“Should Have Gone to Specsavers!”

It is a fact that students learn from and grow to be like their teachers. What their teachers teach becomes the knowledge which is the foundation of their lives. For that reason, teachers are specially accountable before the Lord for ensuring that what they teach is faithful to God’s Word and need to check their spiritual eyesight regularly!

When Paul was training Timothy to be an apostolic leader, he told Timothy, “Watch your life and your doctrine closely. Persevere in them, because if you do, you will save both yourself and your hearers” (1 Timothy 4:16). Paul was making it clear that good teaching will save Timothy’s hearers, but implying that bad teaching (from blind teachers) will lead them astray.

So, back to the blind man – if a leader is blind to God’s truth and is going astray, then their blindness will become the blindness of those who hear and follow. If someone is teaching false doctrine, then those who hear are in danger, because they are likely to believe the same way as their teachers. It is absolutely vital, therefore, that we learn how to use the gift of discernment, through which the Holy Spirit can warn us of beliefs that are wrong and of spiritual pits that we are in danger of being led into.

In these very testing days, when there are so many un-scriptural beliefs gaining ground and influence inside various sectors of the church, we need to be very much on our guard – for things are being taught that are not true to the Word of God. We need to look carefully at what the Word of God says, so that we will have a true plumb line against which to measure whether or not what we are being taught and what we believe is faithful to God’s truth or otherwise.

These are severely testing days and Jesus warned us twice in Matthew 24 about the dangers of deception from false prophets. In our Scripture for today He warns us against being led by a blind man into a pit. How important it is to check out the spiritual sight of those who lead us! There is a popular series of advertisements on British television from a firm of opticians which shows people making huge, and sometimes very funny, mistakes because their sight was defective. The adverts always end with the words ‘Should have gone to Specsavers’.

The plumb-line of truth in the Scriptures is God’s equivalent to Specsavers! It’s important that we all have our spiritual eyesight tested against God’s Word. But the mistakes we can make when we can’t see properly are not funny, they can be of eternal consequence - none of us want to hear the equivalent of words such as these spoken over our own life at the end of time - ‘should have gone to Specsavers!’

Prayer: Thank You, Lord, for warning us against being led astray by blind leaders. Help me to discern truth from error in my own life and to regularly check out my spiritual eyesight against the sight chart of God’s Word. In Jesus’s Name. Amen.