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Justification DOES NOT inherently involve consumption of gander sauce. If you are unfamiliar with the way I am using the term gander sauce, you are invited to go into the archives and read the last couple of installments of Today's Little Lift. Briefly, it involves the judgment that we bring upon ourselves when we unfairly and unjustly judge others. Personally I am opining the fact that I have been so spiritually blinded for so many years and now find myself having to retract as it were so much of what I have taught and thought to be true.

Don't get me wrong; it is not all bad. It is a bitter sweet experience. The emotions that are freed when one begins to grasp the true biblical concepts of justification are unequalled in sweetness by anything else in the universe. The freedom that comes from the lifting of the self imposed burden of sitting in judgment of others is exhilarating beyond description! The bitter part comes from the human pride that resides in all of us and the inherent conflict we have with admitting our human inability to see things as they really are!

Jesus spoke out about this human propensity throughout ALL of his earthly ministry. His seemingly harsh words toward the scribes and Pharisees were more often than not intended to help them open their eyes to their own spiritual blindness and awaken to the dawning of a new day of spiritual sunlight. No passage illustrates His struggle with this human trait better than the story of the blind man whose sight was restored in John 9. If you are unfamiliar with this event, it involves a man who had been physically blind from birth, the gift of sight that Jesus bestowed upon him, and the spiritual blindness that was so crippling to all the others who watched this drama unfold.

It is a story filled with emotions! Imagine the emotions that must have been present when a full grown man experienced sights and colors for the very first time! His disability was immediately removed and suddenly he had all the physical faculties with which others had been born! It is an emotional story that one simply must not read without sensing this side of the events. It is a sad story. People walked away from Jesus as His bitter enemies, crippled by self-imposed spiritual blindness. The were looking at the Man who could have given them spiritual sight, but they chose to close their eyes to the light and grope in the darkness of human depravity rather than to simply say, “I can't see!”

We will be exploring this story for a short time, but you are invited, yea challenged, to read the 41 verses that are involved once and again as we proceed. I find it hard not to skip to the end of the story and spoil the meaning-filled details that are along the way! However, for the reader's sake as well as my own, I will restrain myself. However, there is a line near the end of the story that clarifies just who Jesus was and is. For the sake of understanding Him and how we fit into the picture of human justification, I will quote this passage. Jesus said, “For judgment I have come into this world, that those who do not see may see, and that those who see may be made blind.” (John 9.39).

This pithy phrase captures the role of Jesus in human justification as well as the role of man! Granted, it is couched in figures, but they are explained by the story itself! In another place, Jesus said He came to seek and to save that which was lost (humanity). Here He said the same thing but in a much more dramatic and perhaps practical way. We have hymned these words for years. In the story of the blind man in John 9, they become real. “I once was lost but now I'm found; was blind but now I see!”

Questions:

1. Why is human justification needed?

2. What steps of his own initiative can humanity take toward justification? THINK!

3. Jesus did come to judge, but the greater objective was to ______________ ?

4. In order to see (be justified), I must admit ____ ____ _____________ ?

"Refreshment in Refuge" from Gina Burgess

Things that go bump in the night