When my oldest son was in third grade, his school did a routine vision screening and we discovered that he was near-sighted, the issue being significant enough that it could certainly potentially effect his learning, as at that grade-level, teachers do a lot of writing on the blackboard.

We scheduled an appointment with the optometrist, chose some nice, durable frames, and waited for the new glasses to come in.  When we drove over the next week to pick them up, and my baby put his glasses on, he smiled, but when we walked outside and he looked out across the vast parking area, and the road beyond it, and the other shopping centar across the road, his smile lit up like the sun!  Oh, my mother-heart just squeezed and I got all choked up.  There was a vast difference in “realizing his vision was impaired” and watching him see things “at a distance” clearly for the first time!  Poor kid, and he’d been playing Little League and soccer, bless his heart!  His delight was much the same when he got his first pair of contacts and things were even sharper for him!

It made me think about the Saved verses the Unsaved.  The Bible tells us that we humans, before we meet Jesus, suffer from spiritual blindness. (2 Corinthians 4: 3–4, Acts 28:26-27, I Corinthians 2:14)  When one is blind, there is no way for a person to truly comprehend just what he is not seeing.  Ask any blind person: “do you feel cheated, not being able to see?” and like as not, they will say “well, I can’t really miss what I never had”.  Ouch!

Well, some years later as I advanced to “middle-ager” and my own eyes starting going bad, I whined in frustration one day “oh, I just WISH I could SEE!  I remember when I had 20/20 vision!”  (A bit of hyperbolic drama, I know. I was being a brat!)  My son very softly said “I’ve never had 20/20 vision”

<*gulp*>

“Um, it’s me Lord, uh,  what I meant to say was, er, thanks for forty-some years of 20/20 vision.  I’m sorry I took it for granted”.

Before we were saved, we didn’t even know we needed to be.   A very gracious Heavenly Father lovingly sent someone across our path to change that fact.  Be it an exhausted single mom who decided turning us to the nearby church was worth an hour and a half of peace and quiet on a Sunday morning, or a God-fearing-as-long-as-you-are-living-under-my-roof-you-WILL-go-to-church parent,  or a kindly neighbor, an outspoken Christian teacher, or a bum on the street.  Before that happened, we were blind.  And yet, how many of us take our Salvation for granted, now that we’ve “had it a while”?

How many of us are more concerned with getting our way and our say in the runnings of our church, more wrapped up in the next big class/drama/or big-name-speaker/band-who’ll-draw-them-in that we are going to bring in, and how many members we might steal from that confounded ________________  (fill in the blank) church across the street, than in how many lost, unchurched souls we give the gospel to?

We are living in very evil days,and we must redeem the time.  The age of grace is almost completely up.  If there ever was a time for “toeing the line” it is now.  Too many professing Christians are indistinguishable from the lost in the world.  We stopped upholding the truth, authority and purity of Scripture, and many first convinced themselves and went on to convince others, that the Bible is not relevent or necessary in order to have “church”.  Their “bands” were thrown off, and the church is full of raging heathens, pursuing and teaching “vain imaginings”.

From whom will the lost hear the truth?

They won’t!  We are to go to them.  Before we do, though, we must be sure we “have the truth” in these perilous times!