Your Eyes

(this article was originally published in the March 2019 Communique)

In 2008, Brandon Heath released a song entitled “Give Me Your Eyes” and I think the heart of the message is needed even more now, in 2019, than it was then. These are the words of the chorus:

Give me your eyes for just one second / Give me your eyes so I can see, / Everything that I keep missing, / Give your love for humanity. / Give me your arms for the broken-hearted / The ones that are far beyond my reach. / Give me Your heart for the ones forgotten. / Give me Your eyes so I can see.

From what I can tell, we have a serious problem with our eyes. I look around at the world we live in and I see a world of perpetual outrage. It seems that this becomes the default state for us with each 24-hour news cycle. As soon as a news story breaks, we look through our cloudy and colored eyes to see if we are outraged about what happened or if we are outraged at the people who are outraged about what happened. Our world is reminiscent of the children of Israel in the time of Isaiah: we see but don’t perceive, we hear but don’t understand and we grow callous. As we grow callous, we close our eyes and ears and they don’t even see or hear at all. I believe that God is grieved by what he sees from His church. For a long time, churches have been focused on specks in the eyes of others, ignoring the planks in our own eyes. The western church has been more interested in our own little fiefdoms than with the lost, hurting, and disenfranchised in the world. Ultimately it all comes down to how our eyes perceive value.

In Matthew 6:22-23, Jesus states that “The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. So if the light within you is darkness, how deep is that darkness!” These verses are sandwiched between verses regarding heavenly treasure and the inability to serve God and money. It seemed a little odd to me, at first, to have these verses in this section, but it finally made sense when I recognized that it is about the value we perceive, in people or things. If our eyes are good then we see value in infinite things and we will be full of light. If we then bring that light into darkness, those trapped in darkness will finally see the light. But if we see value in temporal things then we will be filled with darkness. This is why we need to look through the eyes of our Creator and Redeemer. If we start seeing that the value of those that are hurting, abused, broken-hearted, lost, forgotten, and alone greatly outweighs the value of the things of this world that we have been pursuing, then we will begin acting in a manner that accurately reflects God’s interests instead of our own self-centered interests.

My prayer is that we all will actively pursue a lifestyle of viewing everyone through the eyes of the one that created them and loves them. If we do that, I think we will be so busy doing what we were made to do, that we won’t have time for the snares that have entangled us for far too long.

In Christ Alone,
Jamie