What I See Is Not All That Is Real

Scripture describes a blindness that can settle over the human mind. The word Paul uses in 2 Corinthians 4:4 doesn't mean a lack of information — it means a perception so obscured that the glory of Christ can be standing right in front of you and you never recognize it. You can hear the gospel, know the name of Jesus, learn all the terminology, and still not see. Many of us lived there. We went to church, heard the preaching, watched people worship, had a mother or a grandmother pray for us — and we heard them but we didn't hear them, we saw it but we didn't see it. The whole time we were certain, confident, and wrong. Proverbs warns of a road that seems right the entire way and still ends in death. We didn't need a better map. We needed our eyes opened.

Then one day the Spirit of God opened your eyes. Nobody changed Jesus that day — He had always been Jesus. Nobody changed the gospel — it had always been true. You simply finally saw the reality that had been there all along. What sounded foolish started making sense; what seemed distant became personal; what seemed irrelevant became everything. Blindness turned into sight, death into life, darkness into light, lost became found. And here is what you cannot miss: He did not open your eyes so you could see less — He opened them so you could see more. More than the problem, more than the pain, more than the paycheck, more than the diagnosis, more than the grave. So don't spend the rest of your Christian life interpreting everything through the same natural eyes He just healed.

God gave you five senses and they are astonishing gifts. A few notes of an old song and you are seventeen again; one smell and you are back in Grandma's kitchen; you pick up your father's worn Bible and you are holding history. Sight, sound, smell, taste, touch — they let you experience the world He made, and they can reach decades into your heart. But watch what happens. Because you have lived through your senses since birth, you quietly build a rule: I see it, therefore it's real. So far, fine. Then we take a leap God never told us to take — if I cannot see it, hear it, taste it, or touch it, then it must not be real. And that is simply not true. Your senses are wonderful servants. They are terrible lords.

“Pastor, I just don't believe anything I can't see.” Really? You don't actually live that way — nobody does. You can't see gravity, but you trusted it the moment you got out of bed. You can't see oxygen, yet you've depended on it every few seconds since the sermon began. You can't see the wind, only what it does. You can't put love on a table, or weigh justice, or hand me the number seven — and no one calls those things unreal. Your entire life rests on realities you cannot see. So why, the moment the conversation turns spiritual, do we suddenly change the rules and say, “I can't see God, therefore there is no God”? You don't apply that standard anywhere else in your life.

Jesus told Nicodemus, “You must be born again,” and Nicodemus could only think naturally — how can a man be born when he is old? So Jesus pointed to the wind: you can't see where it comes from or where it goes, but you hear it and feel it — so it is with everyone born of the Spirit. God did not create you as merely a body walking a physical planet for eighty or ninety years. Scripture says you are spirit, soul, and body. You were made for God, made to know Him, made for realities your five senses cannot presently contain. That's why Jesus never said, “Become more religious,” or “Get a better philosophy.” He said you must be born again — something has to come alive. And when you gave your life to Him, something happened that no eye could watch and no hand could touch, but it was real: you were born of the Spirit.

Walking by faith has never meant pretending. If you're sick, faith doesn't say you're not sick; if you're hurting, faith doesn't say it doesn't hurt. Faith is not make-believe. Faith says: what I see is real — but it is not all that is real. My eyes can accurately report a problem; they simply cannot report the whole story. Your eyes can show you a grave, but they cannot show you the resurrection. Your ears can hear “they're gone,” but they cannot yet hear the resurrection trumpet. So Paul says we fix our eyes not on what is seen but on what is unseen — because what is seen is temporary and what is unseen is eternal. We don't deny death; we declare resurrection. We don't deny the pain; we declare it is temporary. The problem is real, the diagnosis is real, the pressure is real — but none of it is all that is real.