August 19, 2010

...let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, ... Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider him who endured such opposition from sinful men, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart." (Hebrews 12: 1-3)

Imagine for a minute that you were assigned the task of climbing to the top of a stadium light pole to "fix" or replace one of the burnt-out bulbs. Your supervisor, who assigned you the task, and who has made the climb before, offers one piece of advice before they show you to the pole - "whatever you do, don't look down!" The Holy Spirit, through the pen of the writer to the Hebrews, offers similar advice as he advises us to "fix our eyes on Jesus," who is sitting up "at the right hand of the throne of God." Whatever we do, we shouldn't look down! Because when we take our eyes off Jesus and look down, sin can draw us in, and sin can hinder and sin can easily entangle - sin can cause us to lose our balance.

If we take our eyes off of Jesus, we can lose our balance when we look around at others and start becoming like them. The devil uses our straying eyes as a way to get into our head. Humans, by nature, are adaptable, and so we start adapting to what we see. Sin becomes something that we don't treat like sin, but more like a "different lifestyle" that we should just coexist with. The more time our eyes spend off of Jesus, looking down at others around us, the more we start following the lifestyles of the world. We may not even clearly recognize it, and before we know it, we end up entangled in sin - we end up losing our balance. "So, if you think you are standing firm, be careful that you don't fall!" (I Corinthians 10:12)

If we take our eyes off of Jesus, we can lose our balance when we look around at others and start comparing ourselves to them. The devil uses our straying eyes to plant the idea in our mind that when it comes to sin and righteousness, we are going to somehow be graded on a curve. Our eyes look at others and we say to ourselves, "at least I'm not as bad as so and so." This kind of thinking hinders and needs to be thrown off. There is no grading on a curve - it's pass or fail, and the test is to compare ourselves not to our neighbor, but to compare ourselves to the One who "sat down at the right hand of the throne of God."

When we stop looking down, and when we fix our eyes on Jesus and compare ourselves to him, we sadly see and realize how much we have assimilated to the world's ways and how much we have lost our balance and have "fallen" short of the glory of the one sitting at the right hand of the throne of God. We see that we are part of the "all" who "have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." (Romans 3:23) We see how hard the devil is working to knock us off the light pole and when we take our eyes off of Jesus, we sadly realize how often the devil gets us to lose our balance.

But, when we fix our eyes on Jesus we also see that he loved us enough to take care of all of our sin and the situation that sin put us in. We don't need to "grow weary and lose heart," because we also see our Savior Jesus who climbed the light pole that extended from the depths of hell all the way up to the Throne of God, and he made his climb while carrying the load of the sins of the whole world on his back. The Jesus that we fix our eyes on endured, completed the work he did for us, and perfected our faith! Let's pray for the resolve to keep our eyes fixed on Jesus, because when we do, we accurately see how much we come up short, but we also see how much Jesus has come up big for us. "Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith!"