Blinded By My Rightness


  1. Message: In Acts 9 Saul is at war against all those who call on the name of Jesus. He is on a personal mission to arrest and throw into prison any of them that he can find because he fully believes he is doing this on God’s behalf. In the middle of it all he has his encounter with Jesus where he is suddenly blinded by a bright light, thrown off his horse and hears the voice of Jesus himself asking why he is persecuting him. This story is so famous that even non-believers use common references to the idioms we have drawn from it. One of the most popular phrases we hear is “blinded by the light” or “knocked off his high horse”. As I was reading this again today, I was thinking about Paul’s sudden blindness and I realized that he had always been spiritually blind, and God had used the sudden physical blindness to reveal this to him. The scariest part about being blind and deceived is that you don’t even know it! Paul fully believed he was doing the work of God when he persecuted the church. He saw himself in right standing with God as a very devout and well-educated Jew enforcing God’s law. It must have been a total shock to him when he heard Jesus speak to him the way that he did.
  2. Command: Don’t become so academically right that I am unable to recognize God when he reveals himself to me.
  3. Promise: Nobody is unreachable. Saul was moving in the opposite direction when God literally knocked him down to have a real encounter with him.
  4. Warning: We can be so right in what we know that we miss God himself.
  5. Application:  I have always been afraid of the possibility of blindly living in deception. The truth is, we are all blind and deceived about a lot of things, but nobody wants to get caught realizing they were moving in the wrong direction. I have had to accept that we will always have things we are blinded to, but my prayer is that I would allow my heart to be in a place where God is able to teach me and reveal truth to me without having to knock the pride out of me to do it. 1 Peter 5:5 says that God resists the proud but gives grace to the humble. I don’t want to find myself working against God so I’m asking God to keep my heart tender and teachable. That I wouldn’t become so attached to my own ideas of truth that I prevent God’s voice from getting to my heart when he speaks to me.

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