bless them and provide the abundance He desired for them because their vision had shrunk down to minuscule proportions. They could have been living in a land flowing with milk and honey, and instead they were wandering around a mountain in a hot and dry desert, with no Starbucks in sight.
Is your vision limiting what God wants to do in your life? When you close your eyes, do you see a prosperous you? An overcoming you? Is your vision such a driving force in your life that, like the apostle Paul, it could even prolong your life?
Pluck It Out
In Matthew 5:29, Jesus makes a striking remark: “If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and cast it from you; for it is more profitable for you that one of your members perish, than for your whole body to be cast into hell.” What in the world was Jesus talking about here?
Luckily for us, Jesus was not speaking literally; otherwise most of us would look like we just stepped off the production set of a pirate movie. He’s not talking about our physical eye, because our physical eye does not directly cause us to sin. He’s referring to the way we see life. If our attitude, our outlook, and the things we see in our future cause us to compromise, to quit, or to sin, we need to change it. In addition, if the things we are focused on, even in the natural sense, cause us to draw back, to think negatively, to shrink our visions, then we need to change those things, too. Jesus is trying to help us to understand the vital importance of our vision, and what we are seeing in both the natural realm and the spiritual realm. Our eyes are controlling our lives.
The enemy, who is the devil, understands this. He knows if he can keep us focused on our failures, our mistakes, on our pasts, and on anything else that is negative, he can hinder our lives. He is fully aware of the principles of God, and knows what people are consistently seeing is exactly what their futures will produce. So he works overtime to fill you with negative images, to bombard you with everything that’s bad, and to keep your mind preoccupied by the mess of the world. We can see a perfect example of this in the book of Job.
In the Old Testament, there is the story of a man named Job. He was a very prosperous businessman, with wealth and a full family, but somehow Satan got a hook into this man’s vision, and very soon, Job tragically lost everything: his business, his wealth, and his family. While he was lying in his poverty, grief, and sickness, he began to question how this could have happened to him. In Job 3:25, he cried out, “For the thing I greatly feared has come upon me, and what I dreaded has happened to me.”
At that moment, he unwittingly stumbled upon the truth of the matter. For a time, maybe many years, Job had been holding on to a strong fear that one day he would lose everything he had. And what he saw in his vision is what he actually made happen. Now before some of you start freaking out about some of the fears you have had, thinking they are all of a sudden going to start manifesting in your life, notice what Job said. He didn’t say he had a little inkling of a fear that popped up every once in a while. He said the thing that he greatly feared and dreaded came upon him. This isn’t a fleeting thought or a scary scenario that he entertained a few times. He greatly feared and dreaded it. Dread makes you think and focus your attention upon something over and over. He meditated upon it; he imagined the terrible scenarios repeatedly. They became his vision and what he truly believed would happen in his life—and so it did.
There is a good ending to Job’s story, however. The entire book of Job only spans a portion of Job’s life, and once he repented and completely surrendered his life over to God, within just about nine months, everything started to turn around. He began to fully trust God and build his vision around that trust, and at the end of his life, he recovered everything: family,
Is your vision limiting what God wants to do in your life? When you close your eyes, do you see a prosperous you? An overcoming you? Is your vision such a driving force in your life that, like the apostle Paul, it could even prolong your life?
Pluck It Out
In Matthew 5:29, Jesus makes a striking remark: “If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and cast it from you; for it is more profitable for you that one of your members perish, than for your whole body to be cast into hell.” What in the world was Jesus talking about here?
Luckily for us, Jesus was not speaking literally; otherwise most of us would look like we just stepped off the production set of a pirate movie. He’s not talking about our physical eye, because our physical eye does not directly cause us to sin. He’s referring to the way we see life. If our attitude, our outlook, and the things we see in our future cause us to compromise, to quit, or to sin, we need to change it. In addition, if the things we are focused on, even in the natural sense, cause us to draw back, to think negatively, to shrink our visions, then we need to change those things, too. Jesus is trying to help us to understand the vital importance of our vision, and what we are seeing in both the natural realm and the spiritual realm. Our eyes are controlling our lives.
The enemy, who is the devil, understands this. He knows if he can keep us focused on our failures, our mistakes, on our pasts, and on anything else that is negative, he can hinder our lives. He is fully aware of the principles of God, and knows what people are consistently seeing is exactly what their futures will produce. So he works overtime to fill you with negative images, to bombard you with everything that’s bad, and to keep your mind preoccupied by the mess of the world. We can see a perfect example of this in the book of Job.
In the Old Testament, there is the story of a man named Job. He was a very prosperous businessman, with wealth and a full family, but somehow Satan got a hook into this man’s vision, and very soon, Job tragically lost everything: his business, his wealth, and his family. While he was lying in his poverty, grief, and sickness, he began to question how this could have happened to him. In Job 3:25, he cried out, “For the thing I greatly feared has come upon me, and what I dreaded has happened to me.”
At that moment, he unwittingly stumbled upon the truth of the matter. For a time, maybe many years, Job had been holding on to a strong fear that one day he would lose everything he had. And what he saw in his vision is what he actually made happen. Now before some of you start freaking out about some of the fears you have had, thinking they are all of a sudden going to start manifesting in your life, notice what Job said. He didn’t say he had a little inkling of a fear that popped up every once in a while. He said the thing that he greatly feared and dreaded came upon him. This isn’t a fleeting thought or a scary scenario that he entertained a few times. He greatly feared and dreaded it. Dread makes you think and focus your attention upon something over and over. He meditated upon it; he imagined the terrible scenarios repeatedly. They became his vision and what he truly believed would happen in his life—and so it did.
There is a good ending to Job’s story, however. The entire book of Job only spans a portion of Job’s life, and once he repented and completely surrendered his life over to God, within just about nine months, everything started to turn around. He began to fully trust God and build his vision around that trust, and at the end of his life, he recovered everything: family,
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