Spiritual Eye Drops

Hello readers.  Welcome to my heart.  Let's begin.

First, let me paint the illustration.

So many of us, ok, most of us, alright, all of us have some eye burn.  This eye burn has ruined our sight, its ruined our depth perception, our sense of clarity, and how we see the world.  And we all have our different ways of coping with this eye burn.  A technique many of us use are the "encouraging" eye drops.

Recently I had a good friend of mine and a follower of this blog ask me the tough question, check it out.

"Claude, how do we get to place to where we actually are believing and walking out the things we hear?"

Her question was stemming from a conversation we were having and the topic got brought up about how we hear these good things all the time.  Things like, God has a plan for your life, you're beautiful, don't worry about it, let go and let God, all these encouraging words that usually gets us over the hump of bad days or bad situations or bad moods.  So her question left me interested in being able to answer that the next time she or anyone else ask me.  Here's what I got.

We have to get away from only being comfortable with the encouraging words, or the spiritual eye drops for our eye burn.  Instead, we should seek true healing of the eye burn.

Let me say it this way.

A lot of us tweet these encouraging quotes from C.S. Lewis and ones we come up with our own, or Tweetable lines that awesome pastors drop every week in a sermon, but what will it take to actually get us applying these quotes to our lives.  How do we get away from being Junkie Christians, where we just show up to worship services with our minds ready to only get our weekly fix of Jesus?

Here's my suggestion, let's focus less on getting the eye drops and more on getting the Jesus.

Let me start from it this way.  Place two people in front of you, a stranger, and your best friend.  Now, at the same time, these two people can say the same thing, but you'll receive them in two different ways.  Let's just be elementary and imagine we're in a sandbox.

Stranger says.  "You're ugly."
Best friend says. "You're ugly."

Which hurts more?  They both hurt in some degree or on some measure, but the one from the best friend hurts the most.  Why?  Because the words from that best friend are weighted so much more than the words from the stranger.  So here's what I suggest, Jesus may be too much of a stranger to  you.  Yes, I am suggesting that you may not know Jesus as well as you think you do.  You can't feel the weight of His words for you.  Which is why we must.....

STUDY OUR BIBLES.

Never in my life have I ever realized how important this is.  We must study, not just read, study.  What is God meaning?  Its okay to ask that.  Stop blindly just reading and walking away with surface level understanding. But dig in that thing.  Press in on God to explain to you why you should trust in Him completely.  Why He wants us to flee sexual immorality.  Why we are saved by faith and not by our works.  Why am I supposed to dress modest.  Why should I honor women.  Why, why why.

Now, I must say this.  This thing doesn't work like our method of electing governing officials.  Where we ask God all of our questions and then make a decision whether He should be God over our lives or not.  He's already that.  So all I'm suggesting is this....

Know the person that's saying these things to you.

A pastor can tell you all day that God thinks you're beautiful and worthy of respect.  But, imagine the weight of hearing it from God Himself.  It doesn't have to be hearsay friends.

A pastor can scream at the top of his lungs that God loves you, His grace is sufficient for you, nothing you have done can exceed the amount of grace He has for you, and once you're IN CHRIST, you have been justified and cleared of the wrath of your sins because of the sacrifice Jesus made for you on the cross---- this is grace, we can hear that time and time again, but...... miss out on feeling the weight of the Gospel.  Why?  Because we just know what happened, but we don't understand what happened.  Too many Christians know what happened, because we've sat in Easter services for 20+ years, but we don't understand what happened.  We don't understand the weight of our sins, therefore missing the weight of His wrath, and therefore missing the weight of His love, and therefore missing the weight of Jesus's sacrifice, and therefore missing the weight of grace.

I dare you to go chase after the weight of all that.  Read your Bibles people.  You have no idea what God is exclaiming to you deep within the text if you do not dig into it.  Stop being okay with the spiritual eye drops, the comfort verses, the get over my bad day verses, the message notes I took, or whatever.  Dive into it, define what God is saying to you so you can feel the weight of it.

Stop just knowing.  Seek to understand.  Understanding brings clarity---which proves your healing of your eye burn.