“The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are healthy, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light you think you have is darkness, how great is that darkness!” Matthew 6:22,23

Last time we talked about casting down and defeating every imagination that exalts itself against the true knowledge of God (2 Cor 10:5). That means that our beliefs and views can and do fall short of the truth and God is out to change that. In fact, God has every intention of tossing out what is wrong and refining the seedlings of real truth that He’s planted in us.

It could be our interpretation of a Bible passage, or our view of What He is like which can cause us to remain a prisoner of our past untruth. When this happens we only hear God in line with our upbringing and what we’ve been taught, what we’ve picked up on TV…

So God comes along and introduces something from outside of our understanding of the truth and right away we want to shut Him down and say, “This is what I’m comfortable with; this is what I believe; this is what my tradition is.”

The move of God in our lives can be tough on us when all our certainties are in one direction and suddenly Jesus turns us around. But He’ll surprise us anyway because as Christians we frequently have enthroned the wrong ideas and assumed them to be the truth when they are either incomplete truths, or not the truth at all.

Sometimes we hold tenaciously onto these half-truths or lies—these intellectual idols—because they make us feel comfortable. (There’s a lot of comfort in thinking we’re the only ones who are right. Besides, it’s fun.) Other times we simply don’t know any better. This is what we’ve been taught; this is our tradition.

In today’s verses, Jesus uses the metaphor of our sense of sight to describe how we might or might not see clearly. “If the light you think you have is darkness, how great is that darkness!”
And we say with the psalmist, “Open my eyes, that I may see” (Psalm 119:18).