The Good Eye

Coming from an unsaved home, the messages I first received from Christianity were that there was a Person who loved me. I was mind-blown that there was a Creator who knew and loved me extravagantly. I didn’t understand the religiosity of things or even how people could be sick of church. But over a decade, the Person I first fell in love with began to fade into the background of my memory, and the clamor of my own insecurities and comparisons with others began to take over – in regard to how well-versed I was with the Bible, how well I could pray, how much I was doing for God in missions and evangelism, whether I could prophesy accurately, whether people were healed when I prayed for them, and the list goes on. 

The passage that struck me recently regarding this matter was Matthew 6:22-23:

“The lamp of the body is the eye. If therefore your eye is good, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in you is darkness, how great is that darkness!” 

When I was first meditating on these verses, they did not click for me. I didn’t quite understand how our eyes could be good or bad. My natural conjecture was that filling our eyes with worthless things such as pornography and violent or sexual images, makes them “bad.” But I still wondered what it looked like to have a “good eye” and what we needed to fill our mind’s eye with, in order for them to be filled with light. David Sliker answered my wonderings in class when he referred to the “good eye” as instigating the question, “Who are we looking at?” When we serve, give, pray, fast, and do all the things we do as Christians, there is Someone on the other side of each of those transactions –– who are we looking at when we make those transactions? 

Whoever you’re looking at determines whether your body is full of light or full of darkness. When our eyes are fixated on men when we are supposedly doing things for God, that becomes hyper-spirituality: "Using religious means to present yourself a certain way so people think a certain way – basically religious Facebook. It's the way we can curate our image. We’re in essence prostituting our relationship with God to gain favor with men." 

We are to do things because we know that He sees, and that it moves Him when we do it. Song of Songs 4:9 says, "You have ravished my heart...You have ravished my heart With one look of your eyes." The eye that is fixated on a beautiful God who is moved by every act we do for Him, is the eye that will heal the whole body of performance-mindedness, dull-heartedness, stale religion, and every ailment that comes with being concerned with favor and reputation among men.

The question is how do we see God rightly, so that it will make us want to fixate on His gaze? When the ugly human construct of "I need to perform because God is harsh" meets the truth that there is actually a very beautiful God on the other side, a beautiful God wins every time. When we come across the many instances in the Word where God is beautiful, merciful, tender, meek – we are to rest in them. Relish in them. Unravel those precious pieces of truth with more questions to God, about God. Take a moment to gasp at the beauty of God’s heart, rather than thinking of the application of that beauty in how it can make us better Christians. "That’s where you begin to have friendship with God for the sake of friendship, not for the sake of better religious self-esteem" (Sliker). 

In all my coming and goings, I want to reset my eyes from looking for the approval of men, to looking for the gaze of God and His moved heart. There is a Person on the other side of every transaction, big or small, and every resolve I make to love Him well. That Person has real emotions and a heart that is brimming with love.