| Good morning everyone, Our theme for this month: “Great thoughts from great Christians” Our Bible verse for today: “So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view.” 2 Corinthians 5:16 (NIV) Our thought for today: “See them through God’s eyes” I once heard Billy Graham make a comment about people which caused me to rethink how I see other people – especially other people whom I don’t like, or people who are engaged in sinful behavior. Billy said, “We have to learn to see people through God’s eyes.” What he meant is that God sees people not just as they are, but as they could be and as He wants them to be. When we start seeing people the way God sees them, it changes our perspective of them dramatically. He was basing that comment on the Apostle Paul’s words in 2 Corinthians 5:16 (above). Paul learned to stop looking at people just from a worldly point of view but to see them with spiritual eyes – not just as they are, but as they could be. Billy went on to note that Paul himself was an excellent example of that. When he was an unsaved Pharisee, Paul (then known as Saul), hated Christians – to the point that he hunted them down, had them imprisoned, and presided over their murders. But after Paul had his encounter with Jesus Christ and became a Christian himself, that same man now began seeing people through God’s eyes and he found that he had great love and compassion for all people. That lesson holds true about people who are easy to love, but it is especially true about those who are difficult to love. It was Jesus Himself who told us in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5:44 to “Love your enemies. Pray for those who persecute you.” By that Jesus didn’t mean that we were to approve of or accept the evil things our enemies do. Instead, He meant that we are to see them as people created by God and loved by God; people who, like Saul, can be converted and transformed if they would only come to faith in Christ. They are people Jesus died for, and we are to see them in that light. The great Christian writer C.S. Lewis once had something to say about this. In His book, “The Weight of Glory”, when writing about the fact that every individual is a spirit-being who will exist eternally, Lewis wrote, “It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree helping each other to one or the other of these destinations … There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.” Let’s make an effort to see people through God’s eyes – to see them as He seems them, as the person they could be, as a person He loves deeply and for whom Jesus died. God Bless, Pastor Jim |
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