Feast Your Eyes on This
Posted by Pastor Andrew
This past Sunday I gave a message entitled “Saturate,” at our college gathering on Matthew 6:22-23. Here’s what Jesus says in these verses: “The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!” (NIV) Essentially, what these verses are telling us is that whatever we feast our eyes on will eventually fill our hearts. And most of us would agree with this principle that whatever fills our hearts will inevitably lead and direct our lives. And according to Jesus, we can choose to fill our hearts with good things (the light) or bad (darkness).
These verses have been constant reminder for me, because I’m the type of person that likes to have the newest and latest toys and gadgets. And so Jesus’ words have been a daily, humbling gut check for me. And just today I came across a blog post from pastor and author John Ortberg on the importance of leveraging our desires for good. Here’s an excerpt from his post:
So my task is not to get rid of desire. Its to learn how my desires can lead me toward the person God made me to be. So here are the three laws of desire:
1. Acknowledge my desire. There’s no use pretending to God that I don’t really want that gi-normous house; he already knows. A desire named has less power than a desire hidden.
2. Reflect on my desire. Desires are so powerful that I am apt to think I am my desire. There is actually great freedom in stepping back from it and realizing that I am not identical to any of my desires, and none of them get to have veto power over my life. Very often–just like birds desire to fly and fish desire to swim, my desires are important guides about what God made me to love and to do.
3.Surrender my desire. This doesn’t mean renounce it. It means to place it in the context of my greatest desire. I can do this only because what I want more than any particular outcome is life; and the life I want can only finally be found in God.
My hope and prayer is that we would feast our eyes on good things, and saturate our hearts with the Light of Jesus Christ, so that we may be able to shine forth His love and character in our lives.
