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Welcome to the year 2020!
I predict that there will be some really good times this year.
I predict that there will be some really hard times this year.
I also predict that we will see God’s goodness and faithfulness through both the good times and through the hard times.
If we could only see beyond the natural and beyond our circumstance, we would see that God is aligning things both in heaven and on earth to accomplish His purpose.
Last summer Karie had cataract surgery on both eyes.
Her right eye was especially bad having contracted tracoma during her time overseas.
Tracoma is rare in the US, but is the world’s leading cause of blindness.
The disease was diagnosed and treated but it permanently damaged the lens, especially in her right eye.
She was told that nothing could be done for her vision and that it would probably only get worse.
However, despite her physical condition, Karie occasionally experienced a manifestation of clear vision.
This had been happening before the illness, almost since the time she became a believer.
She came to recognize it as a manifestation of the Holy Spirit at times when God was speaking to her or trying to get her attention.
She was delighted to find that cataract surgery could give her nearly perfect vision (about 20/25).
But she had one concern: how would she know when God was speaking to her? What would be her sign?
It was about that time she read a book by a man named Blake Healy who has a gift for seeing in the spirit.
He literally sees angels and demons and things that God is doing as if it were with his natural eye.
Karie thought that if her eyes were better maybe God would enable her to see beyond the natural and that would be her gift.
Well, to this day that has not occured, though she does still experience a certain sharpness to her vision at times when God is speaking.
Her overall eyesight is much improved by the surgery, only needing glasses for reading and some distance.
She is however constantly looking to see in the spirit, not so much with the natural eye, but to be aware of what God is doing beyond just what she can see.
2020 Vision: Seeing Spiritually
Probably half the churches in America are preaching about 2020 vision today.
The analogy is so perfect you can’t miss it!
20/20 is the standard of perfect vision.
It means you can read the 20 ft line on a Snellen Scale Chart from twenty feet away.
But, as I think of the year 2020, I want to see what God is doing.
It’s going to be a year of transition, for the church and for our family.
But I really want to know, What is God saying that will help us to set the right course?
It is an election year, so expect to be bombarded by contentious advertising and politically motivated news stories.
But what is God doing behind the scenes?
We have been hearing prophecies of a coming revival, but I have not seen anything yet that resembles what has been foretold, as least not in America.
Could this be the year that we see the great end-time harvest come to our country?
Along with the vision of “Seeing Spiritually” in 2020, I would like to suggest some specific goals:
In 2020 our goal is to enter into our spiritual inheritance, experience spiritual growth and produce a spiritual harvest.
My thoughts go to Numbers 13 and to the Israelites spying out the promised land.
We are “spying out” 2020 as we are about to enter into it.
Whether we actually enter in and accomplish what God has for us or merely wander around while the year passes depends on how we chose to see it.
As we move through this chapter, think about what it means to see spiritually.
Let’s talk about our goals as we observe what happened with the Israelites.
In 2020, let’s enter into our spiritual inheritance.
When you are looking at something to acquire it, which do you see first the problems or the possibilities?
Chances are, you will see both, but according to your personality (if you are an optimist or a pessimist) you will chose one side to focus on.
If you are an optimist, you will see the flaws, but you will immediately come up with solutions.
“I can fix that!”
If you are a pessimist, you may see possibilities but they will be soon outweighed by the number of “worst case scenario” issues that you can think of.
What if everything you are receiving is given to you?
Will you choose to possess it, or will it only be a burden to you?
For the believer, life is a gift from God and our situation in life is largely to be seen as an assignment for God.
Do you like your life or do you wish you had a different one?
(Refer to EH teaching on Spiritual Rebellion.)
What could you do if you chose to focus on the possibilities and find solutions for the problems?
You have an inheritance in Christ that is yours if you take hold of it.
The suffering that Paul speaks of here is to willingly embrace the difficulty of living as broken people in a broken world.
We are not denying that there are some problems in life that need to be fixed.
We are going to begin the year by looking at developing some spiritual disciplines which will help us to overcome this problem.
After that we are going to look at the book of Ruth and see how God redeems - turns bad things into good things.
Later in the year, we are going to study through Paul’s letter to the Romans which will help us to get a perspective on who we are in Christ and what is our inheritance.
In 2020, let’s experience spiritual growth both personally and corporately.
When you go to a place you have never been, you come back changed.
In 2013 I travelled with my seminary cohort to Vietnam and Cambodia.
I had traveled a lot before, so I didn’t expect this trip to really change me, but it did.
Most of the trips I had been on I was only ever around Christians and spent most of my time in churches.
On this trip we visited a lot of temples and most of the people we interacted with were not Christian.
We visited the war museum in Saigon, the Toul Slang Prison and the Killing Fields.
We were told not only to observe what was around us but to look for the “light places” and the “dark places”.
In one village there was a great idol and it was festival time.
Some of my colleagues who did not previously believe in spiritual warfare got a first-hand experience of demonic interference.
Some were tormented with bad dreams, one woman suffered a sudden panic attack.
I experienced some strange malfunctions of my computer that stopped as soon as we left there.
As for light places, I remember sitting in the courtyard of Toul Slang Prison and having a powerful encounter of God’s presence in what was once a place of death and torture.
I remember thinking, “Really God?
Of all the places you show up, why here?”
God showed me on that trip just how limiting my perceptions can be.
God is working in people and in places that I might have otherwise written off.
I needed to have eyes to see it.
The spies traveled for forty days covering the southern desert all the way to the mountains of what is now Lebanon.
They found walled cities which meant advanced civilization with organized defense.
They found a cluster of grapes so big they had to carry it on a pole between two men.
They found giants which were the subject of legends.
All of these things must have seemed very intimidating, except to those who were seeing it all with spiritual eyes.
Caleb and Joshua saw everything that the others saw.
Except that they saw God in everything.
2020 is new territory for all of us.
We don’t know what the next year holds, but we will all be changed by it.
Will it be for the better?
Change in inevitable, but spiritual growth is intentional.
If I had not been intentional about seeking God, I would have never found Him in the place that I did.
I was looking for the light places.
Every place I went I was asking, “God, where are you in this place?”
There is no place on earth that God is not there.
And there is no person or circumstance that God is not already at work in.
Not everything turns out for the better, only where people are intentional about knowing and following God.
Spiritual growth happens when we choose to see God in every situation.
We are going to practice seeing spiritually in 2020.
We are going to ask “God, where are you?” in every situation.
We are going to partner with God by exploring spiritual transformation and how that happens.
We are going to ask the hard questions.
In fact, I have reserved some time during the summer months to address topics by request.
So begin thinking about what hard questions or difficult passages you would like to see addressed.
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