Looking Into The Eyes of Jesus Part 3
1 Corinthians 13:4-8
The human eye is a powerful communication tool.
We use our eyes to receive countless images each day,
But we can also express ourselves, our attitudes, our emotions with
our eyes.
Sometimes our eyes speak louder than our words.
Here are a couple of general observations about the possible meaning of our
eye movement.
Again let me emphasize these are possible meanings.
In a business meeting,
Blank stare means the lights are on but nobody is home.
A glance at the door my indicate a desire to leave.
A rolling of the eyes can be a sign of disagreement
A sideways glance can mean irritation
A glance into the eyes of an other may be a request for them to speak.
Looking down can be a sign of submission
Sitting in the interrogation room,
Avoiding eye contact suggest an attempt to avoid or hide something
Maintaining eye contact gives the impression of honesty.
A glance to your left, may indicate you are imagining something,
Making up a story.
Unless your are left handed then the opposite is true.
A glance to your right, may indicate you are remembering something.
Excessive blinking can mean either there is something in your eye,
or your lying
A glance up is usually a sign of thinking or recalling a memory
But if that glance occurs in a classroom it can also mean
your bored.
Eyes moving from side-to-side can indicate shiftiness like your
looking for an escape route.
Making Eye contact with someone is a request to respond.
If we lock eyes its usually aggressive or can be a scream for help.
Making eye contact and glancing away and then quickly making eye
contact again is usually a flirting move.
Look again with a momentary raise of the eyebrow and you
have expressed interest.
So you make a little more consistent eye contact.
If you and the person you are looking at synchronize your
blinking well that’s an invite to take flirting to the next
level.
When you are experiencing pleasure your pupils dilate
When you are stressed your pupils contract.
Want to know if that’s a genuine smile?
No eye movement with a fake smile,
While a genuine smile comes with eyes that have a little
squint to them.
Eyes can be soft or hard,
Shining or dull betraying mood.
Or communicating intent.
The human eye speaks.
So what do the eyes of Jesus say?
We’ve been considering 1 Corinthians 13: 4-8 to discover our answer.
1 Corinthians 13:4-8 (MSG)
Love never gives up. Love cares more for others than for self. Love doesn't want what it doesn't have. Love doesn't strut, Doesn't have a swelled head, Doesn't force itself on others, Isn't always "me first," Doesn't fly off the handle, Doesn't keep score of the sins of others, Doesn't revel when others grovel, Takes pleasure in the flowering of truth, Puts up with anything, Trusts God always, Always looks for the best, Never looks back, But keeps going to the end. Love never dies.
When you look into the eyes of Jesus
they communicate patience.
they communicate kindness
they communicate trust.
they communicate care.
When you look into the eyes of Jesus they communicate humility.
they communicate that He is aware of your feelings.
they communicate respect.
When you look into the eyes of Jesus you see contentment.
you see forgiveness.
Today we are going to consider verse 6
1 Corinthians 13:6 (NIV)
Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.
I may have given you the impression that Jesus is like a dotting grandparent.
But this is where I hope to put that notion to rest.
1. When you look into the eyes of Jesus you will see no delight in evil
Tolerance used to be a good word.
It meant that there was a little jiggle room.
Something didn’t have to be perfect, it could be close enough;
A permissible range of variation.
Tolerance referred to the endurance level of something.
High tolerance, one could take a lot before something needed to be
changed.
Low tolerance, just the opposite.
Tolerance meant we could have differing opinions,
Strongly held contradictory perspectives,
But we agreed to disagree and not go to war over our interests.
Today tolerance is being defined as not only accepting a differing reality
but moving over and making room at your table to accommodate it,
honor it as an equal, in some cases even
applaud it. (Dale Burke)
Today tolerance means that essentially,
nothing is absolutely right or absolutely wrong.
That calamity of judgment is based on the notion that there is no
absolute truth, only relative truth.
The post-modern argument goes that language is a human creation,
all our labels are arbitrarily assigned,
and thus do not have correspondence with any reality.
Something is true or false,
Good or bad,
Because we have determined it to be so.
This is nothing more the result of eating from the tree of the knowledge of good
and evil.
Genesis 3:5 (MSG)
God knows that the moment you eat from that tree, you'll see what's really going on. You'll be just like God, knowing everything, ranging all the way from good to evil."
God is His own standard.
His attributes are woven in the very fabric of the universe.
The Creator is Truth,
the Creator is Righteousness,
the Creator is Justice,
The Creator is in of Himself the standard by which
everything else is determined to be good or
evil.
What happens to humanity is that eating from the tree, mankind places Self as the
standard and judges everything as good or evil based on human experience.
Each person becomes the arbitrator of their own morality.
Remove the standard and then Judges 17:6 reveals the dilemma:
“everyone did as he saw fit.” (NIV)
“everyone did what was right in his own eyes” (NKJV)
Isaiah 5:20-21 (NIV)
Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter. Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes and clever in their own sight.
Evil and sin go hand in hand,
in Jesus eyes,
they lead to acts of unrighteousness.
There is no tolerance for deeds that deter, damage and destroy relationships.
I think sometimes we believe that God is just going to wink at sin and give
us a pass.
Maybe we think that God “has to” forgive us of our trespasses against
the moral law of the universe just because we ask.
We try to rationalize away verses like:
Matthew 5:48 & Hebrews 12:14 (NIV)
“Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” “…without holiness no one will see the Lord.”
But there is no joy in Jesus eyes for evil behavior.
By grace you “get into” the family of God,
By obedience you “stay in” the family of God,
If there is no fruit from obedience your faith is dead.
In our study of the Book of Revelation we were confronted this truth of no
tolerance for sin in the eyes of Jesus.
Revelation 1:14 (NLT)
And his eyes were like flames of fire.
Flaming eyes is a picture of Jesus’ “power to scrutinize and search every life,
to penetrate the inner chambers of every imagination…”
(J. Oswald Sanders, Spiritual Maturity, p. 86)
There is nothing that is hidden from the eyes of Christ.
He knows your story better than you do.
What you think is private, is not.
The stirrings of your imagination are known.
The desires of your heart are known.
Nothing is hidden.
Revelation 19:11-12 (NLT)
Then I saw heaven opened, and a white horse was standing there. Its rider was named Faithful and True, for he judges fairly and wages a righteous war. His eyes were like flames of fire…
Those flaming eyes wage a righteous war against all that is not righteous.
Truth can burn through all our delusions of who we are:
Knight of the Mirrors—Don Quioxte
We think judgment is just for the unbelievers.
We believers get the “ole get out of jail card free.”
It’s all covered by the blood, so no worries about how I’m living my
life now.
If that’s what you think—let me clue you in.
2 Corinthians 5:9-10 (NIV)
So we make it our goal to please him, whether we are at home in the body or away from it. For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, that each one may receive what is due him for the things done while in the body, whether good or bad.
It matters what you do.
It matters how you live your life.
It matters how you use the gifts God has given you.
It matters what you say.
It all counts, its all seen and recorded,
The good, the bad,
The beauty and the ugliness,
The victories and the defeats.
Nothing escapes the eyes of Jesus.
1 Corinthians 3:13-15 (NLT)
On the judgment day, fire will reveal what kind of work each builder has done. The fire will show if a person’s work has any value. If the work survives, that builder will receive a reward. But if the work is burned up, the builder will suffer great loss. The builder will be saved, but like someone barely escaping through a wall of flames.
Righteousness means rightly related to.
Sin is anything that deters, damages or destroys right relationships.
The four relationships of our lives is with God, Others, the Earth and
Self.
Love, seeking to meet the need of another,
Trumps sin.
Sin is unacceptable.
Love lasts
Sin burns.
Jesus’ eyes can communicate a strong “no”
Because he is intolerant of sin, he does not delight in evil.
2. When you look into the eyes of Jesus you will see rejoicing with the truth.
Sunchair: celebrate
There’s that troublesome word for the culture we are immersed in.
Truth.
If there is no truth, then all we are left with is subjective evaluation.
There are no virtues, there is no beauty, there is no sin,
All is just what I decided for it to be.
But the idea of no absolute truth is a philosopher’s game;
a way for egoism to justify itself.
You can dismiss the physical laws of the universe.
But they effect all of life whether you choose to acknowledge them
or not.
Are they absolute, never changing?
That remains to be seen,
As human knowledge increases,
Our descriptions of the physical truth may change.
But gravity is still going to attract,
Light is still going to travel at about 186 thousand miles a
second.
Do you want the person designing and building your home to use
arbitrary measurements that feel right or do you want plans and
construction to be measured to some past standard of
success?
It doesn’t matter the sincerity of your belief.
Some things are the way they are irregardless to your thoughts
about them.
I suggest to you that there are also moral laws of the universe.
These moral laws revealed to us in Scripture effect all of life
Whether you choose to acknowledge them or not.
Morality is based on a TRUTH that doesn’t change.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,
that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,
that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
This statement is totally meaningless if Truth is arbitrary.
Rights are moral entitlements or permissions.
Remove truth and how are these rights determined?
Article 1 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights
“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.
They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards
one another in a spirit of brotherhood.”
On what is such a statement based if there is no absolute moral truth?
We speak of human rights:
the right to life and liberty, freedom of expression, and equality before the law;
the right to participate in culture, the right to food, the right to work,
and the right to education.
The whole notion of rights begs the question of Truth.
No truth, no standards, no rights.
Truth is reality.
Truth is how things are regardless if you believe or don’t.
Truth has nothing to conceal —Barclay's Daily Study Bible (NT)
Truth “never deals in deception” (Burke p. 114)
Truth express “its expectations clearly” (Burke, p. 128)
Truth “never ignores sin.” (Burke, p. 121)
Truth determines right and wrong
Let me put some verses from scripture side by side:
Jesus said, "I am the Road, also the Truth, also the Life (John 14:6 (MSG); I, the LORD, speak the truth; I declare what is right (Isaiah 45:19 (NIV); Yes, Lord God Almighty, true and just are your judgments (Revelation 16:7 (NIV).
Truth is righteousness.
Truth is standard by which all things are judged.
Truth reveals what is within tolerance and what is not.
When we align ourselves with the truth Jesus rejoices.
The desire and the actions of righteous are cause of celebration.
Truth seekers are party planners.
Discovering truth, living by that truth creates festival.
There is absolute truth and you see it in the eyes of Jesus.
And when you do your life will never be the same.
Conclusion
In the eyes of Jesus you see no tolerance for sin,
And you see a celebration over righteousness.
hates sin but woos the sinner.
The gaze of Jesus
strips you and clothes you,
breaks you and makes you,
slays you and resurrects you,
destroys you and recreates you.
Everyone will look in the eyes of Jesus.
When you look in the eyes of Jesus what do you want them to communicate to
you?
Do you want to see intolerance or rejoicing?
That’s one of those duh questions.
Until you realize what is at stake in order to insure the choice
you made.
For me I want to see rejoicing.
That means I need to live my life according to the Truth.
Jesus is the truth.
Therefore I want to live according to Jesus.
I need to abide in Christ.
It is through the daily practice of the spiritual disciplines that I seek truth.
Bible study, prayer, fellowship, service, worship, obedience and
Contemplation are all occasion for a chance to look into the eyes of
Jesus and know where I stand.
I’ll close with our question:
When you look in the eyes of Jesus what do you want them to communicate to
you?