Biography
Gordon MacDonald is a graduate of Stony Brook School, University of Colorado, and Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary (Denver). For the past two years he has served as President of Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, a powerful and popular ministry to young adults on almost every college and university campus in America. Prior to this time, he was Senior Minister, Grace Chapel, Lexington, Massachusetts, and a professor of pastoral ministry at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. He is an author, and his speaking and lecturing engagements have made him a world traveler [Biographical information is correct as of the broadcast date noted above.]

"Look Again a Second Time" 
Every once in a while when my wife and I take a vacation in the New England area, we make it a point to go to the town of Stockbridge, a beautiful New England town in western Massachusetts. One of the things that draws us to Stockbridge is a beautiful museum in which are housed a large number of the paintings done by the American artist, Norman Rockwell.

If you are old enough like I am to remember the great covers on the Saturday Evening Post that Rockwell painted so many times, you’d be drawn to this museum too. For there on the walls of each room are these magnificent original canvases that Rockwell painted, many of them designed for those Saturday Evening Post covers.

I remember the first time that we toured that museum. I was enthralled by looking at each of these canvases — the magnificence of the color, the exactness, with which Rockwell had painted his figures. On another occasion my wife and I returned to the museum, but this time the trip through the rooms was different. We were guided by someone who knew the Rockwell paintings well. This time we saw things in each of those paintings we had never seen before. This expert was capable of pointing out to us the little innuendoes and detail that Rockwell had put into each of those paintings to deliver very subtle and special messages. It was a remarkable experience — this second look at something that Rockwell had painted. We saw things that we had never seen before.

Each time I contemplate that sort of an experience I realize that that’s really a parable about life. There are so many things, so many experiences and activities that you and I go through each day which, if we took a second look at them, we would see at a different level, in a different dimension, and it would call from us different choices and different judgments.

The Bible is replete with stories that make us understand that principal. One of them is the story of one of the great Old Testament prophets whose name was Elisha. If you read the story and study it carefully, it gives cause for lots of humor as well as personal insight.

The story involves two kings: the King of Syria and the King of Israel. They were continually at war with each other. Frankly, they just didn’t like each other very much. The King of Syria was apparently the more dominant of the two and if he could have ever gotten his act together completely, he probably could have beaten the King of Israel quite badly. But he had one thing going against him, and it’s a very amusing side of the story. Every time he set forth some new plans and moved his army and his headquarters about, the King of Israel always seemed to be just one step ahead. Finally the King of Syria made a very obvious deduction. Someone in his household or someone among his military command was slipping information about the plans ahead of time to the King of Israel.

Does this recall anything to you in the contemporary days of White House politics in the last many years — that whole problem of leaks? Where is the information coming from? And that’s exactly what the King of Syria wanted to know. So he called his servants and his officers together and he says in effect in Biblical language, “One of you is leaking information to the King of Israel. He knows exactly what I’m going to do ahead of time.”

One of the men stepped forward and said to the king, “There’s none of us guilty of such a leak. Frankly, we know where the problem is coming from. It has to do with a man who has been sent from God and his name is Elisha. He lives southward in the town of Dothan. And every time you make a plan, he knows, strangely, exactly what you’re going to do and he slips word to the King of Israel. In fact, and this is fairly intimate talk, he knows exactly what you say even in your bedroom at night.” Now that’s getting pretty personal.

The King of Syria immediately reacted. He was angry to know that there was someone who could predict his actions and monitor every word that easily. So he gathered his army and he said, “Gentlemen, I want you to head for Dothan. I want you to wipe this man out.”

And the army moved southward and during the night all the troops, all the chariots, and all the weaponry were carefully positioned encircling the town of Dothan. You could say that Elisha was had!

And that’s exactly what Elisha’s manservant discovered the next morning when he came out from the house where Elisha lived. It didn’t take many minutes for him to look around 360 degrees in the circle and count the soldiers, and see the shining chariots, the spears, the bows and arrows, and everything else that was there, and say to himself, “My Lord, the prophet Elisha has been had.”

And that’s exactly what he did. He ran back in and he said to Elisha, “We’re in serious trouble. They’re here. They’re outnumbering us.”

And Elisha walked out, looked around, and said to this young man, “Don’t worry about a thing. They that are with us are far more significant and far more powerful than they that are with them.”

Strange words because what the servant could see with his eyes didn’t figure out to be that way.

There is one more part to this story. Elisha, knowing what was on his side and knowing what he had to do, stepped forward and prayed, “Lord, open this man’s eyes.” And when that prayer was prayed, the eyesight of the servant was opened to see things in a whole new dimension than he had ever seen before.

Suddenly he looked beyond those troops and those chariots and those spears and he saw the army of the Lord, a host of heavenly beings that surrounded Elisha and guaranteed absolutely his safety. It was something no one else could have seen unless their eyes were opened as Elisha had prayed about the servant’s eyes. In other words, Elisha is saying to his servant, “Take a second look.”

The story concludes in this way. Now Elisha stepped forward to the soldiers who had come representing the King of Syria, the soldiers who at that moment were so confident that they had the circumstances and the situation perfectly under control. And he says to the Lord in a second prayer, “Lord, close their eyes.” And immediately these soldiers, the crack troops of the King of Syria, were struck blind.

It’s almost comical as the prophet, who is supposed to be had that day, marches up to the head of the army and says, “What are you gentlemen looking for?”

And they said, “We’re headed toward this town, we’re looking for this person,” and Elisha, now unknown to them, because they are blind, says, “Why don’t you follow me?”

And within a few short hours Elisha delivers these soldiers who had come to do him in, right into the hands of the King of Israel, where they are taken captive.

That’s a remarkable story! Every time I read it, the first thing I do is laugh. And then after my laughter subsides, I begin to ask the question as one ought always to ask when one looks to the scriptures, “What does this mean?” What did God mean for us to learn when his Spirit caused writers to carry this story down to you and to me?

Throughout the scriptures, the subject of the eyes constantly pops up again and again, the eyes of people who could see and of those who couldn’t see. Take for example the man in the ditch whose eyes were physically blind and he was presented into the presence of the Lord Jesus Christ, and Christ unleashed incredible healing power and the eyes of that man were opened up. When people asked him what had happened, he said, “Well, I really don't know what has happened. All I know, once I was blind but now I see.”

There were a couple of other men who one day walked along a road toward a small town called Emmaus. They talked with Christ, they listened to Christ, they traded information with Christ, but strangely enough their eyes were not opened wide enough, in a spiritual sense, to know with whom they were speaking. And soon after he had been with them a while, and they came to a place where they could eat supper together, and began to break the bread at the table, and they heard Jesus pray, the scripture says, “Suddenly their eyes were opened and they knew that they had been with the Lord.”

Conversely, the eyes come back again into the theme of the scriptures. When we tell and see the story of St. Paul and his conversion on the road to Damascus, there the glory and the power and the splendor of the Lord Jesus Christ became so great that the open eyes of Paul became closed and for a while he was blinded, dumbstruck.

Now we have this theme over and over again, and I want you to return to it once again in the story of Elisha. When Elisha prayed, “Lord, open his eyes,” and he prayed a second time, “Lord, close their eyes,” he was telling us something about ourselves. I’d like you for just a moment to think with me about the situation of that servant. When that servant went out that morning from the household of Elisha and he looked around and he counted the enemy troops, and he saw that power of their chariots and their weaponry, his immediate conclusion was one exactly like you and I would have had. He would have said to himself, “The circumstances here are obvious. It’s all over. Elisha is about to be killed and I’ll probably die with him.” It’s the pessimistic, negative conclusions of a man whose natural eyesight can help him see just so far.

You see when our eyes are merely natural, there is only so much we can see. I think of the words of the English poet, William Blake, who spoke of the eyes in words like these — he said:

This life’s dim windows of the soul
Distort the heavens from pole to pole,
And they leave you to believe a lie
When you see with, and not through, the eye.

What was Blake trying to say? Well, he was trying to deliver a message that’s very apropos to that servant. If all in life I do is see with my eyesight, I’m not going to see the whole dimension of truth. I’m only going to see the here and now, and that servant that day saw only soldiers, who were his enemies, and he rightly concluded, given that extent, that life was just about over.

I don’t know about you but I have the sense that all the way through my life on many occasions, I have been limited with eyesight like that. I can think of times when I grew deeply scared because I was in the midst of circumstances from which there seemed to be no escape, events over which I had no control. I have recollections of many nights like many other men and women, laying in bed awake hour after hour, scared of failure or scared of being embarrassed, scared of being defeated, scared of my limitations. Why? Why such a fear? Because my eyesight wasn’t adequate. I wasn’t seeing the whole truth.

I’m old enough now to have spent a lot of time with many men and women with eyesight which limits them also. The person whose eyesight is limited by physical sickness, or by a sense of limitation because one’s skills and capacities just don’t seem to be large enough to adequately undertake control of the circumstance or situation. I have no doubt that this afternoon I speak to men and women in this television audience whose eyesight is bringing them to a point of deep fear and despair.

Someone thinks about the possibility of bad news coming from the lips of a physician this week with whom they have an appointment. A man or woman suffers because they wonder what’s going to happen on their job in the next couple of days, and they have the expectation that maybe the job is going to collapse from under them.

The person who feels a body growing weak upon him, the one who fears the aging process and discovers the energies of youth slipping away. There are all sorts of things like that.

There are the relationship situations which sometimes bring us into great despair because our eyesight is diminished or limited. We wonder if our marriage can make it, or whether we’re going to lose contact with one of our children, or whether our relationship with a parent is going to get out of control.

And we have the same kind of reaction as that servant had that day when he walked out into the open air and he saw all of those enemy troops and that was all his eyes would permit him to see. As far as he was concerned, life was over. And the prophet prays, “Lord, open this man’s eyes.”

Now there’s another group there who had a different perspective. They stood there with the spears in their hands. They stood on the backs of their chariots and on the tops of their horses. They counted their horsepower, if you please, and the amount of their weaponry, and their eyes suggested to them that they had everything under control. I would propose to you that these men stood there, or sat there, or whatever, and they were filled with arrogance, with a kind of false self-confidence. “There is nothing that can stop us now. We have got the world in our hands.”

I’ve not only met the broken people whose eyesight is limited and therefore they see no future to tomorrow. But you, like me, have met those people who have that kind of eyesight as those soldiers seemed to have that day, that make them think arrogantly that they can control anything.

I’ve sat with a business person who thinks that he or she has control over the destinies of everybody and can make anything happen that he or she wants to have happen. I’ve known the person who has a physical body that is either beautiful or strong and thinks, “There are no limits to what I can do.” Or the young person who says, “Life is going to go on forever.”

Those people remind me of those soldiers who thought that with all of their massed physical and material power that nothing could go wrong. The servant looks and then prays, “Lord, close their eyes.” For what eyesight they have will be taken away from them. And now they’re not going to see anything, and down they tumble in defeat, humiliation and embarrassment. Because the way they looked at things and the things they were trying to do against God’s man and against God’s purposes and plans, simply took them away from what capacity they had and left them with nothing.

That's the story of humankind down through the centuries, whenever men and women have tried to go it alone without God. That’s the story of any person who has thought they could walk through life simply counting on the things that they could see with their natural eyesight. For them the prophet prays, “Lord, close their eyes. There is coming a time for consequence and judgment.” Really, it’s not a pretty story and it’s not a happy ending.

I want to go back, however, to that servant. The faith statement is made by the prophet, “They who are with us are greater than those who are against us.” Who is the “they”? When the eyes are opened up, it becomes very clear, “they” are the armies of God.

What an incredible experience it must have been for that servant when suddenly his eyesight zoomed out, as the photographer might say, when he entered with his eyesight into a new dimension and he saw things in reality that no one else could have ever seen. It must have been a marvelous moment for there far beyond the natural eyesight of anybody else, were these armies. And the servant now makes a new bottom line calculation, “Those who are with us are far greater than those who are against us.”

And now suddenly the fear and the despair dissolves. This servant has found a whole new level of faith. And you can sense in that marvelous story that in those few seconds when the eyesight of the servant is opened up that fear dissolves and he becomes a new man.

I told you that story and I’ve gone into such detail on that story because I think within it, a story that’s 3,000 years old, is a message for you and for me. It's a story whose principles can be carried with us every day of our lives. You see, you could put it this way. When a man or a woman chooses to follow the Christ, whose name was Jesus, the thing that happens when we give ourselves to him and choose to follow him is that our eyesight is opened up. We begin to see through the eyes of faith. This is not an ignorant, naive kind of happy, positive thought type of life-style I speak about. This is a heavenly experience, for now suddenly things begin to open up to us that we would never have seen otherwise. And we begin to walk through life with the eyes of faith.

St. Paul had those eyes of faith and he used them every day. In a jail cell toward the end of his life he could say, “I rejoice in being here. Even though I traveled the world and had maximum liberation and freedom to do whatever I wanted in serving God, I’m happier here in prison because I’m seeing things with this eyesight of mine that God can do with me, and through me, that lie could not have done in any other way. Yes, there are people out to execute me here in this jail. But that’s all right because through my eyes of faith I begin to realize that no matter how much pain and how much human limitation, I could be in the presence of Christ and that’s far greater.”

You see, when a woman or a man follows Christ, those eyes of faith become real, and powerful every day.

I would trust that if you have never chosen to give your life to Jesus Christ that you would do that today. Because when that happens, your eyes will be opened up, and you will begin to see realities and powers and opportunities and possibilities in the routines of life that you would have never imagined possible. That’s why God’s people can be so powerful and carry with them an honest sense of heavenly confidence that could come from no other source.

I have a friend whose name is John. He is a top-flight engineer and manager. I met John fourteen or fifteen years ago. He was sitting about half-way back in our church congregation one Sunday morning with his wife. We met at the end of the service and I immediately liked him. And because I liked him, I invited him to have lunch with me as soon as possible.

And before many days had gone by, we found ourselves facing each other over a lunch table in a local restaurant. We talked for a while about our backgrounds and how as men we had moved into adulthood, chosen our vocations, and what had brought us to this point. And then we got to why John had come to church. I’ll remember his words as long as I remember John. He said to me, “There’s one thing you need to get very straight. I only come to church because of my wife. She needs religion — I don’t. I’m coming, first of all, to make her happy, and secondly, to encourage her, and thirdly to enter her world. But those are the only reasons.”

Well, I choked on a bit of my food and thought, “What do I say next?” And then I heard myself say, “John, I really don’t care what reason has brought you to church. I only ask that you do this one thing. Whenever you enter into the sanctuary, why don’t you offer this little prayer to this God whom you’re not even sure is there. It won’t hurt, John. You have nothing to lose. And you might as well not waste the time if you have to be there. Simply say, ‘God, if you’re there, somehow open my eyes and help me to see something of you in this hour.’”

John said, “Gordon, I’ll do that.”

And for the next many months that’s exactly what John did. Every Sunday morning, “Lord, open my eyes and help me to see you if you're there.”

One day I met John again for lunch. Using, in his own spiritual way, a little bit of profanity, he said, “You’ve got me. Better yet, God’s gotten me. He’s opened my eyes. I found Christ.”

And today John is a new man, seeing new realities, making new judgments and decisions in his life because he has the eyes of Christ which have been awakened and opened because one day he gave himself to him.

Take another look at this world and see, far beyond the natural limitations of eyesight, Jesus Christ is there. He is inviting you to come to know him and follow him today.