Be Thou My Vision: Having the Eyes of Christ -- Open My Eyes So That I Might Have "People Eyes"

The Acts 16:5 concept of looking at people as Jesus would see them, with eyes for people and their hearts. We catch His vision for helping and loving and nurturing people. We see people through the eyes of Christ, as people with needs to be met – physical, spiritual, emotional, social, relational – and look for ways to meet those needs in the mission of Jesus Christ in our time and place.

To see people the way Jesus saw them is to look beyond failure to another chance.
In a world in which it’s “three strikes and you’re out,” to see people the way Jesus sawthem is to believe in redemption, really believe in it, not just as a religious idea but as a fact of real life. To see people the way Jesus saw is to put hope back into the equation. Jesus saw people differently. And we, as new creations in Christ, are called to see people the way he saw them.

Jesus would have us look beyond the obvious and the superficial. He would have
us look deeper into the soul and spirit.

What do you see? What do you see when you see an autistic child? What do you
see when you see a homeless man selling newspapers at the intersection? What do you see when you see a poor person in the line at a food pantry? What do you see when you see a black man or Mexican man or an Arabian man? What do you see when you see a senile senior adult, once proud and accomplished but now reduced to repeating over and over, hundreds of times every day,“Please help me. Won’t somebody help me”? What do you see?

Or, more importantly, through whose eyes do you see? Do you see through the
eyes of a society in which worth is based on what one can produce or generate, and
therefore one in which there is no place for the non-productive – senile senior adults, the mentally ill, the unemployed, the poor? Do you see through the eyes of a selfish, greedy society in which hedonism, the belief that the satisfaction of one’s physical and material desires is the highest good, has become so much a part of our lifestyle that we scarcely notice it any more. Do you see through eyes that align with social Darwinism, (the survival of the strongest, the richest, the financially fittest), rather than Christ's law of love?

Or do you see through the eyes of Christ and the eyes a Christian society in which we have a sense of responsibility for one another, for people we don’t even know but who share something important with us, namely that we are all humans,that we are all people with Christ in common. Are you caught up in the radical individualism, or do you follow the teachings of the radical Savior Jesus Christ? Do you see through the eyes of the world or through the eyes of Christ?

The fundamental challenge for us as followers of Jesus Christ is to recognize that
if we do nothing, if we float along through life, we will see through the eyes of the world. To see through the eyes of Christ requires a conscious decision on our part, a choice.

That decision must be followed by a lifetime of being alert to the ways the world has of shaping our vision and a lifetime of perpetual learning what it means to see through the eyes of Christ.

May God call us to that decision today and every day so that the prayer of the
hymn writers might be our prayer:

Be thou my vision, O Lord of my heart...give me the vision you have for my heart!
Open my eyes that I may see,glimpses of truth thou hast for me. Lord, give us eyes to see the way Jesus saw. In his name, Amen.