“I Was Blind, Now I See...” | Rev. Derek P. Elphick

(John 9:25) Like the man born blind in this account, we are “blind” from birth. We can certainly see the world around us, but we need knowledge from the Lord to interpret what it is we’re looking at otherwise we remain “blind” to the true significance and beauty of life in this world. The sequence of events that happen after this healing miracle reveals the remarkable conversion the formerly blind man goes through as the blind spots of his understanding are removed.

Readings: John 9, Apocalypse Explained 815, Divine Providence 221

Minister: Rev. Derek P. Elphick

Delivered July 26th, 2026 at the Bryn Athyn Cathedral in Bryn Athyn, PA.

The Bryn Athyn Church is a congregation of the General Church of the New Jerusalem, located in Bryn Athyn, PA. We are committed to helping each other draw closer to the Lord God Jesus Christ through lives of love and useful service, guided by the Old and New Testaments and the Heavenly Doctrine for the New Church (contained in the theological works of Emanuel Swedenborg). Please join us for worship on Sunday mornings; services and times can be found at brynathynchurch.org.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:16

The topic under consideration today is the gift of sight, which the Lord gives us. And for our reading that this talk is based on, we turn to John chapter 9, which involves the miracle of the man born blind being healed of his sight. But that's only half the miracle. The second half takes place when he is interrogated by the Pharisees as to how he received his sight. Now as Jesus passed by, he saw a man who was blind from birth. And his disciples asked him, saying, Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind? Jesus answered, Neither this man nor his parents sinned, but that the works of God should be revealed in him. Then he spat on the ground and made clay with the saliva, and he anointed the eyes of the blind man with the clay. And he said to him, Go wash in the pool of Siloam. And so he went and washed, and came back seeing. Therefore the neighbors and those who previously had seen that he was blind said, Is this not he who sat and begged? Some said, This is he. Others said, He is like him. He said, I am he. So they said to him, How were your eyes opened? He answered and said, A man called Jesus, made clay, and anointed my eyes, and said to me, Go to the pool of Siloam and wash. So I went and washed, and I received sight. Then they said to him, Where is he? He said, I do not know. So then they brought him who was formerly blind to the Pharisees. Now it was a Sabbath when Jesus made the clay and opened his eyes. Then the Pharisees also asked him again how he had received his sight, and he said to them, He put clay on my eyes, and I washed and I see. Therefore some of the Pharisees said, This man is not from God, because he does not keep the Sabbath. Others said, How can a man who is a sinner do such signs? And there was a division among them. And they said to the blind man again, What you say about him, because he opened your eyes? And he said, He is a prophet. But the Jews did not believe him, that he had been blind and received his sight, until they called his parents, and they asked them, saying, Is this your son who you say was born blind? How then does he now see? His parents answered them and said, We know that this is our son, and that he was born blind, but by what means he now sees, we do not know, or who opened his eyes we do not know. He is of age, ask him. He will speak for himself. So they again called the man who was blind and said to him, Give God the glory. We know that this man is a sinner. He answered and said, Whether he is a sinner or not, I do not know. One thing I know, that though I was blind, now I see. Then they said to him again, What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes? He answered them, I told you already, and you did not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you also want to become his disciples? Then they reviled him and said, You are his disciple, but we are Moses' disciples. We know that God spoke to Moses, as for this fellow, we do not know where he is from. The man answered and said to them, Why, this is a marvelous thing, that you do not know where he is from, and yet he has opened my eyes. Since the world began, it has been unheard of that anyone opened the eyes of one who was born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing. They answered and said to him, You were completely born in sins, and you're teaching us, and they cast him out. Jesus heard that they had cast him out, and when he had found him, he said to him, Do you believe in the Son of God? He answered and said, Who is he, Lord? That I may believe in him. And Jesus said to him, You have both seen him, and it is he who is talking with you. Then he said, Lord, I believe. And he worshipped him. And then from the work Apocalypse explained. Without this faith, no church could have been established. There were three reasons why faith in the Lord healed people. First, they acknowledged his divine omnipotence or power, that he was God. Second, this acknowledgement brought presence, a phenomenon common in the spiritual world. And third, natural diseases represent and thus signify spiritual diseases. And spiritual diseases can only be healed by the Lord, by looking to his divine omnipotence or power, and by repentance of life. Faith brings the Lord present, but faith in him merely as a man will not draw near his divine omnipotence. Therefore, the Lord could not do miracles in his own country. They had seen him from infancy like any other man, and were unable to add to that idea the idea of his divinity. Amen. May the Lord add his blessing to the reading and hearing of his word. So this morning I want to share a few thoughts from the Lord's Word about the gift of sight. The gift of sight. Just think about right now all the things that we can see, all of the things that we can take in in this beautiful building and all of the stained glass windows. It's an incredible thing, the gift of sight. One of the things that the Lord teaches us in His Word is that the things that we see are connected to our loves. So whatever we love, we see, and whatever we don't love, we don't see. So very quickly, what starts happening is that even though we have eyes that theoretically should be able to see everything, we have eyes that can be blind to certain things. So let me give a few examples. If you've been in a, if you've had a or you're in a bad mood, and you're driving along with your family and you're looking outside, and there's these beautiful mountains and animals out in the fields, and it's just gorgeous. If you're in a bad mood, there's a lot of things that you don't see, especially the beauty and uh the wonder of the Lord's creation. And that's because it's connected to our loves. We see what we want to see. And we're taught in the Lord's word that we have many types of love. Some of the loves are very, very precious that we got when we were children, when we were very young, loving the Lord, loving our neighbor, and doing good and useful things. So we have good loves, but mixed in with those good loves are bad loves, loves that don't want us to see the things that the Lord would like us to see. This brings us to this incredible miracle that we read in the Gospel of John, chapter 9. And what happens in this miracle is that it's a long account, and the first part is very quick. There's a man who's born blind, and the Lord comes along and heals him of his physical blindness. That's only part of the miracle. The bigger part of the miracle, and the more significant part, is what happens later. Because this man goes from when he's interrogated by the Pharisees, and the Pharisees picture the negative thoughts and feelings that besiege us, that attack us, and say, Why would you believe the Lord's word? Why would you believe in heaven? You can't see any of these things. And what's so beautiful and fascinating about this account is that the more that the Pharisees interrogated or attacked this man about what had happened, the more he came to see that the person who had healed him was God Himself. So there was a process of discovery. We talk about blind spots. And a blind spot is where we're going along, or just think of someone who, again, maybe that example of uh being in a bad mood and you can't see all of the beautiful things around you because your mind has sort of muddied your sight, and you don't see things that you would want to see. There's lots of other ways that this can happen, where we're in a bad mood or someone offends us or we're hurt, and so we don't see all the things that we need to see. That this person is a gift from God, that I need to look to the good, that I need to just be patient, take a deep breath. There's all kinds of things that we just lose sight of when our loves are attacked. So, in the case of this man who was born blind, the real miracle was that he went from, when they said, Well, who who healed you? They knew, the Pharisees knew it was Jesus, and they were threatened. Evil is threatened by goodness and truth. Evil is threatened by the Lord. The Pharisees were very threatened by Jesus, and but they wanted to interrogate him. Who gave you your sight? This man called Jesus. That's the first thing. Just said, this man called Jesus. I don't know, this man called Jesus. They press him, they bring the parents in. Surely he wasn't born blind. Surely you're making this up. Press him. Nope, they failed. Who healed you? Well, this man, he must be a prophet. So he goes from, well, there's this man, this prophet, and then finally, as they keep on pushing and interrogating him, he says that no one could do this. No one could give me my sight back if they weren't from God or God. It was a huge confession. And what's so powerful about this story is that the man was prepared to have the Lord remove the blind spots, not with this new vision that he got, but the blind spots in his understanding. Because there are things that we, because of our old will, there are things that we refuse to see. Now, the thing that's really quite remarkable is that it's all here. If you think about the Lord's word and you read a story, like the story you heard this morning, it's all there in the printed pages. There's nothing that we can't see. But our reception of what we read is different according to what we call our state of mind or what we're thinking about, whether we're hungry and we're thinking about something else or whatever, as to how much we actually see. I don't know whether you've ever had the experience of hearing a story from the Lord's word or reading a story in the Lord's Word, and you say, I don't remember that verse. I don't even remember that whole story. Well, you had read it, you saw it, but you didn't see it because you weren't in the right frame of mind. So this is the incredible thing about this miracle, is that the Lord is in no hurry. We sometimes get down on ourselves because there's obvious things in the Lord's Word that we see and we don't forget, like the Ten Commandments or the Golden Rule. It's hard to forget those things. But when we go to the Lord's Word, a lot of it is getting us to see the blind spots or to recognize that we have blind spots, that we're not seeing things that we need to see. Maybe I really should help that person that I said that unkind word to. Maybe I really should just stop and pray. Maybe I really should say, I'm sorry. There's so many things that the Lord in his good time is trying to help us see. But it takes time. And that's why I had in this recitation today this particular one where we talked about, where we read about the Lord's thoughts are not our thoughts, and his ways are not our ways. The Lord is looking at our life from a very different perspective. And sometimes we get frustrated and our faith is challenged, like this poor blind man. Well, did this man really heal you? Do you really have your sight back? Maybe you weren't blind at the beginning. All kinds of attacks. And over the process of time, one of the big and powerful reasons for reading the Lord's word is that as time goes on, we start to see things differently. We start to see things in ourselves that we didn't see before. And that's what we call a blind spot. It might be an attitude, it might be a behavior, it might be something annoying that we do. We don't see it, but everyone else does. And that's called a blind spot. And the Lord is ready to heal. Another teaching, the one that you heard this morning, is a very powerful one that reminds us that when the Lord healed people in the New Testament during his time on earth, the only people that could actually be healed were the ones that believed he had divine power. Omnipotence, that word omnipotence. If they didn't believe that he had divine power or that he was God, they couldn't be healed. And that's why the Lord in his own country, in his own town, Nazareth, couldn't really heal people as much as he wanted to. He couldn't remove their blind spots because they remember him as a boy. They remember him as a child. They couldn't add to that idea the idea of his divinity. So what a powerful thing for us to remember that our sight is very much connected to our loves. And as the Lord changes our loves, as we say, one thing I know that though I was blind, now I see, the more we can just say that, Lord, I'm not seeing something here, I'm missing it. I must have a blind spot. The more we can do that, the more the Lord can perform this miracle of opening the eyes of our understanding, as well as our physical eyes, where we look around and we're in a different mood and we see all of the beauty and wonder of the world around us and say, Thank you, Lord, for giving us this incredible world. Thank you, Lord, for remind helping me remember that everything in the world around me is a theater representative of your kingdom. What a beautiful thing, the gift of sight. It's all connected to our ability to turn to the Lord and work on the things that we might be blind to, so that we can reach out to other people and be of service to the Lord Himself in our lives here on earth. Amen.