Sunday, “Best of” messages

February 28^th, ‘10

OPEN YOUR EYES

“Love not sleep, lest you come to poverty; open your eyes, and you will be satisfied with bread” (Proverbs 20:13)

Solomon’s truth nuggets, the Proverbs, are so simple yet so profound, profoundly simple, simply profound. Here he admonishes, “Open your eyes”. Or we might say, “wake up and smell the coffee”, “get a clue”, “Earth calling Mork”, “yoo-hoo, is there anybody home?” Sleep is not just a dream-stage. You can be at school, work, driving a car or engaged in any number of activities and still be sleepwalking or sleep-working. Open your eyes, promotion is calling. Turn up your hearing aid, opportunity is knocking. Jesus mentioned, “Having eyes to see, they see not”. There is such a things as adult attention deficit. Some cannot see the tree for the forest. Some focus on what they wish to see and tune out the periphery. As a result they won’t listen to advice and won’t solicit other people’s expertise. Beware the land of unaware. Hebrews speaks of men who have “entertained angels unawares”. Many have missed the angels, the God-sends, bargains, super deals, business opportunities and advancement when they were standing right in their midst. They missed Jesus back when (John 1:11,26), we can miss him today as well. Open your eyes!

The text warns of poverty. That is one of my least favorite words, how about you? My faith requires no vow of poverty. It does however include health, wealth and the pursuit of happiness. The more successful preachers nowadays own ancillary companies with all kinds of investments and options. Why was Paul a tentmaker on the side? Well, obviously, because it paid bills. It was all right for Paul to trade in tents but not all right for Reverend Joe to get a realtor license? Open your eyes. Better yet, open your mind. Minds are like parachutes they only work properly when opened up.

Open your eyes and you will be “satisfied with bread”. Bread implies bare necessity. Some believe God only wants us to have the necessities of life, not the nice-ities, that He supplies all our needs but not our greeds. Personally, I disagree because heaven is paved with gold and God’s will is to be acted out “on earth as it is in heaven”. But laying that aside, the meager or the eager, either way, a person has to keep his eyes open to survive. Solomon is calling for visual acumen, an ability to translate vision into passion then action. Faith begins with the “substance of things hoped for” and ends with the “evidence of things not seen”. To open your eyes may mean perceiving things beyond the natural. By faith Moses saw “him who is invisible” (Heb 11:27). How do you make visible what is invisible? Certainly not by relying totally on what is logical. The function of the eyes is sight but the function of the heart is vision. So what Solomon is talking about is both optical and spiritual because the natural man cannot understand the things of the Spirit of God because they are foolishness to him. But the person who minds the Holy Spirit and walks in the wisdom of the Word views everything through a divine lens. That person opens his eyes and is satisfied.