Work In You

Jesus answered, "It was neither that this man sinned, nor his parents; but it was so that the works of God might be displayed in him. We must work the works of Him who sent Me as long as it is day; night is coming when no one can work." (John 9:3-4)

Jesus was not going to use this man to work on his life; Jesus was saying here that the works of God would be seen in this man. What a difference!

How often do we mistakenly think that God is wanting to work on us, maybe to help us change our bad habits, to make us look good and become a nice Christian. So we set about seeking to access God's strength to quit doing the things we think are sinful and may even join up with a group of people who are very skilled in keeping up appearances. We learn all the techniques of how to keep up the appearance of being a good Christian man or woman; we learn the rules, the traditions, the formulas and even how to perform routines that we call worship. But all the while our hearts are shrinking under a heavy load of fear or guilt or may be crusting over with pride. Our spiritual eyes are oblivious to the life-charged scenes of a reality that is all around us but inaccessible to our awareness.

The religion of Jesus is a heart-oriented religion. We have largely obscured that truth by emphasizing the external aspects that result from a genuine heart change and go about trying to produce those external symptoms by trying to achieve them directly without the real cause in place. But as we do this our hearts wither and we hide while the pain we feel deep inside is ignored and we desperately seek ever more earnestly to force our lives to comply with the requirements of God's kingdom.

This blind man may have learned some amazing techniques for navigating his way around town and may have developed unusual keenness in some of his others senses to compensate for his blindness. He may have even become so adept at getting around efficiently that at times he might have even fooled some who were unaware of his condition into not realizing that he was blind. Just so, no amount of skills learned or knowledge amassed about religious subjects can produce the kind of sight that is needed to fully function as we were designed.

Blindness will always prevent one from ever even coming close to what a person can do effortlessly if they could just receive the gift of sight. A person who can see clearly does not have to think about all sorts of alternatives and live in constant fear of unseen dangers around them. With healthy sight they can move with confidence and not worry at all about stumbling over obstacles in their path. And far more than that, they have the incredible privilege of enjoying all the rich benefits of color and movement and dimension that one is aware of only if they have at some point enjoyed the gift of sight.

Jesus was not intending on offering this man a very advanced method of compensation for his blindness that would give him advantages over every other blind person on earth. Jesus wanted to do a work on the inside, to literally repair or provide what was missing in his head that had prevented him from enjoying all the emotions and the freedom that comes from having normal eyes. Rather than providing this man with insight as to what was meant by the names of colors or more effective descriptions of the world around him, Jesus wanted to give him the ability that God had intended for all humans to have but that had been deprived of him when he was born.

Of course the real issue that Jesus was trying to bring to people's attention was the reality that all of us are just as blind spiritually as this man was physically. This man had been blind all of his life so he had absolutely no clue as to what people meant when they talked about colors or any number of other subjects that most of us take for granted. Unless a person has experienced such a dramatic transition as this man did, they cannot begin to imagine the intensity and shock of passing from total darkness into the full tapestry of sensory joy available from so many things that most people take for granted.

The only way this could happen for this man was for Jesus to provide miraculous healing in providing sight from the inside for him. Additionally, there was nothing this man could do to earn this gift from Jesus. All he could do was to accept what Jesus did for him and then to cooperate with the very simple but strange instructions that Jesus gave him to fulfill his healing. But the most important thing that Jesus emphasized here was that the real work that had to take place was inside. And that work could not originate from human effort but had to be God's work.

...so that the works of God might be displayed in him.

But interestingly, the work Jesus may have had in mind was even more dramatic than his physical healing from blindness. As the rest of this story unfolds I see a compelling demonstration of this man's witness for God that is rarely seen in anywhere. This man's spiritual boldness is a powerful and dramatic testimony for Jesus and it disrupts the religious establishment so thoroughly that nothing is ever the same again. It gets both Jesus and this man's family in big trouble with the authorities and ends up getting himself kicked out of church in the process. But the privilege this man has of entering into fellowship with the Son of God personally is worth every minute of it and far more.

So then, my beloved, just as you have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure. (Philippians 2:12-13)