Now I Can See

Thank you. My name is Mark, one of the pastors here. We're so glad that you're in church here today, and isn't it nice to have a little bit cooler weather than we had last weekend? Man, that was a bit of a scorcher. If you were here with us, it was quite balmy inside this room. But it reminds me, this week I was thinking about an epic heat wave that hit New York City in 1959. How many of you remember 1959? You don't have to answer that question. Some of you did here. They're proud of it. 1959. If you were in New York City in August of 1959, you would remember this heat wave. Every single fan and AC unit in the city was cranked to the max, especially in the high-rise apartments and office buildings. You can imagine how uncomfortable it would be to be 50, 60 or more stories up in the heat.

I imagine that the electrical meters could double as fans. They're spinning so quickly as they're providing the juice for all this electrical equipment that was not energy star rated at the time. And then after the sun went down, the city's power grid had simply had enough. It just went kaput, and much of Manhattan was plunged into darkness. And this was in the days before many of these buildings had backup exit lights. And so you can imagine to see now there are thousands of people trapped in these high-rises trying to stumble their way in utter darkness to find the exits, the hallways, and find themselves out on the street in the relative cool and calm.

This scenario is playing out over and over again as these panicked people try to get their way out of these buildings, except in one building. In one of those high-rises, there was no panic. There was no stress. Those people just got up and left the building like they always did because the major tenant in that particular building was the Guild for the Jewish Blind. No big deal. Not only did they just calmly exit the building, there were about 70 plus other sighted office workers in their building. They're just like, "Here, take my hand. I'll help you out." And I walked them right down onto the streets like, "Hey, no big deal." I love that story.

And today, we're gonna see something like that. As we wrap up our summer series, "Aha," we're gonna see a blind man in Scripture who's able to see what just about everyone around him cannot. And to be clear, only Jesus Christ can open our eyes and illuminate our hearts. But this blind guy, he's gonna be our guide today in how he responds to Jesus and some of the insights that he has. Because let's face it, we all have blind spots in various areas of our lives. Every single one of us, we have hurts and we have habits which lead to emotional, spiritual, relational hang-ups in our lives.

And the crazy thing about these things is that we can become so accustomed to them. We learn to live with them. We come to the point we don't even notice them. So again, we become blind to the things that are right there in our lives. My hope, my prayer today, is that we have room for yet another "aha" moment, that whether you are expecting it or not, you will walk out of this room today and say, "You know, I did not know I was blind in a particular area of my life, but now I can see." We're gonna dive into Mark's gospel. Yet again, if you've been paying attention, I've been camping out in Mark's gospel, well for one reason, because I just think Mark is an awesome name for a book of the Bible.

I mean, hate to put too fine a point on it, but there is no book of Adrian in the Bible. No book of Trent. You can't even open your Bible and say, "Please turn to the book of René." So it gives me great joy to once again say, "Please open your Bibles and find the book of Mark." Now kidding aside, the reason I've been focusing on Mark's gospel is that Mark's gospel has this "aha" quality to it. Mark loves to put the focus on when the disciples don't get it, when they don't understand. If you read through his gospel, most of the time the disciples are totally clueless, and Mark, he does not put a flattering light on them.

In fact, he loves to show when the unexpected person has the "aha," the person you least expected. He or she are the ones that tell you what you need to know. For instance, near the very end of Mark's gospel in chapter 15, a Roman centurion who has presumably participated in the execution of Jesus Christ, hours later he looks up at the dead body of Jesus on the cross, and he says, "Surely this man was the Son of God." Aha. Mark loves those moments because it's as if he's saying between the lines, "Hey, if a guy like that, in a moment like that, could see Jesus with greater clarity, could see the significance and the reality of who Jesus is, so can you." And so he loves these things, and you're gonna see that again in Mark 10.

I'm gonna invite you to open your Bibles. Mark 10, we're gonna be looking at verses 46 through 52, which is where we left off right before this last weekend, and if you missed last weekend, or you happen to fall asleep, you can go to our website, tlc.org, and you can try again. You can see last weekend's message, along with many, many, many others. They will be there for as long as there's an internet, or we keep the electric bill paid up. So, Mark 10, please follow along as I begin at verse 46.

"Then they reached Jericho, and as Jesus and his disciples left town, a large crowd followed him. A blind beggar named Bartimaeus, son of Timaeus, was sitting beside the road. When Bartimaeus heard that Jesus of Nazareth was nearby, he began to shout, 'Jesus, son of David, have mercy on me.'" Now, it's about a 15-mile walk from Jericho up to Jerusalem, and once Jesus arrives there, he will be crucified in less than a week, due in part to the fact that some of the people in that very crowd that are following him right now, they are going to turn on him, they're gonna become part of the mob who screams out, "Crucify him." But for the moment, they're all very enthusiastic.

Everyone's really stoked on Jesus, and there's this huge parade following him on this monumental trip up to Jerusalem. One of the people, though, one of the persons who does not anticipate making that journey is Bartimaeus. Bartimaeus is doing the only thing that people in his condition could do in those days to survive. He finds a high traffic area, plants himself down, and hopes to receive the spare change of people walking by. It's kind of interesting that Mark would point out that "Bar" to "maus" means "son of" to "maus." It's somewhat odd that he would do that because the prefix "bar," it's the Aramaic for "son of," you hear this in "bar mitzvah," right?

Presumably, his readers would know this better than we do, so why does he take this extra length of saying, "It's the son of to "maus," that's what Bartimaeus means? Well, Bible scholars think that Bartimaeus became a fixture in the early church, that he was known to some of Mark's readers, so Mark, in a sense, is giving him a shout-out, like, "You know this guy, you've seen him in your church, this is his story, this is for real," and that's a certainly a very plausible explanation.

I have another hunch, and you know, don't take this to the bank, but when I was studying this week, I discovered that "tameus" comes from the Hebrew, the root of "tameus" comes from the word "tame" in Hebrew, and "tame" means "unclean," it means "defiled" or "impure." I find that very ironic because that's exactly what the people around Bartimaeus would think about him or his parents. They would think, "Well, he's born blind," or "If you're born with any other kind of congenital disorder, it's basically because God is punishing you for some sin, God is punishing your parents." In fact, you see this very same assumption in John's gospel when the disciples encounter another blind person, and in John 9:2, they simply ask, "Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents that he was born blind?" They weren't being cruel, that's just how they thought, and Jesus will correct their perspective, by the way, but that was the going assumption.

So I wonder if Mark's just going, "Even his name, it rang in the ears of the people around him that he was cursed, that he was the son of uncleanliness, he was that much on the margins of his society." But however, and why ever Mark decides to do that, when Bartimaeus hears that Jesus is passing by, he shouts, "Jesus, son of David, have mercy on me," and what's surprising is that he uses that phrase, "Son of David," it's the only time you'll see this in Mark's gospel, that's a messianic title, that's akin to saying, "Messiah, have mercy on me." Now, prior to this, the only person to voice this to Jesus is Peter, when he says, "You are the Christ, you are the Messiah." And even just the disciples, the inside circle, they're just starting to comprehend that Jesus is the Messiah, and yet here's Bartimaeus, this blind guy on the outskirts of Jericho, he knows who Jesus is, amazing insight into the person of Jesus.

And not only that, but there's a tremendous urgency that he demonstrates here, he will not be thwarted in his desire to get to Jesus, despite some obstacles, because what happens when he yells this out, what all these enthusiastic followers of Jesus, how do they respond? Well, verse 48, "Be quiet!" Many of the people yelled at him, "Hey, you know, pipe down, quit yelling, don't you know we have a religious event happening right now? We got a program going on, you're getting in the way, dude, you know, pipe down." Does the compassion of these followers, does that just kind of strike you? I mean, it's amazing. It's such a good thing that that doesn't ever happen in our day, right? We don't have to worry about, I mean, do the followers of Jesus ever get in the way of people who are trying to get to Jesus himself? Does that ever happen? Yeah, it sadly does.

Some of you could tell horror stories about how followers of Jesus were an obstacle for you to get to him. Well, one of the more humorous examples of this, pastors love this in kind of a cringy way, but church signs are notorious for doing kind of this, right? Well-meaning folks, it's like, "Come, don't come, you know, we want you, we don't want you." And here's just some funny examples. I love this one, it says, "Hell, one way in, no way out, welcome!" I'm not quite sure what they intended to say there. How about this one? "Do you know what hell is? Come hear our preacher!" Along the same subject of the hot place, "Whoever stole our AC units, keep one. It is hot where you're going!" I think that happened last weekend in Santa Cruz, I'm not sure. But God loves you, by the way, just want you to know that.

This one, this is one of my favorites right here, "Jesus would so smack you in the head!" Okay, truth be told, every pastor wants to have at least one message called, "Jesus would so smack you in the head!" These people, they tried to sound compassionate, they really tried. I have to kind of think about where you put the emphasis on that. René showed this one several months ago, but it's worth repeating because I love all the categories, surfers, skateboarders, musicians, artists, vegetarians, the like. You're all going to hell, repent now, and I know the thing that's striking some of you is that with a few notable exceptions, this describes the TLC pastors right here. We've fallen into all those categories. Yeah, there better be a few exceptions there.

Well, this is the vibe that Bartimaeus is receiving from these followers. Jesus does not have time for you, dude. Go away, be quiet. But he only shouted louder, "Son of David, have mercy on me!" And so, they're going back and forth, the crowd's trying to muzzle him, and he just keeps turning up the amplitude in his voice, and the word that Mark uses here, when he starts crying out, it's the same word that Mark uses when Jesus is on the cross, and he cries out in a loud voice before giving up his spirit. It's a word that's related to the screech of a raven. It's a screech or a scream. It's not a pleasant sound. This man is literally screaming for Jesus, and I love this. This is such a great line. When Jesus heard him, he stopped.

He stopped. Because there's something about the persistent cry of faith that stops Jesus. That keeps you see over and over in the gospel. When Jesus hears the cry for mercy, it just stops him in his tracks, which is great news because, I mean, some of us here today, we're in difficult circumstances. You're struggling in your home, in your marriage, you're struggling with a family member, or again, some other kind of relationship. You're struggling in your own self because there are things that keep plaguing you, habits or addictions or whatever they are, and you wonder, "Will I ever be able to move on? Will life ever look different than it looks right now?" And Jesus loves to hear the cry for mercy.

I began this "Aha" series in June, and in that first message, one of the things that I talked about is that there's basically three possible answers to prayer, as far as I can tell. I don't know if you remember this, but those three answers were "Yes," "Wait," and "Maybe." No, it's not maybe. It's "No." "Yes," "Wait," and "No." As far as I can tell, that's about the three possible answers. Well, today, I want to give you three prayers that Jesus loves to say "Yes" to every single time, and the first one comes right from Bartimaeus, "Lord, have mercy." I mean, you can just know Jesus loves to say "Yes" to that because of His love and grace for us. And again, you see this over and over in the Gospel. There is incredible power and potential to simply saying "Lord, have mercy." It could change your life even today. It could change your life to just utter those three words.

Well, look what happens when they reach the ears of Jesus. It says, "When Jesus heard him, he stopped and said, 'Tell him to come here.'" So they called the blind men. Now, I want you to watch how quickly this crowd changes their tune. The crowd that was telling him to be quiet, "What do they say next?" "Cheer up," they said. "Come on, he's calling you." It's like, "Are you serious?" They're like, "Yeah, Jesus loves you and so do we." What? Did you get a different impression? Come on, I want to think that Jesus is like, "Man, I would so like to smack you guys in the head right now." Come on, dude. Let's go.

So Bartimaeus threw aside his coat, jumped up, and came to Jesus. His coat was probably the most valuable possession he had, and yet he just tosses it aside and beelines it to Jesus. And when he arrives, Jesus says, "What do you want me to do for you? What do you want me to do for you?" If you're with us last weekend, that's the exact same question Jesus asks James and John. Exact same question. Verbatim, "What do you want me to do for you?" Of course, they had loftier ideas about having thrones on his left and right. Bartimaeus is gonna come back with a much more down-to-earth answer, but think about this. This is the Son of God. This is the King of the universe. You would expect that when a subject comes to a king, the subject says, "What can I do for you, your majesty?"

And yet Jesus said that he came not to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many. And so here he is serving Bartimaeus, this one who's completely marginalized, and yet Jesus gave his life for Bartimaeus too. So Bartimaeus is precious to him. Bartimaeus is worth noticing, worth stopping for, worth saying, "Come, come. How can I serve you, Bartimaeus?" That's the kind of Lord we have. It would say, "What can I do for you?" It's such a wonderful moment. And you know, the answer here is gonna be revealing, because what you ask of Jesus reveals what you think of him. You're never gonna ask Jesus for something more than you think that he can provide, right? So Bartimaeus just thinks that Jesus is a good teacher, just another, maybe even an exceptional rabbi. He's gonna ask him for a blessing. You might even ask him for money.

But again, he shows us he knows something more about Jesus. He's gonna ask him to give him sight. He says, "My rabbi, master," the blind man said, "I want to see. I want to see." And if you're looking for another prayer that Jesus enjoys saying yes to, it's kind of hidden in these words I want to see, because it doesn't mean that he's going to physically heal us much or many of the times. We know that that's not our experience, but when we ask him to open the eyes of our heart, of our mind, he is eager to say yes every time. In fact, he's already done that with Bartimaeus. Before Bartimaeus can come and ask him for his physical sight to be restored, he's already demonstrating that he has spiritual insight that's been given to him.

How does he come by this knowledge that Jesus is the Son of David, the Messiah? It could only come from God's Spirit. How does he have this sense of urgency that meant, "I have to get to him now," because here's the sobering truth. Jesus will only pass by Bartimaeus in this way one time. He will never pass by in the same way again, ever. And again, that's sobering because there are times in our lives where opportunities come and then opportunities go, and once they go they're gone. I mean, is it possible that that Jesus is passing by in an area of your life? And bear in mind, what we choose to do or choose not to do, we cannot always undo. You say that again. What we choose to do or choose not to do, we cannot always undo.

Yet we can be forgiven, we can be restored, there can be healing, but you cannot go back and do it over again or do it differently. Some of us, you might be on the cusp of making a decision that could lead to great blessing or great harm. You may be on the cusp of a relationship that will lead to blessing or great injury. The cusp of saying something that could be a blessing or a curse. And right now, is it possible that in some of our lives Jesus is passing by and the best thing that we can say is, "Open my eyes, Lord." Because if I've heard anything in 20 years of being a pastor, it's this, "If I only knew then what I know now," oh, I would have done it so differently. "If I could only see what's so crystal clear now," oh, Mark, I would have chosen differently.

So to ask Jesus Christ to open our eyes, man, that is a prayer He loves to answer, to help us to see things that we otherwise would not see. And when Bartimaeus says, "Open my eyes," Jesus answers verse 52, "Go, for your faith has healed you." I love this because notice Jesus doesn't say, "Okay, here's the way it works, Bartimaeus. I'm about to really do something cool for you. You got a promise to be committed to me from here on out, okay? Because you owe me, you're obligated." He doesn't do it. There's no strings. He releases him. He says, "Go, go wherever you want. Your faith has already healed you." It's a gift of grace that's just given to him freely with no strings.

And yet I love how this little story ends. The latter half of verse 52, it says, "Instantly the man could see and he followed Jesus down the road." Isn't that a great last line? This is the last thing you'll ever read about Bartimaeus. He followed Jesus down the road. Isn't that a great epitaph? Would you love that to be the summary statement of your life? I would. I would take that any day. You know Mark, he was blind spiritually, intellectually. He was blind and yet in God's mercy, he opened his eyes and from that day on, he followed Jesus down the road. Would you want people to say that about you? Maybe when your life has come and gone, they're saying, "You know what? Hey, the road wasn't always easy. Sometimes it was steep. Sometimes it was bumpy and twisty. They were unexpected events. Sometimes it was great and joyous and smooth, but through it all, through thick and thin and high and low, he/she followed Jesus down the road."

That brings us to our third prayer which is simply, "Help me follow." Help me follow, Lord, wherever you lead. I don't know how you start your day. Maybe there's a time you set aside for prayer. Maybe you feel you don't have time for any kind of prayer. I think it's safe to say that we all have time to simply pray, "Lord, have mercy. Open my eyes. Help me follow." That can change your life. Just those three short prayers and make no mistake, they may be short prayers, but they are in no way little prayers. They're powerful. I'll prove it to you.

About 200 years ago, young boy John was born. He had a wonderful, nurturing mother. She made it her ambition to fill his mind and his heart with the knowledge of God, but sadly she died two weeks shy of his seventh birthday. His father was absent. He was stern. He was often preoccupied with his business. He had no time for faith. He had even less time for John. So John pretty much raised himself. He threw his lot in with kids he knew on the streets and he quickly learned their ways which led to him getting to no small amount of trouble in school. Eventually he was conscripted into the Navy where even though he was with just a riotous group of sailors, he was like the worst of the worst. They just thought his life was totally out of control.

He became quite miserable serving in the Navy. He tried to desert. He was caught and punished severely in the way they punished people 200 years ago for trying to desert. The punishment was so severe he spent the next several days plotting how he might murder the captain of that ship and then he would commit suicide immediately thereafter. Well, that didn't happen. He actually ended up on another ship, a slave trading ship bound for Africa. John knew something about the slave trade. It's what his father's business was, and he thought here's an opportunity for me to become wealthy myself. I'll throw in my lot with this guy. I'll get rich, but when they arrived at the shore of Africa, the captain of that ship took John and made him a slave in the captain's house. Barely gave him enough food to survive. It was the most miserable lowest point of his life.

But because his father was connected, he sent a ship to rescue John, and on the return voyage to England, John didn't have any responsibility, so he spent every day just binging on alcohol, and because he had kind of a gift with words, he would make up new curses and blasphemies about God. This is how he entertained himself. He had long since rejected the God that his mother had told him about, and so when an epic storm hits this very same ship, the sailors think it's John's fault. He's drawing God's wrath upon all of them. They want to actually throw him overboard, and in the middle of this crisis, John says something that surprises even him. He says, "May the Lord have mercy on us," and he's stunned that those words actually have left his mouth.

He spends the next couple days thinking about why would I even say that? I mean, it's a surprising thing for an avowed atheist to say, "Lord, have mercy." I guess the Lord's first mercy is they didn't throw him overboard. The ship limps to the coast of Ireland. The moment they make landfall, an even worse storm descends. John knows his life has been spared. Somehow there's a God there, but he doesn't really take it too much to heart. He actually becomes a slave trader himself for many years, but those words "Lord, have mercy," he can't escape from them. He becomes gravely ill, and it's upon that point in his life that he decides to leave the slave trade. He actually spends the next 10 years preparing to become an Anglican priest, if you can believe that.

It took 10 years because the church wouldn't accept him for the years prior to that, and it took 10 years for God to open his eyes to what his life had amounted to that so far, and he realized with deep regret how his participation in the slave trade and how just his debauchery of his life had just injured so many other people, including just his own soul. He would write essays about the evils of the slave trade, and he would also, as a pastor, mentor other young men. One of them was a young abolitionist named William Wilberforce. You know William Wilberforce because he's the one who led the campaign over several years to end slavery in Britain, and once that happened, it set the stage for the same thing to happen here in the United States.

So now those words "Lord, have mercy," they have grown to epic proportions in John Newton's life. Historic proportions. Ramifications that still affect us to this day, but that's it all because he took that gift for writing lyrics, and he was a prolific hymn writer. In fact, he actually penned the words to the most popular hymn ever written in the English language, "Amazing Grace," which is simply in many ways his faith story beginning with the very personal words, "Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see." Can you say that today? Can you say, "Mark, I was blind? I was blind but now I see thanks to Jesus Christ." If you can't say that, I got three very short powerful prayers to recommend to you here this morning. If you can, praise the Lord.

Even if you've been walking down that road, you've been following Jesus down the road for many, many, many years, there's never a time when we simply don't need to say, "Lord, have mercy. Open my eyes. Help me follow." Let's pray to that end right now.

Heavenly Father, we thank you. We thank you for your goodness and your grace. We thank you for just the mercies involved in us allowing us to be here today physically or to be able to listen over our computer, DVD player, whatever the case is. Lord, we do pray that your word would illumine our hearts and our minds, that you transform us. Lord, there's a full spectrum of stories and situations in this room from those who are just beginning to understand who you might be, just hoping that, Lord Jesus, that you are who the Bible and your church claim you to be, and so I pray that you just continue to bring on greater and greater understanding and clarity.

And for those of us, Lord, who have just been by your grace and mercy been able to walk with you for some time, just pray that you would energize us and give us the endurance and the desire to just follow you and to finish strong through every season of life so that when it all is said and done, we look at our stories, look at some ways it would resemble that of John Newton's where we can and Bartimaeus, you could encapsulate it all by saying, and you know what? Immediately his eyes were opened, her eyes were opened, and he or she followed Jesus down the road. That's our prayer this morning. We ask this in the matchless name of Jesus Christ, the Messiah, Savior, our Lord. All God's people, Amen.