What A Genius!

Spiritual Insight—do you have it? Can you get it? Why is it that some people are more “in tune” with God than others, or that they seem to have greater insight into God’s word? The story is told of a class of noisy boys in a German primary school that were being punished by their teacher. They were assigned the problem of adding together all the ...numbers from 1 to 100. The boys settled down, scribbling busily on their slates—all but one. This boy looked off into space for a few moments, then wrote something on his slate and turned it in. His was the only right answer.

When the amazed teacher asked how he did it, the boy replied, “I thought there might be some short cut, and I found one: 100 plus 1 is 101; 99 plus 2 is 101; 98 plus 3 is 101, and, if I continued the series all the way to 51 plus 50, I have 101 50 times, which is 5,050.” After this episode, the young scholar received special tutoring from his teacher. The boy was Karl Friedrich Gauss, the great mathematician of the 19th century. Every now and then, God gives us some of that insight into His word. The big issue is that you have to actually get into the word yourself to make those discoveries and gain those insights. It seems as though we have created a church culture of unhealthy dependency – followers of Christ, who are dependent on others to give them insight or tell them the important things from the Bible that I need to know this week. I believe that it is God’s desire that every follower of Christ learn how to study God’s word on his own and make personal discovery and application of God’s truth. While reading devotionals by others, whether books, emails or social media posts, can be good and encouraging to us; nothing replaces you and I, personally taking time to read and study God's word while allowing Him to give us the insight for personal life transformation that He desires in us. That is part of living as an authentic Disciple of Jesus. The Gospel of Mark, gives us two miracle accounts dealing with sight that I believe challenge us to greater spiritual insight. In chapter 8, Jesus heals the blind man at Bethsaida and during his encounter Jesus asks; "Do you see anything?"

Then, in chapter 10 Jesus meets blind Bartimaeus. Hearing him call out, Jesus stopped and instructed them to bring him over. Jesus then asked a rather obvious, direct question of Bartimaeus that you would think we would all know the answer to. Jesus asked; "What do you want me to do for you?" The blind man said; "Rabbi [Christ] I want to see."

The specific word for "healed" that Jesus used with Bartimaeus can refer to physical healing and spiritual salvation. I believe that Bartimaeus experienced both.

What about you? What do you want Jesus to do for you? Are you regularly digging into God's word saying; "I want to see." As you are spending time with Christ in His word, do you hear His gentle voice saying; "Do you see anything?" The more we learn to study His word, the more insight we receive. What are you doing to grow deeper?