. Now, there are about 50 million websites which we can go on to find a person to date. Let’s say we go on one of those sites and we find several people we are interested in because of what they have written in their profile. How many of you would immediately go and marry the person who had the best written profile? I don’t think any of us would. We still need to spend time with the person and get to know them before we can truly decide that we love them. The same is true with God. We can’t truly grow to love Him just by reading about Him in His Word. It should intrigue us to read about his miraculous and loving nature, but we can only fall in love with Him by starting a relationship with Him and having our own personal interaction with Him. That’s what we do when we open the eyes of our hearts. We move beyond seeing Him only through our physical eyes by reading and learning about Him through the Bible and we see Him for who He truly is – a loving God who wants a love relationship with us that moves beyond knowledge. Pastor J. David Hoke put it this way. “It is much like music, or a sunset, or a delicious dinner. You can represent these things logically and analytically if you so choose. A musical score, for instance, is the mathematical representation for music. A marvelous concerto or symphony can be represented by the notes on a page. Or you can represent music by means of an audio scope where you can analyze the varying wavelengths of sound. But this is not experiencing music. Looking at notes on a page doesn’t thrill you like being surrounded by a full orchestra soaring to the heights. Likewise, you can describe color mathematically. But you must see color to really know how red looks. You can describe taste anatomically. You can describe the chemical reactions which occur when we bite into a lemon. But you will never experience the pungent sour taste of a lemon until you bite into one yourself. We can describe God theologically. We can list His attributes and describe His work in creation and redemption. But unless we experience God ourselves, we will never truly know Him. ‘Taste and see that the Lord is good,’ says Psalm 34:8.” Paul is saying that we need to really experience the Lord’s presence. If you were hungry, would a picture of a thick and juicy steak satisfy you? Would the steak itself satisfy you if you never took a bite? No. If we want to satisfy our hunger, we must eat the steak if we truly want to know what it is like. So, if we are to hunger and thirst after God, we need to do more than just know about Him. We must open the eyes of our hearts to see and know Him more. What can we see when we do this? Paul tells us. - The hope to which he has called us. Have you ever become discouraged in your Christian walk? Have you questioned why you are even walking with God at times? Have you ever thought about giving up on God? I think that most of us have at some point or another in our lives. Why is that? It’s because the Christian life is tough. It is not an easy road all the time. In Romans 5:2-5 we are given a great teaching. It states, “And we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance, perseverance, character, and character, hope. And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.” We all want hope in our lives. Hope is a wonderful thing. In fact, it is in the top three with faith and love of the best things in the world. The problem is that we cannot just get hope. According to the Scripture, we must go through suffering, perseverance, and character building until we can get hope. The problems we see when we go through trials and hard times is that we often only look at them with our physical eyes. And, when we do that, we cannot see past our current situation and the circumstances going on in our lives. But what happens when we open the eyes of our heart? Opening the eyes of our heart is the equivalent of experiencing God in a personal relationship. When we see Him in this way, we know that we have a loving God on our side that is looking out for our good. We remember what the Scripture says about going through tough times in order to get hope. We have trust and love for God that allows us to accept His plan no matter what it is because we know that He truly loves us. - The riches of our glorious inheritance. Have you ever tried telling someone how wonderful, or what a place is like? It is almost impossible. I saw many pictures and read about the Amazons and heard the stories of those who had been there before, but they did not do justice to actually going there myself and seeing it and experiencing it firsthand. The same is true of heaven. We will never know how glorious it is until we experience it ourselves. We will not get to do that until we die and go there. However, when we live in the way that we are meant to by having a relationship with Jesus Christ, we can begin to get a glimpse of what heaven will be like. We hear about the streets of gold and the mansions, but what is going to be the best part of heaven? It’s going to be the presence of God. So, if we open the eyes of our hearts and see Him in His glory here on earth, we are going to unlock a little bit of what God has promised us in the end. And, when we begin to see how great our inheritance is going to be, we will do two things. We will want to strive to please God even more because we will want to do all we can to get there, and we will want to tell everyone how great it is going to be. That will cause us to witness as never before. When the church acts like the true church, it is like a little slice of heaven. We experience true friendship and brotherhood. We experience joy by doing His work. We get to know Him more and more every day. And, in so doing, we begin to see, through our spiritual eyes, the glory that is heaven. But we must open the eyes of our heart to truly experience it. - His incomparable great power. As we spend intimate time with God, He will begin to reveal more and more about himself to us. We will be tuned in to His plan and we will begin to see where He is working and what He is doing. With our own eyes, we can only see what is in front of us and we have to guess where God is working. When we open the eyes of our hearts, He shows us where He is working, and we can go there. And, where God is working, there are miracles and power. So, when we go there, we will experience these things as well. Our physical eyes cannot see God’s plan and God’s will. Only our spiritual eyes can do that. So, if we want to see His incomparable great power, we must spend time with Him so He can reveal to us where He is at work, and we can go there with Him. How Can We Take the Red Pill? So, do you want to see more? Do you want the red pill or are you satisfied with the blue pill? Do you want to see more than what your physical eyes can see, or are you satisfied with the way things are? If you want more, you must ask for it. When Paul talks about having the eyes of our heart enlightened, he does it in a prayer. He states, “I keep asking that God…the glorious Father, may give.” Only God can open these eyes. We cannot do it on our own. Think about Saul’s conversion. He was persecuting Christians, and then, on the road to Damascus, his physical sight was taken from him. But, after an encounter with the Lord, his physical sight was restored, and he was given a new spiritual sight as well. So, if you want to see in a way far beyond what your eyes can see, you must keep asking God for it until He grants it. And, in the meantime, you must continue to get to know Him better. But only part of this comes through reading the Word. The rest comes from you entering into a personal relationship with Him in which you experience God. After taking the red pill, Neo turns to Morpheus and asks, “Why do my eyes hurt?” And, Morpheus responds, “It’s because you have never used them before.” Sadly, I think many of us are guilty of the same thing. We take in all the sights with our physical eyes, and we neglect to use the eyes of the heart. And because of it, we are missing the bigger picture that God wants us to see. We need more than intellectual understanding. We need to really see. We need to see the hope to which He has called us. We need to see the riches of our glorious inheritance. We need to see His incomparable great power. We need to step out in faith, take the red pill, and get to know God in a more intimate way than we ever have before. Will you do that this morning?
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