“The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are healthy, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness.” (Matthew 6:22-23)
How we look through our eyes will determine how we experience life. If we have good vision, we will see clearly with an abundance of light. If we have poor vision, not only will we see the outside world in a blur of confusion, we will be in the dark as to what is going on within as well. It comes down to a matter of perception. Henry Ford is famous for opining“ whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.” Merely in terms of accomplishments, Ford recognized that personal belief was a deciding factor in success. Those who believed themselves capable of achievement proved themselves thus through hard work and perseverance, while those who believed themselves inconsequential would also demonstrate that was the case through lack of effort and easy discouragement.
Belief is a powerful thing; and belief in a lie empowers that which is false. It is crucial then, to see clearly and believe that which is true. When sitting outside on a long summer evening as the sun goes down slowly, our eyes adjust to the growing gloom and it isn’t until you walk back into the light indoors that you perceive just how dark it has become. Darkness sneaks up and plays tricks on your eyes but light, though sometimes glaring to our sensitivities, never does.
Perception can only be trusted to be full of light when it is brought into contact with the very Source of Light “This is the message that we have heard from him [Jesus Christ] and declare to you: God is light; in Him there is no darkness at all.” (1 John 1:5) We cannot afford to risk deceiving ourselves by believing things and thinking thoughts that God does not think. Everything must be dragged into the light so that it can revealed for what it is. Even the ideas that we think to be right and true must be regularly brought into contact with the light of God’s Word so that we can see each matter clearly, rather than through the dimming effect of habitual opinion.
Throughout the Old Testament, God reminded the people of Israel to repeat the stories of their relationship with God to each new generation; that every new Israelite would know that the Lord God had rescued them from slavery in Egypt, that He divided the Red Sea, that He fed them manna in the wilderness and so forth. The repetition of who God was to them and how He had abundantly provided for them in the past was meant to give them good eyes to see their present circumstances clearly. The God who brings you out of slavery with the riches of your former captors (without a battle) is certainly able to deal with the threats of today. Reminding yourself of how God has provided for you in the past will encourage you regarding how He will provide for you in the future. It is when the Israelites forgot God; when they neglected to retell the history of their relationship with Him that they went astray. We are no less prone to this same danger if we forget to remind ourselves of our story with the Lord and the truth of His Word. This trend toward the gloom of forgetfulness is evident not only in our personal lives but in the tumultuous cultural context in which we live.
The Judeo-Christian Western nations have at their foundation the principle of liberty. This liberty was not prized because it enabled an anything goes lifestyle (though it certainly can be abused in such a way) but rather because it mirrored the freedom that God Himself gave to mankind. Each individual had the freedom to choose God, to love Him of his own free will and to benefit from all the good that He entails. Or, conversely, to have the freedom to reject Him, shunning His wisdom and inevitably choosing evil for there is no good apart from God. This is the source of our cultural valuation of freedom, yet the passage of time and the failure to bring this important ideal into remembrance has instead watered it down to cliched maxims of “to each, their own”, or “what’s right for you isn’t right for me”. This is a darkened perception of freedom without understanding its God-given source and intent. Liberty becomes licence when we fail to bring it into the Light of God’s Word.
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