Clear Vision

Finally, The Lovely Joanne and I have un-decorated our Christmas tree, put all the symbols of Christ and the Christian life (light, fruits of the spirit, praise, thanksgiving, proclamation, etc) back in their boxes and taken the tree out to be mulched. 

I noticed something interesting as we took all the ornaments and lights off.  We own 'sets' of various ornaments: several angels, four flame-shaped glass ones, and so forth, so we wanted to box them up together again.  But looking for the fourth snowflake or the last angel became a chore, as one individual piece was hard to find in the midst of the strings of lights and other ornaments.  So we had to un-clutter our view of the tree by unwinding the lights and the gold ribbon from it, so that the missing piece would become obvious.

As you might guess, there's a spiritual lesson from all this.  Christian life is wonderful but we can complicate it with too much activity--even serving--and miss the point of following Jesus.  In Hebrews 12:2 we're reminded that to succeed in the Christian life, we need to be "keeping our eyes on Jesus, the champion who initiates and perfects our faith."  When my appointment book or to-do list gets too cluttered, I can lose sight of just following Jesus.  Then I tend to fall back on my own energy and wisdom--which, trust me, ain't enough.  Peter found this out when he was walking on water in Mt 14:24-33.  When he took his eyes off Jesus (he "saw the wind and the waves" -- what was he doing looking at them?) he fell into the lake.

'Keeping our eyes on Jesus' might require un-cluttering our lives by fasting from food or some favorite distraction like watching football games, even during the playoffs.   It might require taking our burdens of guilt, anger, and unforgiveness and loading them on Jesus instead of trying to haul them around ourselves.  Or it might mean completely trusting Him instead of our own performance, law-keeping or some other form of self-righteousness, which we humans tend to fall back into regularly.

The exercise of looking once more to Jesus and Him alone for our salvation--our acceptance into the love of God--would be a good thing to do at the beginning of 2011.  The exercise of looking to Him for direction at every point in the day instead of following our human motivations, helps us focus on finding following His will.  You might have to unwind some of the 'stuff' that's become wound around your life, in order to see Him clearly, just like I unwound a bunch of stuff from the tree to see those last few ornaments.  But the vision of Jesus, a clearer understanding the glory He has called us into, will take your breath away.  Aren't quite sure what I mean by that?  I'll see if I can describe it for you next time.