A Routine Comprehensive Eye Exam | Agassiz Campus | A Gospel For Everyone

Somebody had mentioned to me just yesterday at the fair, somebody who attends this church, he said, When we started, when we brought Colin and Cassie on the stage and prayed for them, he could literally sense and feel a unity coming to the church.

And that's what care and concern and prayer does, genuine care does for the church.

It unifies us.

And it mitigates, in fact, it's not even on our minds, really, the kind of things that Jesus warns about in scripture, which we're going to get back into today as we resume our series in the gospel of Luke called A Gospel for Everyone.

Jesus talks about how we should treat other people and to mitigate the things that cause division, right? We want to focus on the things that unify us.

And so we took a break at the end of June and did a weird and wonderful series throughout July and August, but we're back in Luke now.

And the last sermon that was preached in Luke was by brother Steve Burrell back there.

And he focused on the passage in Luke chapter six, just prior to the passage that I'm going to preach this morning, which is on loving our enemies.

And it ends with a phrase that we should be merciful even as our father is merciful.

That's the bridge between loving our enemies and what we're going to talk about today.

So today's text is a practical outflow of really loving our enemies because the tendency is for us to treat people whose lives are so much messier than our own perfect lives.

Insert a lot of sarcasm there, okay? Our tendency is to treat people that we think are so messed up as enemies.

Being judgmental, condemning, being unforgiving instead of showing the mercy and the grace and the love and the forgiveness that God wants us to.

Or we view others who do judge us, even if it's in the right way.

Somebody sees something in my life and they speak into my life.

We can view them as our enemies because we don't like it when people try to remove the speck from our eye when they have their own issues, right? Has anyone been there? I've been there.

In fact, this past year, someone removed a speck from my eye.

And I want to tell you that it stung a little bit when they got their fingers in there.

It really did.

But it was necessary.

I needed to hear it.

But at first I had my back against the wall and I thought, who are you? And then the Lord got a hold of me and said, no, they're doing what they need to do because there's something, there is a speck in your eye that needs to be removed.

So today we're going to go for a little checkup.

We're going to have an eye exam, if you will.

You see the value of a routine eye exam is that those exams not only check our overall vision and they'll update, you know, if we wear corrective lenses to correct our vision and But like a regular eye checkup, it screens for hidden things, hidden eye diseases and general health issues.