Photo by Sasha Freemind on Unsplash

You cannot be what you cannot see. Since our creation, we are tempted to look away from the one we were meant to become. This affects everything about what it means for us to be human and also to be made in God’s image. In Genesis 3:1-5, Satan drove a wedge between the Creator and the Created by insinuating God didn’t have the best interests of the newly formed Image-Bearers at heart. Rather than look at the God with whom they walked in Paradise, they looked at the serpent and the fruit he offered. They soon became like what they gazed upon: bound to the earth, eating dirt in order to be satisfied. No longer could they see the one who could bring them up out of the limits of the earth and into heavenly realities. The glass through which they were allowed to perceive God had grown dim. The results of this new blindness were shame, fear, deception, and division from God and one another.

This is the tragic part of the Anglican Communion’s story in modern times. The glory she shared in and for Christ has dimmed, because some of the churches listened to another voice, and they stopped beholding Christ. They have reaped what they have sown: division, chaos, dwindling numbers, and irrelevance for real Gospel change. Gafcon is a great effort to recover the glory that was lost, grounded in the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Truth of His Word, and our identity in Him. There is a reason that the book of Colossians is the focus of daily Bible studies, where we have heard how St. Paul calls the Colossians to remember Christ’s supremacy, to look upon His glory, and to grasp the promise of that same glory within each of them.

We cannot become what we can’t perceive, and often, especially because of the world’s darkness, we find Christ’s glory hard to see. This is why God set his Church in the midst of the world, as a light to reflect the glory of God in Jesus Christ to those in darkness.

But what will we do when that glory is obscured in the church itself? How great must that darkness be?

A.W. Tozer wrote in his book, The Knowledge of the Holy: “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.” The images we have of Him as Lord and Savior color how we pray, how we read Scripture, how we treat our families and our neighbors, what we teach, and how we live. Gafcon is here to call us back to repentance and, in reality, to help us recover the image of God in the Church. As Christians, spiritual blindness has driven us to embrace our sins, addictions, and anxieties. Many of us are overly-driven, seeking approval through those around us. We have been passive and have refused to take up our authority and our place as leaders in our families, workplaces, or churches. We accept an orphan heart rather than a heart of sonship, and we can resist many of the comforts offered to us by Christ, because we really don’t trust him. We tolerate false teaching and are willing to surrender what is tried and true for what is new.

Our healing begins by gazing intently at Christ again in the Scriptures, through the Church’s worship, in the spiritual disciplines, and in healthy men and women of God. We must commit our lives once again to God and ask that he transform our brokenness by the power of his Holy Spirit. We must begin to read and pray through the Scriptures. We must meditate and talk about who God is as revealed in the Bible and who we are meant to be in light of who He is. We must press into the process of forgiveness. We must work through forgiving our fallen leaders, those who hurt us and contributed to our distorted view of God and ourselves.

In Jeremiah 31:31-34, God promises a time when he will heal our inability to perceive him well, when we will all know him, even as we are known. The beginning of healing our image of God comes through believing that God is present and that he wants to be known. Then through prayer, fellowship, the Word of God, and the power of the Holy Spirit, we can grow into a deeper knowledge of who God really is, revealed in the glory of Jesus Christ. We will then begin to reflect that glory as we walk towards Paradise and, at the same time, lead those behind us on that same path. Gafcon reminds us this week that such healing is possible. Change will come and blind eyes will see, and once we behold him whose sight was lost to us, we will never be the same again.