Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus

We had a wonderful time at our church fellowship lunch meeting recently. There had been no previous communication between those leading the singing and the pastor giving the message, but he was thrilled that they had chosen to sing ‘Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus’. His message was essentially that we are to fix our eyes on Jesus and we will be gradually transformed into His image. Then we are able to reflect Jesus and mirror His image to the world.

Some Bible translations say ‘beholding’ the glory of the Lord. ‘And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit’ (2 Corinthians 3:18, ESV). Other translations say ‘reflecting’ the glory of the Lord. Both words are true of the original Greek word.

“How does this happen”? he asked. How do we look at, contemplate, or behold Jesus, (all verbs used in different Bible translations of this verse)? It is not just passively waiting. There are things we have to do. He then proceeded to ask us three questions that we could discuss on our tables with one another.

The first question was “What has helped you, in your Christian walk, to fix your eyes upon Jesus”? He was aware that many in the group had been Christians a lot longer than himself and also asked us to think about what we knew now that we wished we had known years ago.

The second question was “Who has helped or supported you to become more like Jesus and how did they do that”?

The third question was for us to reflect upon at home. “Who do you know, younger in the faith than you, that you could support and /or pass on your wisdom to”?

The fellowship group is predominantly comprised of retired people, although a few younger people have joined us recently, one being a young mother of four children. On my table of six there was a lady in her eighties who had not been a Christian for a long time, and she told us about her sister who had prayed many years for her to become a believer.

She had always resisted until the day she saw her sister go through the terrible trauma of losing her son in a car accident. She saw the amazing peace and lack of bitterness and anger in her sister’s life, and as a result she came to faith in the Lord Jesus for herself. She then came to church and was welcomed and encouraged in the faith by three special people there.

If we are staying close to our Lord Jesus and fixing our eyes on Him, even in the most painful of circumstances, we will be able to reflect something of His glory to others. I was reminded of the words of Jesus in Matthew’s gospel, which I am reading in my daily devotional. ‘Anyone who listens to my teaching and follows it is wise, like a person who builds a house on solid rock. Though the rain comes in torrents and the floodwaters rise and the winds beat against that house, it won’t collapse because it is built on bedrock’ (Matthew 7:24-25).