Open My Eyes That I May See

Have you ever looked at any of the artwork of M.C. Escher?  He has some amazing optical illusions. Some of his impossible constructions truly mess with your mind. The reason optical illusions are so intriguing is that they contradict what you expect to see.

Most of the time we see what we expect to see. We see what we want to see.  How many times have you passed by something and totally missed it? Or perhaps you’ve seen something a million times and then you walk by the spot where it should be and don’t even see that it’s gone.  It takes a minute for your brain to register that something is missing because you have been trained to see it.

Spiritually we do the same thing. We’ve heard the phrase “don’t put God in a box,” so many times we have become accustomed to what we think it means.  Of course, it means that God works and acts in ways that don’t fit our limited mental capacity to understand. We tend to limit His ablilities because we can’t “think outside the box.”

But where did the box come from? And is it God who’s in the box or us?  I think we have turned it around. I think it is we who are in the box and not God.  I think we know what God is capable of, even though it is more than we can imagine.

The real issue is that we have put ourselves in the box. A box with high sides all the way around us. We are trapped by our own illusions.  The fact is, the box sides have been blown down like the walls of Jericho but we are still imagining that they are there. They still limit our ability to move and act in the ways God designed us too.

We see what we expect to see. What we want to see. We see the walls there, holding us back, limiting our effectiveness. Time to look past this mental illusion and move beyond the walls that Jesus removed when he rose from the grave. Time to ask God to give us eyes to see what we have been blinded to for too long.

I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened, so that you will know what is the hope of His calling, what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints – Ephesians 1:18 (NASB)

Open my eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of your law. – Psalm 119:18 (ESV)