I’m going to read John 9 if you want to open your Bible. My favorite chapter of the entire Bible. John 9. Yeah. Cuz don’t find a lot of jocularity, but uh the guy who gets healed in this one, he’s just like on point. It’s great. John 9 starting at verse 24. having trouble kind of seeing that. But so a second time they called the man who had been blind and said to him, “Give glory to God. We know that this man is a sinner.” And then he then answered, “Whether he is a sinner, I don’t know. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.” So they said to him, “How did he do it to you? How did he open your eyes?” He answered him, “I told you already and you didn’t listen. Why do you want to hear it again? You do not want to become his disciples too, do you?” And they reviled him and said, “You are his disciple, but we are disciples of Moses. We know that God has spoken to Moses, but as for this man, we do not know where he is from.” And the man answered and said to them, “Well, there is an amazing thing that you don’t know where he is from, and yet he opened my eyes. We know that God does not hear sinners, but if everyone is God-fearing and does his will, he hears him. Since the beginning of time, it was never been heard that anyone open the eyes of a person born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.” And they answered him, “You were born entirely in sins and you are teaching us.” So they put him out. Then Jesus that had been uh Jesus heard that they had put him out. And finding him, he said, “Do you believe in the son of man?” He answered, “Who is he, Lord, that I may believe in him?” Jesus said to him, “You have both seen him, and he is the one who is talking with you.” And he said,”Lord, I believe.” And he worshiped him. And Jesus said, “For judgment I came into this world, so that those who do not see may see, and that those who see may become blind.” Those of the Pharisees who were with him heard these things and said to him, “We are not blind, too, are we?” And Jesus said to them, “If you were blind, you would have no sin. But since you say we see, your sin remains. Thanks, Murray. Morning. It’s good to be with you. We haven’t forgotten it’s Father’s Day. We’ll get we’ll get to that a little bit later, but um for some Father’s Day is a great day. For others, it’s a it’s a difficult day. And so, we recognize that. But, uh but we want to honor the fathers that are here and the grandfathers that are here. And uh we’ll do that a little later on the service. So, what we do, if you’re new at Knox, we typically do a little bit of work in God’s word, which we’re going to do for the next few moments, and then we have a time of prayer where we respond to what God has said to us. And uh so as Murray said, this is a it’s a great passage of scripture. It’s one of those passages of scripture where there’s a lot of hidden humor and sarcasm and there’s tragedy, but there’s revelation. Uh this kind of has it all. So we’re going to try to do justice to this passage in John chapter 9 this morning. Now last week we looked at the first seven verses of John 9, and that had to do with the actual healing of the blind man himself. The last 34 verses of the chapter that we’re looking at this morning deals with the aftermath, the controversy that went along with that healing. Now, it seems odd to us initially from our vantage point that miraculously giving a man who was born blind the gift of sight would stir up any opposition at all. I mean, who’s going to be mad about some guy who’s never seen who can suddenly see? What fault could anyone find with this extraordinary event? This is the most exciting revelational day of this guy’s life. Who’s going to stand there and pour cold water on it? Well, the point of our passage, as we’ll see, is that for a person to get upset about a blind man being physically healed requires a degree of spiritual blindness and religious obtuseness, puts them out of step with reality, closes them off to the very presence of God. That’s what we see happening. And at the end of our chapter, as Murray read, the Pharisees, the Jewish religious leaders, they’re all constipated by their religious legalism. They can’t believe how Jesus views them. They look at uh at these respected leaders, the nation of Israel, look at this Galilean peasant, and they say kind of snortingly, “What are we blind to?” And Jesus says essentially, “Yes, you are.” Their assumption is they’re the clear-sighted ones. They’re the ones who are seeing reality clearly. And Jesus says, “You guys can’t see a thing.” Jesus says, “For judgment I’ve come into this world so that the blind will see and those who see will become blind.” Oh, if you were blind, you would not be guilty of sin. But now that you claim you can see, your guilt remains. Jesus really is saying that for some in our world, the scales are are falling off our eyes and we’re seeing spiritual reality clearly for the first time. And for others, especially for those who feel that their eyesight is just fine, unnoticed cataracts are forming and they’re losing their spiritual sight. So, this passage really challenges all of us this morning to take an eye exam and consider what might be getting in our way of seeing with 2020 vision the spiritual realities all around us. Because like cataracts that form on people’s eyes slowly and gradually, spiritual blindness has a way of creeping up on people without being noticed. Journalist Masher Gesson was an American correspondent. She was based in Russia from 1991 just after the wall fell um until shortly after the war with Ukraine commenced. So for 30 years she witnessed and reported on Vladimir Putin’s autocratic rise to power. She saw so many awful undemocratic things happen in such quick succession. She says the shock just faded among people and government crimes became routine and people kept adjusting. They kept habituating to a new normal and even though it became increasingly worse and Geston writes how it’s often quite a beautiful thing uh in people in uh our capacity to normalize and to habituate and to find our footing in a new setting. So in a in a war scenario, people might be wandering around shell shocked for the first three days and then then they make adjustments and they find themselves just casually cooking their meal on a sidewalk or teaching children in bomb shelters. And that’s the kind of resilience humans have that’s very warm, very natural. But in a situation where life is actually darkening and getting worse, our resilience can work against us. Gesson writes how journalists in Russia, they first got used to a little and then less and then no independent media at all. And everyone just kind of got used to it. Some critic of the Kremlin would be poisoned or shot. And journalists would simply tell themselves, “Oh, that could never happen to us.” And they’d learn to cope. And occasionally, she says, her and her fellow journalists would look back at the freedom they had had to publish something just a year ago or two years ago or 10 years ago that they could never publish today and they would recognize how that creeping authoritarianism had come to dominate their lives. Authoritarianism that they’d become used to. Now, Masha Gesson writes her piece because in her in her observation, she sees some of the same things currently happening in the US. And whether we agree with her or not, her point I think is pretty well taken. All of us can easily become habituated to a darkening situation. So in our passage, the religious leaders that gradually become so habituated to these intricate legalistic interpretations, their add-ons to the Old Testament law, they couldn’t enjoy a flatout miracle when it was staring them in the face. The blind man uh went home from the pool of Saleom where Jesus had told him to go wash. He could see for the first time. He was utterly transformed. We read that his own neighbors and those who knew him only as a handicap beggar all of his life. They had trouble recognizing him. They didn’t know if it was the same guy. But he insisted, “Yeah, that’s who I am.” And when they asked him how his eyes were opened, he told them, “The man they call Jesus did it. He put mud in my eyes. I washed and now I see. And then the neighbors asked him a question which probably qualifies for the dumbest question of the day because they asked him, “Where is this man Jesus?” And of course, this formerly blind man, he had no idea what Jesus looked like. He’d never be able to pick Jesus out of a crowd. So, he just says, “I don’t know.” And that led to this investigation then by the Pharisees. When they heard the man repeat his story, they were a little split in terms of their verdict. But for some of them, their immediate reaction was, “This man, meaning Jesus, is not from God, for he does not keep the Sabbath.” Now, apparently, it was a Saturday. It was the Jewish Sabbath on which Jesus healed the blind man. All the Pharisees could see was a legal violation. They couldn’t rejoice in the miracle. Their world had become so prescribed and so flattened and so overregulated and disenchanted that their judicial concerns trumped the sparkling joy of a man who was seeing for the first time in his life. If we take a brief tour back to the giving of the law, the giving of the ten commandments, Exodus chapter 20, the Sabbath, the day of rest, was an incredible gift from God to people. Very liberating people. the law was first given to had been people who had just emerged from 400 years of enslavement in Egypt. I don’t know if they’d ever had a day off from work and neither had their parents or their grandparents or their greatgrandparents. A day without work was certainly not on their radar, not something they could ever dream or imagine. And here was God putting this gracious gift of the Sabbath in their laps. And for one day in seven, they didn’t have to set their alarms. They could sleep in, could make some mana pancakes for lunch, and they could take the kids to the park, and they could binge watch Lord of the Rings. And you know, they didn’t even have to go to church on the Sabbath. It wasn’t until 40 years later when they’d entered God’s promised land, God gave them further instructions about a couple of simple worship offerings that they could make to him on the Sabbath. Sabbath day is scandalous treat for people emerging from enslavement. And they they didn’t always know what to do with it. Some people tried sneaking in a little work. They were so used to it and they were caught and they were punished as a result. And we read of business people in Amos chapter 8 who begrudged the Sabbath. They’re sitting there in church and they’re impatiently stewing over how much money they might earn the next day when they can finally sell their grain and market their wheat. And to such people are given the wistful words of Isaiah 58 declaring how God wanted his Sabbath to be a delight for his people, not an obligation. They wanted them to find joy in the Lord on that day. But over the years in the centuries leading up to Jesus’ time, uh various rabbis and scribes and religious leaders had taken it upon themselves to scrupulously define what work involved and what work was not. and uh all the practices to avoid. So they squeezed all of the joy out of the day with their overregulation, rules for how far you could walk and what you could carry and what illnesses or physical conditions could and couldn’t be treated on the Sabbath. Everything was very rigorously legislated. So in healing the blind man, Jesus had actually violated three of their regulations. His technical breaches involved first of all making the little mudp pack that he was going to put on the guy’s eyes. That involved kneading and molding the earth and and that was considered work. And then when Jesus placed the mudpack on the guy’s eyes, he was violating their rules on the Sabbath against anointing someone else. And finally, it was very clear that for medical treatment, unless the person’s life was in absolute grave danger, you weren’t allowed to attend to that medical treatment till the following day. So Jesus though, he referred to himself as the Lord of the Sabbath. He said the Sabbath was made for man. Man wasn’t made for the Sabbath. And he seemed to take particular delight in kicking down the little sand castles of the Pharisees rules right in front of them. And it irritated them to no end. Over centuries, that creeping authoritarianism of man-made legalism had stripped away their delight and miracle and enchantment and its place has just brought dry, dead, disenchanted religious rules. Read this week that in Iran, people are bracing themselves for a renewed government crackdown this summer against what was declared a crime back in 2019, the crime of dog walking. Now, enforcement has been very lax in recent years, but this summer that’s apparently going to change. Dog walking is a clear crime, one of their prosecutors has stated. And so is driving around with a dog in your vehicle. Among religious leaders in Iran, dog ownership, it’s a sign of wealthy western cultural influence. And dogs are considered religiously impure. So Iran’s supreme leader, the Ayatollah Kmeni has issued a fatwa, a religious order stating that a dog’s uh that a dog’s saliva or hair renders anything it touches, a person or clothing or any kind of surface impure. And his his fatwa officially declares that prayer is invalid in the presence of dog hair. But millions of people in Iran own pets. Growing number of veterinarians in cities like Tran. So despite threats of fines and having their vehicles confiscated, their dogs confiscated, their businesses sealed shut, one veterinarian says that Iran citizens know how to deal with this stuff. Religious crackdowns, they know how to keep a low profile until the enforcement begins to ease. So any creeping authoritarianism, man-made religious rules, it just squeezes all the fun out of life, the joy and the enchantment and the miracle. ministry of Jesus, we read about it in the New Testament, just always sparkles with enchantment. Did in his day, still does in our day, but all those cataracts of religious blindness keep forming in our eyes against it. So, our passage goes on then to describe as Murray read, three separate interviews or judicial inquiries led by the religious leaders. They want to shut down the excitement of this man with newfound sight. First interview, the man himself is questioned concerning what happened. bit of division among the leaders. Some wanted to completely invalidate Jesus’ claim of being from God because he’d violated their Sabbath regulations. Others though were a little more reflective and they said, “How can a sinner do such miraculous signs?” It’s interesting that they these religious leaders then turned to the man himself to hear what he had to say about Jesus. So we have these religious theologians consulting an illiterate beggar, some guy who’d never read a book in his life and they asked him for his opinion. And so he just ventured his best guess and he said, “Uh, well Jesus, I think he’s a prophet.” Now unsatisfied, the religious leaders still didn’t want to accept this that this man had been born blind and had received his sight. So they sought out his parents for confirmation. They brought the parents before them. They said, “Is this your son? Is this the one you say was born blind? How is it that he can now see? Parents, they were very intimidated by the religious leaders. We read that the word on the street was that anyone who acknowledged Christ would be thrown out of the Jewish synagogue. They’d be outcasts. They’d be uh banned from practicing their Jewish religion. They’d be paras in society. So, the parents cautiously affirmed that their son was born blind but now could see, but they really didn’t want any further involvement. They wanted to get off the witness stand as soon as they could. So they said, “Just ask our son. He’s of age. He can speak for himself. He can tell you how this happened.” That leads to the third interview with the Pharisees. They recall the blind man. They summon him again and they’re very direct with him this time. Kind of a stern command. They say, “Give glory to God. We know that this man, Jesus, is a sinner.” They warned the healed man that he’d better get with their program. They already had the evidence that to conclude that Jesus was a sinner, so the man had better join them in denouncing Christ. But to his credit, the man won’t play along. There’s high courtroom drama here. He stood up to the religious leaders and he said, “Whether he’s a sinner or not, I don’t know. One thing I know, I was blind, but now I see.” They then asked him, “Well, just go over your testimony once again. Tell us exactly how this happened.” And he’s uh I think he’s exasperated with that. So he quite cunningly and sarcastically replied, “I’ve told you already you did not listen. Why do you want to hear it again?” And then he puts this little dig in them. Do you want to become his disciples, too? And that’s that’s a last straw. The religious leaders, they’re not about to be lectured by an illiterate beggar. And asked if they wanted to become Jesus’ disciples. I think they’re very red in the face. And they blurt out, “We are disciples already. We’re disciples of Moses. We’re followers of the law. Now, I’m sure if Moses had been there and had looked at those guys with their blind, shriveled applications of the law of God. I mean, this was a law that had been conveyed to Moses on Mount Si with the utmost of glory. When Moses came down from receiving the law, his face shone. People could hardly stand it. Moses knew the glory of God in the face of Christ. 2 Corinthians 4:6 says, “For God who said, “Let light shine out of darkness has shone in our hearts to uh give us the glory of God in the face of Christ.” So the face of Christ should reflect the glory of God. And when Jesus was transfigured on the mountain, he had Moses and Elijah with him. Moses knew the blinding glory of Jesus Christ. And so I don’t think he would ever have adopted these guys as his disciples, these shriveled religious leaders when he knew all about the glory of God in the face of Christ. The blind man then who could see so clearly, he wasn’t having anything to do with this disenchanted theology of the Pharisees. So he said to them, “Now that’s remarkable. You don’t know where he comes from, but he opened my eyes. We know that God does not listen to sinners. He listens to the godly man who does his will. Nobody has ever heard of opening the eyes of a man born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing. And with that, the exasperated Pharisees, they had had enough. It says they threw him out, likely meaning that they did excommunicate him from Jewish fellowship. and their parting condemnation of the man. It’s it it echoes the start of the passage when the disciples were looking and asking Jesus, “That guy born blind, was it his sin or was it his parents’ sin?” Well, the Pharisees have made their conclusion. Their final words of condemnation said to the man, “You were steeped in sin at birth. How dare you lecture us?” Now, it’s not difficult from our historical van vantage point to see the the error of the Pharisees ways. their their fixation with religion had blocked their ability to observe and rejoice in the miraculous things Jesus was doing. They couldn’t see the glory. But we shouldn’t be too quick, I don’t think, to look down on the Pharisees and and congratulate ourselves because general disenchantment, closing ourselves off from the miraculous is pretty endemic in our modern world and in our church. Author Rod Dreer has written a book entitled Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age. And his book is a call for people like us to recognize a world that’s far more enchanted, far more brighter and beautiful than we normally think it is. And at the same time to see that the world is much darker as well. It’s populated by evil spirits and demons and powers and principalities. So our world very thick with spirits. That’s how the Bible presents our world with angels and demons and manifestations and miracles. But in our in our preodern past before our age, people just took that for granted. Everyone took for granted that the world was enchanted. But not our generation. So here’s what Dreer says. He says, “The social world that sustained this everyday view of enchantment has disappeared. It’s not to say that no one still believes in God. It is to say, however, that even for many Christians in the present time, the vivid sense of spiritual reality that our enchanted ancestors had has been drained of its life force. Instead, many of us experience Christianity as a set of moral rules, as the bonds that hold a community together, as a strategy for therapeutic self-help, or perhaps as the ground of political commitment. He says, “And yes, it is all those things, but without the living experience of enchantment, present and accessible and at the pulsating center of life in Christ, the faith loses its wonder. And when it loses its wonder, it loses its power to console us and change us and call us to acts of heroism. Slowly, imperceptibly, the vibrant life of the spirit ebs away, and with it es our confidence in ultimate meaning, maybe even our hope for the future. The world has never been truly disenchanted. We modern people have simply lost the ability to perceive the world with the eyes of wonder. We can no longer see what is really real. and fueling our disenchantment. Things like just our our rationalism. We we prioritize rationalism over feeling and our fragmentation and our deep need to control everything around us. Journalist Nicholas Carr has written on how the internet has rewired our brains. Greatest machine humanity’s ever built. At the same time, may be the most effective way of disenchanting our world and disenchanting our lives. Nicholas Carr writes, “Our brains were just not made to function with internet technology. It renders the task of understanding what we perceive much more difficult. Takes patience and concentration to evaluate new information and to gauge its accuracy and to weigh its relevance and its work and put it in context. And the internet by design subverts patients and concentration. When the brain is overloaded by stimuli, as it usually is when we’re peering into a networkconnected computer screen, attention splinters and thinking becomes superficial and memory suffers. We become less reflective, more impulsive. And far from enhancing human intelligence, the internet degrades it. And Dreer adds, “The internet destroys our ability to focus attention. That unruly crowd of competing messages jostling for the attention of our prefrontal cortex not only makes it harder for our brains to focus, but it renders it far more difficult for us to form memories. This is because for lasting memories to lodge in our minds, we need to process the information with sustained attention. Using the internet creates brains that cannot easily remember. It also creates brains that cannot easily pray. Now, I don’t think it’s possible or advisable for any of us to get rid of the internet or devest ourselves of it. I don’t think our technology is going to go backwards. But I think we should reflect on maybe what it’s doing to us and what it’s doing to our appreciation of our enchanted world. If it if it stifles our prayers, if it neutralizes our ability just to sit down quietly and read the Bible or read a book, if it diminishes our sense of wonder with what angels and demons and the spirit of God is doing around us, then it’s working against us. It’s not working for us. And we might be in danger of becoming more like the Pharisees, consumed with a lot of religious information, with all those bits and bites of regulation. But it’s a prayerless world of doubt and it’s a desire to control everything. Jesus says, “For judgment, I’ve come into this world so the blind will see and those who see will become blind.” In other words, Jesus is is the key to clarity to having our eyes or else having our eyes clouded over. Either the scales are falling off our eyes and our vision’s getting better or we’re slowly becoming blind to the enchanted nature of what our world is really like. 1972 the novelist Tobias Wolf he was in his late 20s at the time and he went to Lured France that’s the site of a lot of uh Catholic pilgrimages the site of miraculous healings to and he went there to help the sick pilgrims who were coming bathe in the waters because they were hoping for a cure and Wolf himself had uh had always had poor vision but he hated wearing glasses so he uh he went through his whole entire youth in a bit of a blur And one day his crew was accompanying a group of disabled Italian pilgrims. They were on their way to the airport to catch their flights home. And his assignment was to care for a little paralyzed 2-year-old girl. She was confined to bed with tubes coming out of her nostrils that drained into bags under her blanket. And it was hot and it was muggy. Passengers were loading the plane. Then unexpectedly, for no apparent reason, the door to the plane closed while the child was still waiting to board, stranding her. Wolf says he panicked. He desperately tried to keep the insects off the suffering child and and he wept for her and he wept over the cruelty of the world. And then the plane door reopened to let the child on. And as it did, Wolf was still sobbing. Uh but no one noticed because everyone was sweating buckets. And on the bus ride back to Lurard from the airport, Wolf, still not wearing his glasses, noticed that he could suddenly see things off in the distance. He rubbed his eyes to clear them, thinking that maybe that mixture of of sweat and tears had formed some kind of lens over his eyes that enabled him to see, but the effect didn’t go away. He says, “I felt giddy and restless, happy, but uncomfortable, not myself at all.” And he wrote to a fellow author, John Cromwell. He says, “Then I had the distinct thought that when I got back to Lurard, I should go to the grotto and pray. That was all. Just go to the grotto and pray.” But he didn’t do that. He fell into conversation with an Irishman, decided not to tell him about the miracle. He never went to the grotto. The next morning, he woke up and his eyes were back to their broken state, and he was reduced to having to wear his glasses again. And Wolf tells his friend Cornwell, “What interests me now is why I didn’t go. I felt, to be sure, is some incredul, but that wasn’t the reason.” And he says, “And I have a weakness for good company and good talk, but that wasn’t it either. That was only a convenient distraction.” As he reflects on it, he says, “At heart, I must not have wanted this thing to happen. By giving up doubt, I would have lost that measure of pure self-interest to which I felt myself entitled by doubt. Doubt was my connection to the world, to the faithless self in whom I took refuge when faith got hard. Imagine the responsibility of losing it. What then? No wonder I was afraid of this gift. Afraid of seeing so well. It’s a very human story. He had experienced a miracle. All he was asked to do was sacrifice a few minutes of his time to to go to the grotto just to pray. And tragically, he says in his doubt, he preferred his blindness. It gave him license to behave in ways that he wouldn’t have been able to if he really knew that God was real and watching over him. Jesus states that his presence is a dividing line. It causes blind people to see. Causes people who think they can see to become blind. And really the call for us in this passage is just to not be afraid of enchantment. That’s the application. Don’t don’t fear the glory of God. Don’t let doubt bubble up so strongly in our lives that we miss how enchanted our world really is. You know, when I when I think of my own times, those little those glimpses of glory that I’ve seen over the years, those unusual experiences of God’s presence, well, it’s it’s encouraging and it’s faithbuing, but it’s really easy to cover that over with cataracts again and and forget about it and put it down and not uh and not give credence to it, not thank God for it. Near the end of our passage, you know, Jesus learns that this guy has been thrown out of the synagogue. he’s uh he’s uh he’s no longer in fellowship. And Jesus very tenderly goes looking for this blind man until he finds him. And when he did, Jesus said to him, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” To which the healed man responds, “Who is he, sir? Tell me so that I may believe in him.” Jesus says, “You’ve now seen him. In fact, he is the one speaking with you.” And we read that the healed man then said,”Lord, I believe and incredibly he worshiped him.” Wor worship is probably the most key indicator of our spiritual sight becoming clear of seeing with greater clarity when we can worship in spirit and truth and with sincerity and with hope. You know, there’s an astounding trajectory in this man’s life as you follow through the through the chapter. First, when he’s talking about Jesus, he uses the phrase the man they call Jesus. Next, under uh questioning by the Pharisees, he says he’s a prophet. Then he says, well, he must be from God. Finally, he calls Jesus Lord. And then he worships him. Phenomenal thing to do for one Jewish man to worship another Jewish man. But this man was seeing with religious clarity that none of the religious leaders were able to see. And that clarity concerning Jesus, it was only going to increase once Jesus died willingly on the cross for sin. And he offered eternal life to all who would receive him. Paid the penalty for our sins. He rose from the grave in resurrection glory. He appeared undeniably to hundreds of people in Israel over the course of the next 40 days. He then visibly ascended into heaven. So our world could be charged then with the ongoing enchantment of the Holy Spirit. This passage is really just a call for you and I take an eye exam. Maybe we know that we have a pretty fractured attention span. It’s aided and emedded by the internet. I’m sure it hasn’t taken away our faith in Christ, but maybe we’re not seeing as clearly as we used to or as clearly as we need to. We don’t have the attention span to read and to pray and to meditate and to anticipate God’s spirit at work around us and and through the lives of others and through our lives. Maybe we know we’re not seeing as well anymore and we need to make some changes. The most dangerous place for us to be would be to deny that we’re having any trouble at all with our eyesight. We refuse to go see the doctor. We refuse to change our prescription. It’s like the Pharisees refusing to admit that they’re having any trouble seeing. That’s the only eyesight problem that really has no remedy at all. There’s no greater blindness than to be blind to our own blindness. So, if we can’t look back at a time when we were spiritually blind and have some notion of how God worked in our lives to either suddenly or gradually restore our sight, then we’re probably still not seeing reality very clearly. We still need Jesus to put that mudpack on our eyes and and cause us to see. We need to dispel our doubts with with that sincere worship. So only only you know how your eyesight really is doing this morning. But if our eyesight is sharpening, it’s not becoming dull, we’re going to see more of the enchanted world this week, more of the things that are really happening around us. More of the things that Jesus is really pleased to dwell in. So just a a few things in response to God’s word that you may want to pray about this morning. might want to take in the next couple moments just ask God to show you ways that maybe you have habituated to a very flattened, disenchanted, secular view of God’s world. Ask God to open your eyes to the reality of the enchantment and thank Jesus that he has opened your eyes and he’s committed to giving you increased spiritual clarity. This is just your time, your business with God for the next couple moments and then I’ll close us off after that. So take some time to pray.