Eyes Wide Open // Jud Wilhite
One of the most difficult things to communicate to people is that they are loved by God and that He is desperately longing to be in relationship with His creation. This is most difficult because love, especially in our culture, has been cheapened so much by making it more about a physical relationship rather than a deep intimate connection where one individual is willing to lay down his life for another. Yet it remains the challenge of the Church to communicate this truth to those outside of that relationship with Christ and one of my main thoughts on a daily basis.
In “Eyes Wide Open,” Jud Wilhite immediately captured my attention in the introduction by clearly articulating the main issue people have to overcome before they’ll be willing to commit to true love. He writes, “Too many of us live with a distorted perspective of God. We see God as an all powerful police officer aiming His speed gun at us. We believe that God loves; we just aren’t convinced at the core of our being that He loves us.” (This is also a major focus of a sermon series we have coming up, and this is one of the basic premises we wanted to communicate.) That distorted image has been perpetuated by the Church as we’ve built up barriers and made grace difficult for broken people to accept when Christ’s desire for us was to break down the walls and make it available to anyone, but that’s another post.
Jud takes the reader through four movements that everyone must experience on their journey to reshape how we see God, how we see ourselves, and how we see people in order to live out the lives he intended for us.
The first movement is reforming our view of who God is and how amazing His grace over us truly is. Jud asks some hard questions that we all must wrestle with, but reminds us that truth lies in a difficult question from the apostle Paul when he says, “He who did not spare His own Son, but gave Him up for us all, how will He not also along with Him graciously give us al things?” Of course Jud goes to greater lengths to demonstrate the depth of this question and the implications it has for our own identity in Christ.
The second movement is to redefine how we see ourselves once we are in Christ. We are a loved people. We are also servants of the King of Glory. One of Jud’s comments that gripped me the most was this: “Servants are free from the constant one-upping mentality that drives so many in our culture.” There is so much freedom in this one statement alone and I could spend a great amount of time just meditating on this. But, there was so much more. Jud reminds us that we don’t get to just sit around once we begin to understand who we are. He writes that God has given us a new identity and “[He] didn’t give us a new identity so that we could stay the same. He desires for us to grow and be transformed into a person more in line with that identity.” We must grow in Him.
Lastly Jud calls us to live with “Eyes Wide Open” towards the rest of the world. We must be ready to not only engage culture, but to lead it. That phrase, leading culture, can become cheap if we as the church continue to toss it around without a lack of commitment to it, but Jud is, and his stories communicate how he is doing it right in the heart of leading a church in Las Vegas. He says his freedom came in the realization that we lost the culture war and how that understanding has made him available to love and accept people one on one right where they are (but I’ll let you get the book to fully understand what he means by this).
“Eyes Wide Open” was a formative book for me without a doubt. I sat and cried on the couch one evening as I read while the Spirit began to help me understand my own identity in Him. It was freeing to relinquish the battle of trying to define my own identity and just being confident that it was found in Him.
Pick up “Eyes Wide Open” here. Make it a part of your reading this year.
