Sermon Tone Analysis

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Prayer- (anyone approaching this text need realize their own desire to appear

ill- vanity glasses (eye glasses with no lens)

Summary:

I. Vanity Glasses, A Trendy Blindness

Q.

Why Can't They See? A. Because They Refuse to Look (Subjectively)

“A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word 'darkness' on the walls of his cell.”

― C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

Quote: "none so blind as those who refuse to see"

none so blind as those who refuse to see"

A. "Not the first rodeo" (many examples of refusal to see up to this point):

This marks the fourth time they asked for a sign (; ; ; ) The First Sign: Turning Water into Wine() The Second Sign: Healing an Official's Son () The Third Sign: Healing the Sick () The Fourth Sign: Feeding of the 5,000note: He actually fed the 4,000 just before this event also

B. "Partners in Pretension" (Pharisees and Sadducees)

usually enemies, partnered against Jesussome translations = "Hypocrites" () define hypocriteExposing Their Hypocrisy by observing their confident Meteorology ()

C. Insufficiency of signs to convince a pretentious heart

Biblical Illustration: parable of Rich man and Lazarus () in very next verses, Jesus warns of their leaven

D. Why this matters to you:

if you are an unbeliever

if you are a believer, you still must consider what, whom, and why you have believed and what it determines about how you should live.

Disclaimer: There is such a thing as "foolish faith"

It never asks what or whom it is believing in or why

it cannot be qualified beyond subjective feelings or wishful-ness

E. A Personal Honesty

C.S. Lewis on his conversion: “You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet.

That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me.

In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.

I did not then see what is now the most shining and obvious thing; the Divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms.

The Prodigal Son at least walked home on his own feet.

But who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape?

The words “compelle intrare,” compel them to come in, have been so abused be wicked men that we shudder at them; but, properly understood, they plumb the depth of the Divine mercy.

The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.”―

C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life

II.

Evil Eye of Adultery

Why Don't They Want to Look?

it would men that they would have to change their minds (repent) They think they find more joy in looking at and imagining something else

A. Pretension characteristic of adultery ()

Adultery demands that an adulterer act in pretentiously, pretending to feel the same way and act the same way while something different has touched their emotions and desires.

There is a sense in which it may be said that we commit a type of self-adultery when we develop a type of dishonesty with ourselves, when we love from within something different than we portray ourselves to seek without.

David's greatest moment of getting right with God (incidentally after an adulterous affair) involved a type of honesty before God and with himself ()

Illustration- thinkers preceding atheists were anti-theists and they were more honest about their motives

B. God feels the violation, Jesus Bothered Deeply ()

Jesus was not only bothered by those who followed Him for the wrong reasons (benefits of loaves and fishes etc), but also by those who refused to follow Him for the wrong reasons.

We cannot easily determine those things that their generation should have recognized as signs but we can interpret by Jesus' response that they carried certain expectations.

We must also ask ourselves if we are just as hard-hearted and pretentious.

C. Heart of the Matter: Beware of the Leaven of the Pharisees ()

What could they possibly like looking at better than the promised Messiah?enjoyment of praiseEnjoyment of identity as the people of GodGod came taught, healed, helped and delivered even the Gentiles and that by dying

D. What About Me/Us?

Have we believed in such a way that our lives have not only been changed but are also continuing to changeAm I still looking for Joy in something or someone else

“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God.

That is the one thing we must not say.

A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher.

He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell.

You must make your choice.

Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse.

You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher.

He has not left that open to us.

He did not intend to.” ― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

III.

Blessedness of Believing to See ()

It is Not Good to Have Blindness From A Hard Heart,

Unfortunately, this narrative does not have a happy ending for the Pharisees and Sadducees, but it can for many of us.

Unbelievers can at least acknowledge

A. Promise of Blessedness ()

B. The Effectiveness of Faith Upon God Through His Word (; )

C. Greater Things to Come ()

D. What About Us?

Does anyone ever ask why He wants us to believe in the first place?There is a certain "I knew it!"

type of excitement to those who believe without seeing'“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” ― C.S. Lewis