Fix Your Eyes

"So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal." -2 Corinthians 4:18 (NIV)

There is a difference between faith and fantasy, and I think we confuse the two more often than we’d like to admit.

Fantasy says, “If I trust God, then surely this situation won’t be this hard.” Faith says, “This situation is hard, and I still trust God.”

Those sound similar, but they lead to completely different ways of living.

In my life, I have spent more time than I care to admit trying to negotiate reality with God. I haven’t always asked Him to change my heart first; I usually asked Him to change the circumstances. If this relationship were healthier. If this job would finally work out. If that prayer were answered. If this season would hurry up and end. Somewhere along the way, I quietly began believing that faith meant pretending the hard parts weren’t actually there. God, in His grace, illuminated this pattern for me early last year.

Scripture never asks us to deny reality. The Psalms are full of people naming exactly what hurts. Martha looked Jesus in the eye and said, “Lord, if You had been here, my brother would not have died” (John 11:21). Even Jesus, in the Garden of Gethsemane, acknowledged the weight of what was in front of Him before surrendering to the Father’s will (Matthew 26:39). Faith has never required us to put on spiritual blinders.

Instead, Paul writes, “We fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal” (2 Corinthians 4:18). I love that he doesn’t tell us the visible world disappears. The bills are still there. The diagnosis is still there. The unanswered email is still unanswered (reminder to check your inbox). Your difficult coworker still schedules meetings that absolutely could have been an email (seriously, why). Reality doesn’t vanish because we’re people of faith.

What changes is where our attention settles.

Have you ever been walking (or driving, which is more terrifying) and you catch yourself looking at something interesting to the right or left and suddenly you find yourself falling off the sidewalk or casually changing course in the direction of the thing you were looking at? It’s almost impossible to keep moving in one direction while your eyes are fixed on another.

The same is true in our spiritual lives. I’ve noticed that whatever holds my attention the longest eventually becomes the lens through which I see God. If I stare only at my circumstances, they begin whispering that God must not be working. If I stare only at myself, I become painfully aware of all the ways I’m not enough. But when I keep turning my eyes back to Jesus—sometimes for the hundredth time before lunch—I remember that neither my circumstances nor my emotions get the final word.

That doesn’t make me naïve. It makes me anchored.

I once heard Pastor Rick Warren compare life circumstances to a mattress. Get on top of it, and you can rest. Get underneath it, and it’ll suffocate you. I laughed because it sounded ridiculous, but then I realized how often I crawl underneath my problems as though analyzing them one more time will somehow make them lighter. It never does. I’ve yet to overthink my way into peace.

Isaiah wrote, “You will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are steadfast, because they trust in You” (Isaiah 26:3). Not because everything around us makes sense. Not because every prayer has been answered exactly the way we hoped. Because our minds have a place to return.

That’s what faith really looks like. Not refusing to acknowledge reality, but refusing to let reality become the only thing we see. Maybe that’s why Scripture keeps calling us to “fix our eyes” on Jesus (Hebrews 12:2). Not because God is asking us to ignore reality, but because He knows whatever we keep looking at eventually begins to shape what we believe.

There’s a reason generations of Christians have kept singing, “Turn your eyes upon Jesus.” The hymn isn’t suggesting that the things of earth disappear or suddenly stop hurting. It’s reminding us that when Christ becomes the object of our attention, everything else is finally seen in its proper place. Reality matters. It just isn’t the whole story.

“O soul, are you weary and troubled?
No light in the darkness you see?
There’s light for a look at the Savior,
And life more abundant and free.

Turn your eyes upon Jesus,
Look full in His wonderful face,
And the things of earth will grow strangely dim,
In the light of His glory and grace.

Through death into life everlasting
He passed, and we follow Him there;
O’er us sin no more hath dominion
For more than conqu’rors we are!

His Word shall not fail you, He promised;
Believe Him and all will be well;
Then go to a world that is dying,
His perfect salvation to tell!”

Helen H. Lemmel, 1922

bytaylormcgee