Can you see?

Sight is more than a physical sense we’re greatly blessed to have.

Sight is deeply spiritual.

It’s very possible to physically see everything around you, yet be spiritually blind. And if you’re spiritually blind, you’re blind, indeed!

Spiritual sight allows us to see truth and value. An illustration of this can be seen in this story told by Neatorama …

In 1876, Western Union had a monopoly on the telegraph, the world’s most advanced communications technology. This made it one of America’s richest and most powerful companies, with $41 million in capital and the pocketbooks of the financial world behind it. So when Gardiner Greene Hubbard, a wealthy Bostonian, approached William Orton with an offer to sell the patent for a new invention Hubbard had helped to fund, Orton treated it as a joke. Hubbard was asking for $100,000!

Orton bypassed Hubbard and drafted a response directly to the inventor. “Mr. Bell,” he wrote, “after careful consideration of your invention, while it is a very interesting novelty, we have come to the conclusion that it has no commercial possibilities … What use could this company make of an electrical toy?”

The invention, the telephone, would have been perfect for Western Union. The company had a nationwide network of telegraph wires in place, and the inventor, 29-year-old Alexander Graham Bell, had shown that his telephone worked quite well on telegraph lines. All the company had to do was hook telephones up to its existing lines and it would have had the world’s first nationwide telephone network in a matter of months.

Instead, Bell kept the patent and in a few decades his telephone company, renamed American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T), had become the largest corporation in America … The Bell patent – offered to Orton for a measly $100,000 – became the single most valuable patent in history. Ironically, less than two years of turning Bell down, Orton realized the magnitude of his mistake and spent millions of dollars challenging Bell’s patents while attempting to build his own telephone network (which he was ultimately forced to hand over to Bell).

Instead of going down in history as one of the architects of the telephone age, he is instead remembered for having made one of the worst decisions in American business history.

It could be said that William Orton was blind. Oh, he had his physical vision, but he couldn’t see value. One writer noted this about Orton’s enormous gaffe …

It’s hard to imagine a more obvious business opportunity than the one turned down by Western Union’s William Orton. Mr. Orton couldn’t see the “electrical toy” for what it could become. He was too blinded by his present success to appreciate the profound implications this opportunity held for the future.

This is exactly the situation many place themselves in as they scoff at the opportunity offered to them in the Gospel. Do they continue on as they are, content with their current success, or do they embrace this divine opportunity to have their lives count, not just for now, but for eternity?

The average Christian does very little to build their spiritual sight by spending any valuable time in the Bible learning to see through God’s eyes. Instead, we depend on church leaders who all too often are too busy to spend much time in their own Bibles. It’s no wonder, then, that we have this dire statement from Jesus:

“Jesus replied, ‘Every plant not planted by my heavenly Father will be uprooted, so ignore them. They are blind guides leading the blind, and if one blind person guides another, they will both fall into a ditch,’” Matthew 15:14.

Our ability to see clearly, spiritually, is so important to Jesus it was a part of His mission …

“Then Jesus told him, ‘I entered this world to render judgment — to give sight to the blind and to show those who think they see that they are blind.’ Some Pharisees who were standing nearby heard him and asked, ‘Are you saying we’re blind?’ ‘If you were blind, you wouldn’t be guilty,’ Jesus replied. ‘But you remain guilty because you claim you can see,'” John 9:39-41.

Can you see?

What are you doing to be able to see truth and value as learned only by spending both a quantity and quality time studying the Bible, talking to God, and yielding to the transforming, sight-giving work of the Holy Spirit?

Scotty