19 Don’t store up treasures on earth! Moths and rust can destroy them, and thieves can break in and steal them. 20 Instead, store up your treasures in heaven, where moths and rust cannot destroy them, and thieves cannot break in and steal them. 21 Your heart will always be where your treasure is.
22 Your eyes are like a window for your body. When they are good, you have all the light you need. 23 But when your eyes are bad, everything is dark. If the light inside you is dark, you surely are in the dark.
24 You cannot be the slave of two masters! You will like one more than the other or be more loyal to one than the other. You cannot serve both God and money.
Read Matthew 6:19-24 in context and/or in other translations on BibleGateway.com!
If Jesus had a favorite one of the five senses, what do you think it might be? Would seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, or touching top His list if He were to prioritize them?
In the gospels, we have examples of all of these senses, but when I read the passage we are focusing on in this journal entry, I wonder if the sense of sight may be the most important of the senses in Jesus’ mind. In the middle of our passage, Jesus tells the crowd, “Your eyes are like a window for your body. When they are good, you have all the light you need. But when your eyes are bad, everything is dark. If the light inside you is dark, you surely are in the dark.” (v. 22-23)
While there are several levels of truth Jesus is touching on in these two verses, the most obvious one is that our eyesight is incredibly important for seeing and navigating our world.
But Jesus is using the sense of sight as a metaphor for something else. In the last portion of this verse, Jesus hints at light potentially being darkness – and in this case, Jesus may be touching on something spiritual.
If light in these verses has more to do with seeing and discovering spiritual truths, then when we have great eyesight that is focused on the right things, we will have all the light we need. But if we don’t have the right focus, we live in the dark, or even worse than simply living in the dark is when we believe that the darkness we are living in is actually light.
Our eyes adjust to the amount of light in whatever location we are in. Perhaps this too relates to a spiritual truth that our spiritual eyesight gets stronger the more we focus on the right things.
Our eyes are like windows for our bodies. Everything we read, watch, and focus on gets into our minds, and it affects our worldview and our focus. It is up to us to be extra intentional about what we focus our eyes on because what we focus on will shape who we become.
This thought was inspired by studying the Walking With Jesus “Reflective Bible Study” package. To discover insights like this in your own study time, click here and give Reflective Bible Study a try today!
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