Are You Looking at Life with Eyeballs Only or with Spiritual Eyes?

Are You Looking at Life with Eyeballs Only or with Spiritual Eyes?

In yesterday’s blog post, I shared about how the extension cord connected to my computer was accidently unplugged during my How to Care Like Christ seminar (http://bit.ly/3YYAR4), causing my computer to go into hibernation. To read that entire post, please visit http://bit.ly/LLrwI.

As I asked yesterday, I’d ask you again today to imagine the scene and to put yourself in my shoes as a speaker.

Your computer is going into hibernation and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. Your entire presentation is PowerPoint driven. Most of the audience doesn’t know you. The whole start and set-up for the entire day could be ruined.

What would you do? What would you think? How might you respond?

With Eyeballs Only

My immediate, fleshly, emotional, eyeballs only response was to think and feel, “The day is ruined.” “They will think I’m a hapless presenter.”

With eyeballs only, with a fleshly mindset, I was thinking about me, and not about God and not about them. Hardly a reflection of Matthew 22:35-40!

With Spiritual Eyes

Interestingly, just moments before this event, the seminar host and my spiritual friend, Pastor Mark Tanious, had taken me aside to pray with me. Pastor Mark specifically prayed that God would lead me not to say anything I should not say, and to say anything He wanted me to say, even if it wasn’t in my pre-planned presentation. Mark is a young man mature beyond his years.

So what did I say? How did I react?

Well, read part one for my first response which was a God-led object lesson about how we desperately need to stay plugged into our personal power source—God—because when we live in the power of the flesh we will eventually go into spiritual hibernation mode.

A Second Object Lesson

But God’s Spirit wasn’t done teaching lessons that were not in my lesson plan!

A second major point of the How to Care Like Christ seminar highlights our need in spiritual friendship to help our spiritual friends to look at life with renewed minds—with spiritual eyes, with faith eyes. The only other option is to look at life with eyes of the flesh, with eyeballs only—conformed to the world, the flesh, and the devil.

So later in the morning when we arrived at the point in the seminar where we address spiritual eyes, I confessed to the audience my earlier temptation to look at my hibernating computer with eyeballs only—with a “woe is me,” “I am defeated,” “it’s all about me” fleshly attitude.

Open the Eyes of My Heart, Lord

And I shared with my audience that through Pastor Mark’s earlier pray, and certainly through their silent prayers during the hibernating moments, that God’s Spirit did a work in my heart. He enlightened my eyes. He opened the eyes of my heart. His Spirit transformed and renewed my thinking in the moment.

The eyes of my heart were enlightened:

*With the reminder that, “It’s not about me; it’s all about Him.”

*With the reminder that, “God is in control and He cares.”

*With the reminder that, “God allows negative events to occur so that we might not rely on ourselves, but on God who raises the dead.”

*With the reminder that, “I was not there to impress people, but to serve people and to serve God.”

*With the reminder that, “I had a choice—I could look at life with eyeballs only or I could look at life with spiritual eyes.”

*With the reminder that, “It’s not what happens to us that matters most, but how we respond to what happens to us that is the real measure of our walk with God.”

How’s Your Eyesight?

So…how’s your eyesight?

Are you looking at situations in your life today with eyeballs only or with spiritual eyes?

As Elisha prayed for his sight-impaired servant, ask God to open your eyes so you may see, so you may really see reality, God-reality (2 Kings 6:17).