“You are worshipping with your eyes shut.”

(John 4:22 – Phillips translation)

By Jacob’s well in Samaria Jesus found a woman who was horribly mixed up. She had intellectual difficulties and problems of faith. “Where is the right place to worship,” she asked. “Here in the mountain where my fathers have worshiped, or in Jerusalem where you Jews say folks ought to worship?” In other words, “Which denomination is the right one?”

Then she had moral problems, too. She had mixed up her life by indiscrete relationships and immoral alliances with a number of men.

Her trouble? It wasn’t that she had no religion. She was troubled with religious blindness. “You have been worshiping with your eyes shut,” Jesus told her. “You worship you know not what.”  Her need? A religious faith with its eyes opened.

St. Paul found the people of Athens had erected a monument to the object of their religious devotions and put upon it this inscription: “To the Unknown God.” It wasn’t that they were irreligious. They worshiped they knew not what. They were a people worshiping with their eyes shut and St. Paul went immediately to work making known to them the nature of the God they worshiped in ignorance.

George Santyanna once said of the American people that we are as a nation traditionally more exercised about religion and more at sea on the subject than any other people on earth. William Alexander Percy, our Southern author, remarked in his Lanterns on the Levee “that the churches wouldn’t know religion if they met it in the middle of the big road.”

Do you ever feel that you are pretty much in the dark about your religious life? That it all seems quite hazy and unreal? That you would like to see with clearer vision and feel with firmer assurance the great affirmations of the Christian faith: the reality of God, the power of the new life, the challenge of Christian service, and the next steps in the establishment of God’s Kingdom?

I saw not long ago a new litter of puppies, not yet nine days old, with their eyes unopened, bumping into and falling all over each other. I thought to myself, “Not much hope for the poor little fellows to get along any better till they get their eyes open.” And there is not much hope for us either in our religious life until we come to a religious faith with its eyes opened. For the puppies it is just a matter of time; for us it is not quite so easy.

For coming to a religion with its eyes opened involves in the first place, opening the eyes of our minds till we behold the moral and spiritual grandeur of Eternal God in the face of Jesus Christ.  John Calvin, whom we Presbyterians revere as our spiritual mentor, held “that true faith must be intelligent; that intelligence and not ignorance is the mother of piety.” John Calvin never believed that churches should be built with doors so low that men in order to enter them must leave their heads outside.

Yet we worship with our eyes shut, not knowing whom we revere until through study of the scriptures we come into personal acquaintance with the Christ of the gospels. For the Christian there is no substitute for knowledge of the New Testament. We cannot know the God whom Jesus Christ reveals until we know what He said and did to reveal the moral grandeur and ethical goodness of His Heavenly Father.

The scripturally illiterate disciple is like an autoist without a road map or highway markings; like an air pilot without flight training; like a surgeon about to perform a delicate abdominal operation without benefit of anatomical knowledge.

James Stewart points out that, “When St. Paul composed his great hymn of praise to love, he began by distinguishing between a vital religion of Jesus Christ, as it had gripped his own experience and certain more or less imperfect and unbalanced forms of religion, which from that day to this have sheltered themselves under the name of Christianity: the religion of ecstatic emotionalism — “speaking with tongues as angels”; the religion of speculation — “having the gift of prophecy and understanding all mysteries”; the religion of working energy — “to remove mountains”; the religion of humanitarian service — “bestowing goods to feed the poor”; the religion of asceticism — “giving the body to be burned.” And all these one sided and patently inadequate representations of the gospel, Paul expressly repudiates.”

And we cannot attain to a religion of opened eyes until the eyes of our minds are opened to behold through study of the scriptures the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

But coming to a religion with opened eyes requires yet another step — not only the eyes of the mind, but also the eyes of the will must be opened that we may behold in perfect clarity the connection between faith and knowledge, prayer and effort, worship and morality.

In our Presbyterian form of government there is a penetrating insight: “Truth is in order to goodness.” It is not enough to see the truth, comprehend correct doctrine. It must be done. How many of us there are who have caught some glimpse of God’s glorious holiness and then blindly shut our eyes to who He is and what He wants of us and strike out in the darkness for what we want rather than for what pleases Him.

Knowledge is not for the sake of knowledge, neither is art for art’s sake, nor science for the sake of science — but all to which the eye of man’s mind is opened is for the purpose of grasping and bringing in glad homage to the service of God’s will. This worship of God in spirit and truth is achieved only by those the eyes of whose wills have been opened to God.

One summer when Rufus Jones was vacationing at his boyhood home in Maine, he took his small five year old son with him on an errand. They were riding in a wagon hitched to the old farm horse. The little boy saw some pretty chicory flowers by the side of the road and said: “Oh Daddy, let me get some of those flowers.” Rufus Jones said later that he should have let the boy go for them himself, but instead he stupidly got out of the buggy, hanging the reins on the seat, never dreaming that the old plug of a horse might be dangerous to leave.  Just as he reached the flowers, he heard the child scream, looked up to see the horse starting off in a gallop with his precious son alone in the wagon. “I prayed with all my soul,” said Rufus Jones, “but I ran as vigorously as I prayed. With the greatest sprint of my life, I dashed after the flying wagon, by a leap far beyond my natural powers — n’doing what I couldn’t — I sprang into the back of the wagon, climbed over the seat, recovered the reins, pulled in the running horse, and saved the day.”

Religion with its eyes opened has a converted will — it sees clearly the relationship between worship and morality, between faith and knowledge, between prayer and effort. It strives as vigorously as it prays.

Finally, coming to a religion with its eyes opened involves opening the eyes of the heart to God in Christ. “If we are ever to live the fuller, richer life of continual association with the presence of God, we must have new eyes, the eyes of the heart enlightened. That means we must see essential realities vividly. We must have our imaginations captured. Matthew Arnold said that conduct is three-fourths of life. But it isn’t. Getting your imagination captured is almost the whole of life.  The minute the eyes of the heart are enlightened, the minute your imagination gives you the picture of your path, your goal, your aim, it is as good as done. The way to become the architect of your fate, the captain of your soul, is to have your imagination captured. We talk about the momentous will, but you tug in vain at your will until your imagination dominates the scene, and at once you are on the way to your goal.”  (R. Jones)

Just to test this for yourself: place a plank six inches wide and ten or twelve feet long on the floor of your living room. Now walk it from one end to the other. You have no trouble at all. But place the same plank on the edge of a wall that skirts the top of a skyscraper 35 stories up and try to walk it. Your head swims, you have butterflies in your stomach, you feel you are losing your balance. What’s wrong? It’s the same plank. Your will to walk it is just as strong or stronger than in your living room. Why the difference? Oh, your imagination has hold of you. You can imagine yourself falling through space and that plays havoc with your control.

“There is no other way to spiritual victory except through having the eyes of your heart enlightened.” That is the way to saddle and kindle and control your instincts and emotions. This happens to be the psychology not only of St. Paul and St. Augustine, but of William James as well. “Consent to an idea’s undivided presence at the focus of attention,” said the Harvard psychologist, “And action follows immediately.”

Yes, consent to taking Jesus Christ to the focus of your undivided attention, let Him capture and hold your imagination, and you will have religion with opened eyes.

Now if ever there was a time when men and women needed a religion with its eyes opened, that time is now. Visibility in the present is pretty poor. But the church has discovered through long experience that one of her very best agencies for fostering religious faith with its eyes opened is the Christian college. There the eyes of the mind are opened to scriptural truth through scholarly teaching of God’s inspired word and all realms of learning are related in the student’s mind to the over-arching purposes of God. There the eyes of the will are opened to see that truth is in order to goodness. There the inner life of the spirit is cultivated by worship, study, and association with godly men and women whose passion it is to do what St. Paul did — so live that Christ lives in them, and the eyes of the students’ hearts are opened to receive and enthrone Christ as master of their imaginations.

I’m told that the men who serve under General Curtis LeMay in the Strategic Air Command often fly through four different climates in a day and must be ready for a crash in frigid cold or tropical jungles, are all prepared through rigorous training with the knowledge and skill which would enable them to make it back alive regardless of where on earth their planes may go down.

Facing an unknown threatening future, can we do less than offer our encouragement and support to our Christian colleges as they prepare our young men and women to go into that future with an open-eyed religious faith?