Vision

Humans have color vision because our eyes contain three types of cone cells. One cone helps us see blue, another to see green, and the third to see red. This is called trichromatic vision. The brain combines signals from these three types of cones to perceive a wide range of colors, allowing humans to distinguish millions of different colors from periwinkle to chartreuse.

There is, however, a rare breed living among us called tetrachro¬mats. They possess a fourth cone, allowing them to see a hundred mil¬lion colors that are invisible to the rest of us. For every color a trichromat sees, a tetrachromat perceives a hundred hues!

I can't help but wonder if we'll get a fifth cone in heaven, enabling us to perceive a billion colors. Or perhaps a sixth, seventh, or hun¬dredth cone! By earthly standards, we'll have extrasensory perception. Everything will smell better, taste better, sound better, feel better, and look better. With our newly glorified senses, we'll hear angel octaves.

Remember when Elisha was surrounded by the Aramean army? He said to his very confused assistant, "Those who are with us are more than those who are with them." Elisha prayed that the Lord would open his servant's eyes, and it's almost like God created an extra cone. "He looked and saw the hills full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha."

Possible Preaching Angle: If our spiritual eyes were opened, what would we see? We'd see what's really happening! We'd see guardian angels, as the scriptures describe them ministering to those who will inherit salvation (Heb. 1:14). We'd discern the manifest presence of God, perhaps like Moses who encountered God's glory on the mountain or Isaiah in God’s throne room (Exod. 33:18-23; Isa. 6:1-7). We'd perceive powers and principalities, those unseen forces at work in the world, as Paul warns us about (Eph. 6:12).

Scientists at UC Berkeley have developed a groundbreaking technology called Oz that uses laser light to make people see a completely new color — a dazzling, ultra-saturated blue-green they named olo. This new hue is unlike anything found in nature.

“Olo” was described as “a profoundly saturated teal … the most saturated natural color was just pale by comparison,” said Austin Roorda, one of Oz’s creators. The platform works by firing precise, tiny bursts of laser light at up to 1,000 light-sensitive cells — called photoreceptors — in the eye at once. With this control, researchers can make people see shapes, moving images, and especially colors that aren't normally visible.

The name Oz is a nod to The Wizard of Oz — a journey to an unknown land with sights never seen before. “We chose Oz to be the name because it was like we were going on a journey to the land of Oz to see this brilliant color that we’d never seen before,” said James Carl Fong, a doctoral student who helped develop the system.

Typically, humans see color using three kinds of cone cells in the retina: one each for blue, green, and red. But because green and red cones respond to very similar light, it's impossible in nature to trigger just the green ones alone. Oz overcomes this by activating only the green cones with laser light, letting people see what might be the “greenest green” ever — olo.

In experiments, people described olo as peacock green or blue-green, and far more intense than even a laser pointer’s green. “When I pinned olo up against other monochromatic light, I really had that ‘wow’ experience,” said Roorda.

Beyond just making people see new colors, Oz could help study vision loss and even explore whether we can expand how humans perceive color. As Roorda puts it: “I think that the human brain is this really remarkable organ that does a great job of making sense of inputs, existing or even new.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

God’s light also reveals spiritual truths beyond our innate understanding

This 2024 report claims that "every state is number one in something." For instance, did you know that:

• Colorado tops the list as the most physically active state.
• Idaho ranks as the number one state for home ownership thanks to affordability.
• Kansas has the least number of poor roadways with less than 1% of roads considered unserviceable.
• Louisiana has the highest number of unmarried adults and thus is the best dating state.
• Michigan has the most golf courses and country clubs per capita.
• When it comes to high school graduations, Nebraska leads with an incredible 93.7% of students graduating.
• Pennsylvania has the most licensed hunters per capita, with 20 hunters per square mile.
• You can binge watch your favorite shows much faster in Tennessee, with internet speeds 50 times quicker than the national average.

You can see the results, best and worst for all 50 states here.

Possible Preaching Angle:

This a fun way to set up a sermon on church vision (“our church's greatest strengths”) or spiritual gifts.

In the fall of 2023, singer Oliver Anthony got his big break in the music industry with his song “Rich Men North of Richmond,” a scathing criticism of wealthy politicians and other movers and shakers. And now that he’s gotten a taste of the music industry in Nashville, he’s decided to live out his convictions.

Anthony revealed in a recent YouTube video, “I’ve decided that moving forward, I don’t need a Nashville management company. I don’t even need to exist within the space of music. So, I’m looking at switching my whole business over to a traveling ministry.” He added, “Our system is broken.”

The singer, whose real name is Christopher Anthony Lunsford, says his vision is not to participate in the system, but transform it. "I have this vision for this thing that I’m calling the Real Revival Project, and it’s basically going to start as a grassroots music festival. But hopefully it grows into something that can literally change our landscape and our culture and the way we live.”

Anthony says he wants to create something that exists parallel to Nashville that circumvents the monopolies of Live Nation and Ticketmaster, and it goes into towns that haven’t had music in them in a long time. And he insists he’s not doing anything revolutionary. “I just want to help bridge the gap between millions of people who all believe in the greater vision of us all just getting back to living a normal life.”

Anthony sees the decline of the industry as part of a larger pattern that discouraged his interest in pursuing the traditional path to music stardom. He said:

At the very beginning, our focus was just trying to figure out what we felt like God’s purpose was for our lives and trying to figure out how to pursue that. I think it was just being around all those people that weren’t of that mindset. There’s no way to create something that’s focused around God when you’re working with people who are just focused around making money.

Possible Preaching Angle:

God’s purpose for life is more than just seeking fame and fortune; God calls us to make a positive difference in whatever space we’re called to inhabit.

In the summer of 2023, Heather Beville felt something she hadn’t in a long time: a hug from her sister Jessica, who died at age 30 from cancer. In a dream, “I hugged her and I could feel her, even though I knew in my logic that she was dead.”

Like fellow Christians, Beville is sure that death is not the end. But she’s also among a significant number who say they have continued to experience visits from deceased loved ones here on earth.

In a recent Pew Research Center survey, 42 percent of self-identified evangelicals said they had been visited by a loved one who had passed away. Rates were even higher among Catholics and Black Protestants, two-thirds of whom reported such experiences.

Interactions with the dead fall into a precarious supernatural space. Staunch secularists will say they’re impossible and must be made up. Bible-believing Christians may be wary of the spiritual implications of calling on ghosts from beyond. Yet more than half of Americans believe a dead family member has come to them in a dream or some other form.

Researchers say most people who report “after-death communications” find the interactions to be comforting, not haunting or scary. Professor Julie Exline says, “They’re often very valuable for people. They give them hope that their loved one is still there and still connected to them. These experiences help people, even if they don’t know what to make of them.”

There are several factors that come into play for a person to turn to supernatural explanations for what they’ve experienced. Prior belief in God, angels, spirits, or ghosts, combined with a belief that these beings actually do communicate with people in the world is one condition. Another factor is the relationship between a person and their loved one—“the need for relational closure” amid prolonged grief. And women are more likely to report the phenomena.

Possible Preaching Angle:

The spiritual realm described in Scripture comes with strong warnings. The text repeatedly advises against calling on spirits outside of God himself, with several Old Testament verses specifically addressing interactions with the dead (“necromancy” in some translations). Deuteronomy 18, for example, decries anyone who “is a medium or spiritist or who consults with the dead” as “detestable to the Lord” (vv. 11, 12).

Pastors can attest that grieving Christian spouses occasionally believe they have seen shadows or objects in the home moving after the death of a loved one. We can rest on the absolute truth of God’s Word that “absent from the body and at home with the Lord” (2 Cor. 5:8). At death, believers are immediately in the presence of the Lord and not wandering the earth (Phil. 1:23).

Dilli Lumjel gave his life to Jesus on May 4, 2011, at 1:33 a.m. Earlier that day, he had performed a Hindu funeral service for his father-in-law in a refugee camp in eastern Nepal, where he lived with more than 12,000 other refugees.

As was the custom, Lumjel spent the night at his wife’s uncle’s house. Both of Lumjel’s parents-in-law had recently converted to Christianity. That night he had a vision: His mother-in-law approached him and shared the gospel, stating, “If you enter this house, you have to believe in Jesus.” Then he saw a flash of lightning from heaven and heard a voice saying, “What you are hearing is true; you have to believe.” In the dream, he knelt down crying and committed his life to Jesus.

When he woke up, his face was wet with tears. Lumjel called a local pastor and told him he had had a dream and was now a Christian. The news shocked his family of devout Hindus. He said, “Every­body—my relatives, my wife, sisters—they all woke up asking, ‘What happened to Dilli? Is he mental? He says he’s a Christian!’”

The next day, the pastor explained the gospel to Lumjel and his wife. The two committed their lives to Jesus. A day later, Lumjel began attending a monthlong Bible school in the refugee camp. Then church leaders sent Lumjel out to preach the gospel to other refugees. Several months later, he became a church deacon, then an elder.

One year later, Lumjel arrived in Columbus, Ohio, as part of a massive resettlement of about 96,000 ethnic Nepalis expelled from their home of Bhutan to the United States. There he joined Yusuf Kadariya in pastoring a group of about 35 Bhutanese Nepali families. As more Bhutanese Nepali refugees settled in Columbus and the group brought more people to Christ, the church continued to grow.

Today, Lumjel is a full-time pastor at Emmanuel Fellowship Church in Columbus. On a wintry Sunday morning in December, about 200 people streamed into the sanctuary, greeting one another with a slight bow and “Jai Masih,” meaning “Victory to Christ.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

God is bringing the nations to our neighborhoods here in America and is bringing many to faith in Christ. We can carry out the Great Commission in part by welcoming them with Christian love and sharing the gospel to those with hungry hearts.

Condoleezza Rice, the former diplomat and Secretary of State, was a sophomore in college majoring in piano performance, working toward a professional musical career. That summer, she went to study and perform at the Aspen Musical Festival, a prestigious and competitively sought honor.

While there, she came into contact with, as she put it, “11-year-olds who could play from sight what had taken me all year to learn.” She knew that she could not compete with people of such innate talent. She knew she would never be the best, and that meant this wasn't the path she wanted to pursue.

At the start of her junior year, she changed her major from music to international relations. And the rest is history.

Rice earned graduate degrees in political science from Notre Dame and would go on to become an expert on the Soviet Union and eventually foreign policy. She served as the National Security advisor and then US Secretary of State, as the first woman of color to do so.

Her life, and the future lives of countless others, was changed that fateful day when 19-year-old “Condi” decided she would not be a pianist. She didn't waste time staring at a door that was closing, but instead, while the opportunity was still ripe, pushed a new one open.

When Krish Kandiah was young, growing up in the United Kingdom, his family could always count on their next-door neighbor, Mrs. Oglive, to be around. They left a spare key with her in case they got locked out, because she was always there—morning, afternoon, and night—to let them in.

Mrs. Oglive never went out. She suffered from agoraphobia, the fear of open spaces. Having lived next door to her for 40 years now, they still haven’t seen her venture past her doorway. She wasn’t always this way. She has pictures on her mantelpiece of less anxious days, from her honeymoon with Mr. Oglive and from a day at the beach with her children. But after her husband died, Mrs. Oglive began to isolate herself.

One can only imagine the heavy cloud of fear and frustration that surrounds her. Now frail and in the twilight of life, Mrs. Oglive’s curtains are almost always drawn.

There are some parallels between Mrs. Oglive and the contemporary church. Many Christians observe the world from behind closed curtains, bemoaning culture instead of engaging it. Many local churches are isolated from the wider community and world, bunkered up like doomsayers, suffering from fear of an open public square with divergent viewpoints and lifestyles.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Only by encountering the risen Christ and receiving the life-giving power of the Holy Spirit are we able to step beyond our doors and carry out God’s mission. When we do so, we are transformed from an agoraphobic church to an apostolic church.

One hundred years ago (1922), a Minnesota man named Ralph Samuelson went to a local lumberyard. Most people would have said that Samuelson found two ordinary eight-foot-long pine boards. But Samuelson had a more creative idea. He saw two water skis. Here’s the backstory on his invention of waterskiing.

Samuelson lived in Minnesota and wondered if you could ski on water the way you could on snow. At 18, he made his own skis and had his brother pull him behind his boat. He unsuccessfully tried snow skis and barrel staves before realizing that he needed something that covered more surface area on the water. That’s when Samuelson spotted two eight-foot-long, nine-inch-wide pine boards.

Using his mother’s wash boiler, he softened one end of each board, then clamped the tips with vises so they would curve upwards. He affixed leather straps to hold his feet in place and acquired 100 feet of window sash cord to use as a tow rope. Finally, he hired a blacksmith to make a small iron ring to serve as the rope’s handle.

Samuelson tried several different approaches. In most of his attempts, he started with his skis level with or below the water line; but by the time his brother got the boat going, Samuelson was sinking.

Finally, he tried raising the tips of the skis out of the water while he leaned back—and it worked. As his brother steered the boat, Samuelson cruised along behind him. To this day, this is still the position that water skiers assume. Samuelson began performing tricks on his skis and crowds as large as 1,000 came out to watch him.

Possible Preaching Angles:

1) Creativity; Persistence; Vision – Those who are truly successful often start with a dream and persist despite setbacks. Just because it has never been tried before, doesn’t mean it can’t work. 2) Skill; Spiritual Gifts; Talent – God gives different gifts to his people to use for the common good. Don’t neglect your gift, but use it to glorify God and to serve his people.

More than 5,000 people groups are without an indigenous Christian church, according to recent data from Joshua Project. Nearly 2 billion people—more than a quarter of the world’s population—live in a group without a “self-sustaining gospel movement.” The ten largest unreached people groups are located in Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Turkey, and Algeria.

Missiologists say cross-cultural missions are more effective than near-neighbor evangelism to share the gospel with people who have never heard it, but only about 4 percent of global missionaries are going to places where there are no existing churches.

George Wood was a superintendent of the US Assemblies of God. He shared the following story in a Preaching Today sermon:

When I was a boy, my sister left our home in Pennsylvania, and traveled to Central Bible College. She had a lifelong problem with her eyesight. She had 20 percent vision in one eye and 50 percent vision in the other, and wore thick, Coke-bottle glasses.

During a fall revival at Central Bible College, she had been praying at the altar and saw a vision of Jesus on the cross. She felt a voice, saying to her, "Doris, take off your glasses." In those years, if you wore glasses, you were prayed for on a regular basis—that you would be healed. My sister had had enough of that, so she said, "No."

Again, she felt the voice say to her, "Doris, take off your glasses."

Again, her response was, "No."

A third time, while she was having the vision of Jesus on the cross, she felt this voice say to her, "Doris, take off your glasses." She sensed it might be the Lord, so she prayed, "Lord, if I take these glasses off, I don't want to ever put them on again."

The vision disappeared, she opened her eyes, and she had perfect sight. It's been 50 years. She has never put on a pair of glasses to this day.

Most people don't know about Samuel Pierpont Langley. In the early 20th century, many people were pursuing the dream of flight. And Samuel Pierpont Langley had, what we assume, to be the recipe for success. Langley was given $50,000 by the War Department to figure out this flying machine. Money was no problem. He held a seat at Harvard and worked at the Smithsonian and was extremely well-connected; he knew all the big minds of the day. He hired the best minds money could find and the market conditions were fantastic. The New York Times followed him around everywhere, and everyone was rooting for Langley. Then how come we've never heard of Samuel Pierpont Langley?

A few hundred miles away in Dayton, Ohio, Orville and Wilbur Wright, had none of what we consider to be the recipe for success. They had no money; they paid for their dream with the proceeds from their bicycle shop. Not a single person on the Wright brothers' team had a college education, not even Orville or Wilbur. And The New York Times followed them around nowhere.

The difference was, Orville and Wilbur were driven by a cause, by a purpose, by a belief. They believed that if they could figure out this flying machine, it would change the course of the world. Samuel Pierpont Langley was different. He wanted to be rich, and he wanted to be famous. He was in pursuit of the result. He was in pursuit of the riches. And lo and behold, look what happened. The people who believed in the Wright brothers' dream worked with them with blood and sweat and tears. The others just worked for the paycheck. They tell stories of how every time the Wright brothers went out, they would have to take five sets of parts, because that's how many times they would crash before supper.

And, eventually, on December 17th, 1903, the Wright brothers took flight, and no one was there to even experience it. We found out about it a few days later. And further proof that Langley was motivated by the wrong thing: the day the Wright brothers took flight, he quit. He could have said, "That's an amazing discovery, guys, and I will improve upon your technology," but he didn't. He wasn't first, he didn't get rich, he didn't get famous, so he quit.

This strategic work in Southeast Asia faces continued pressure from the government, yet it continues to spread. Drawing on new technologies, the leaders have equipped hundreds of “hubs” across their region. In some places, they have brought the gospel to tribes who have never heard it. They’ve translated the Bible, for the first time, into the language of some of these people. Their video ministry is even reaching untold numbers of deaf people, helping them learn sign language, and the language of God’s love. For security reasons, we don’t divulge the identity of these brothers and sisters.

After watching this episode of God Pops Up, read the story in Christianity Today of missionaries in the mountains of Papua, who face life and death in “The Land of the Clouds.”

In Christianity Today, Al Hsu writes:

Encouraged by a 25 percent-off coupon given to me by a friend, I went ahead and had [laser eye] surgery [to correct my vision]. ... It didn't quite take. ... My vision had been something like 20/400, and he was able to bring it to 20/40—tantalizingly close to clear vision, but still fuzzy. Then I happened to attend an InterVarsity Asian American staff conference. During corporate worship, I squinted to make out lyrics on the far wall. In one particular session, we sang "God of Justice ”:

Live to feed the hungry

Stand beside the broken

We must go

Stepping forward

Keep us from just singing

Move us into action

We must go

I closed my eyes as we repeated the chorus, praying that God would direct me. How might I move into action? The song cycled back to an earlier verse, and I opened my watering eyes. The lyrics on the screen shimmered slightly, then came crisply into focus. I could see. Clearly. Wow. I could read every word easily, without squinting.

Had God just healed me? ... I blinked several times, and my vision wavered back and forth. Clear, blurry, clear, blurry. Then I realized what was happening. While singing I had been tearing up, moved by God's call, and the thin layer of water on my eyeballs functioned like contact lenses. The tears had been making my vision clearer. ... I suspect that I will never see as clearly as I do when I have tears in my eyes.

The SEALs, arguably one of the most elite fighting groups in the world, did not develop from a grand strategy of the military. But instead from one individual who refused to allow his condition to keep him from moving ahead. His name was Draper Kauffman, and today he is known as the godfather of the US Navy SEALs.

Upon his graduation from the Naval academy in 1933, Mr. Kauffman's plan was to follow in the footsteps of another great man, his father, who also served in the US Navy. But it wasn't to be. It was not because of drug abuse that Mr. Kauffman's dreams were shattered, nor was it because of a life of crime. He simply had poor eyesight and this was enough to prevent him from receiving his commission. What do you do when you invest years of dreaming about a bright future and making plans to get there, only to find it sabotaged by something that seems so small? This is where Mr. Kauffman can inspire us all.

With his door to the US Navy closed, he joined the American Volunteer Ambulance Corps in France. This warrior trained to lead other warriors into combat found himself behind the wheel of an ambulance. He was imprisoned for a short time in France when the Germans occupied the country in 1940. After his release, he joined the Royal Navy Reserve in England and served in their bomb disposal unit.

While he was home on leave, the US Navy wanted to learn from his experiences. At their request Mr. Kauffman organized an underwater demolition school. After the United States entered the war, Kauffman's experience and trainees became crucial to US amphibious operations around the world. They changed the course of the war through disarming underwater bombs and conducting top-secret reconnaissance. Had Mr. Kauffman allowed poor eyesight to be the final draft of his identity, the Allies' strategy during WWII would have been different.

Did you know that of our five sensory inputs (seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, touching), 80 percent of what your brain “knows” comes from your vision? This fact led A. M. Skeffington, a famous American optometrist, to say, “If a person cannot see 100%, they cannot be 100%.” Your brain is continually working to decipher and direct your body movement as your eyes perceive what is right in front of you.

A significant insight about eyesight hit me one day watching my wife paint a watercolor landscape. While she was turning some random pigments on her palette into a beautiful autumn forest, I realized that the landscape she was painting had three horizons. After a little digging, I learned that artists refer to these as the background, midground, and foreground planes of the painting. In fact, a landscape painting without one of these horizons becomes much less interesting. Why? Because it would fail to engage our depth perception and would be considered a dull work of art.

In a landscape painting, the background may be a blue sky, a beautiful sunset, or a mountain range. It's as far away as the eyes can see. Then there is usually a focal point of the piece in the midground that draws and keeps your focus, a deer, or a stream, or a tree in a field of wildflowers. Finally, you will notice that most painters create a further dimension by having an object in the foreground like a tree branch or the side of a house or a person. These objects are up close, right before our eyes. The artist must intentionally plan and design these three planes to simulate a peaceful or soul-stirring three-dimensional viewpoint.

In fact, the landscape painting simply reflects what is happening every moment your eyes are open. The ability for the human eye to focus in and out of distances is called “accommodation.” Your eyeball can zoom out and zoom in--say from looking at the sky, to looking at words on this page-in 350 milliseconds.

One of the most prolific songwriters in the history of Christianity has been Fanny Crosby, who wrote over 9,000 spiritual songs. Crosby was blinded in both eyes at six weeks of age through a medical error. However, she could still visualize the beauty of Christ's blessings, often with more clarity than those who had sight. As a result, it has been noted that in many of her hymns, this visually impaired lady quite amazingly spoke about sight, as seen in the following examples.

“Visions of rapture now burst on my sight” (Blessed Assurance)

“Watching and waiting, looking above” (Blessed Assurance)

“Near the cross I'll watch and wait, hoping, trusting ever” (In the Cross)

“But purer and higher and greater will be, our wonder, our transport, when Jesus we see.” (To God be the Glory)

Possible Preaching Angle: Even as we receive spiritual insight through the lyrics of a lady with no vision, may we too, get a new vision of the glories of Christ! "Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith ..." (Hebrews 12:2)