Did you know that what you lay your eyes on ends up bringing either light or darkness into your body? There is no neutral. There are varying degrees of each - but it is always a combination of those two things. Our eyes are so important because what we see sparks a thought. And that thought commands our attention, colors our opinions, invites action, and sets a course for our emotions and our behavior. That’s crazy powerful!
Jesus warns, “See to it then that the light within you is not darkness” (Luke 11:35).
The eye is the lamp of our body. It lets in the things that will influence us. It will either help us to fill ourselves with God’s light - the good kind of light; it will invite the darkness - dimming the light in us; or our light will be darkened - like hidden under a bowl.
The God’s light in us is to be ON DISPLAY. It is to radiate in and out of us. We are to be shining lights on a hill for all to see! The purpose of light is to dispel the darkness!
No one lights a lamp and puts it in a place where it will be hidden (see Matthew 5:15). God has no intention of putting us under a bowl once He has lit the light inside of us. And WE have a role to play in keeping that light brightly shining, that is where we choose to place our attention - our baby blues.
The eyes can feed us many things. I find that what I watch on TV can very much influence me - when I am viewing shows like Downton Abbey, We Crashed or Inventing Anna, I start to feel like a pauper, like I have nothing luxurious in my life, and I am deprived. My attention is
pulled to the material things all around me. I compare and I judge. I begin to covet.
That is not to say that those shows are bad - they are entertainment. However, the thoughts that they elicit in me are MY concern. I need to be VERY aware of how the things I watch impact me.
When I see a shirtless well-built young man jogging by - I turn my eyes away. It may seem silly, but I do not want to invite lust into my body. I have a loving husband at home, and he has the only body I want to drool over. So, I do not watch a lot of movies with sex scenes or naked men because I know it will plant those seeds of lust in my mind. I also cover my husbands eyes when there is a nude scene with a woman. He does not need to be taking that in like a cool drink of water. Feasting on “eye candy” inevitably invites comparison and if you are in a committed relationship then you have no business spending time admiring other people’s bodies. We can take in our partner’s sexy body as much as we want while keeping those eyes where they belong.
As we guard our eyes from seeing things that tend to derail us (and they can be different for
everyone), we can renew our focus on taking in uplifting things - and this is what Jesus was
getting at. Let your eyes bring in the GOOD light. There is so much beauty in the world, so
much wisdom, so much love, so much truth. Let us focus on those things. They will fill us with
contentment, delight, and an overabundance of the love that we can then overflow and display from the hill where God has stationed us. “When your eyes are good, your whole body also is full of light. But when they are bad, your body also is full of darkness” (Luke 11:34). May our eyes be fixed on the “light of the world,” the One who will illuminate our own lives and help to fight off the darkness around us.
- Kelly Joyce