How can I be sure that my understanding is taking in the word of God? If I have a great love of sin, that will twist my understanding so that I will not listen to the message of Christ. I won't want to hear this message: that I need to repent of my sin, and that my guilt can be washed away and I can be given a new life and can be put in touch with God now and forever. I won't want to hear that because I shall be prejudiced against it, because I have a great love of my sin and I don't want to give it up. I'm not going to listen to anything which may dislodge it out of my life. So take heed, says the Lord, watch, examine. Have you got a great love of some sin and it means you can't listen to this message? Here is the lamp of God. Here is the kindest message in the world, but you can't listen because you love something too much which you know you would have to give up. The eye of the soul has blurred vision, and you will never take this in.
Sometimes there are other things which obscure. Some people are amazingly self-righteous. They think so highly of themselves that when we talk about the need for forgiveness, something inside them says, ‘That's not me. I'm better than most people. I live a good life. I am not going to listen to a message that says I need to grovel, that I need to repent, that I need to have a Saviour.’ Some people are so proud of what they imagine is their good character and their good points, that they have no idea how they appear in the sight of Almighty God. It's like a great cataract obscuring their vision.
For some people, the eye of the soul, the understanding, can't take in the message of God because they're just swamped with lies. Not their own lies, but the lies they have been told. People have told them lies, and these lies are cluttering up their understanding. Somebody listens and says, ‘I don't understand this, because I thought all people went to heaven in the end.’ This great lie is obstructing the understanding. How can you listen to a message, however kind, which says there is pardon for you? You need not go to hell. You can be forgiven. You can have a place in heaven. You can know God now. How can you listen to that, if there is this great lie wedged into your understanding, which tells you that all people are going to heaven anyway?
Some people are just so complacent: the problem is within them. They just don't care. There are some people who will take no precautions in life if the brakes have failed on the car. They will use it all the same; You just can't figure them out. They live on the top of a one in four hill, and they will still take the old jalopy out with the brakes failed. There's always somebody as crazy as that: absolutely complacent. Nothing will ever go wrong for them. Some people are like that with the soul. They will get to seventy or eighty years of age, and they still haven't given heaven or hell two second’s thought. They are just going sublimely on absolutely complacent on the issue. Don't lose your eternal destiny and wreck your life on earth, because there is just some deadly complacency in you. It is like a great mist across the eyes, so that the understanding is fuzzy, and the message of God is just idle tails to you.