Eyes of our Heart

God gave me something recently that keeps coming to mind periodically as I go through my day. It is a great encouragement to me and I wanted to share it with all of you, in case it could be the same for you.

God gave me this while I was reading the second chapter in The Final Quest. In his vision, Rick Joyner has been standing in the Garden of the Lord, he has ate from the Tree of Life and has been worshiping God. Then he is being told he needs to leave the garden to go out and bring the Good News of Jesus to others. He is saddened to leave the garden, but an angel named Wisdom tells him that this place and the presence of Jesus lives in his heart.

Then Wisdom released me and started to walk toward the gate. I followed with ambivalence. I remembered the exhilaration of the battle and the climb up the mountain, and it was compelling, but there was no comparison to the presence of the Lord and the worship I had just experienced. Leaving this would be the greatest sacrifice I had ever made. Then I remembered how it was all inside of me and was amazed that I could forget this so quickly. It was like there was a great battle raging within me, between what I saw with my physical eyes and what I saw with my heart.

(The Final Quest, by Rick Joyner)

After reading this the Lord gave me a vision of me walking down a wide asphalt road. On each side of the road I could see bright lights flashing and hear loud music and laughter. So many distractions beckoning me to leave the wide dark road I walking down. It reminded me a lot of Las Vegas. It was so hard to concentrate on the road ahead which was so cold and dark when I could see so many things on each side of me that looked so fun. But then I heard the Lord's quiet voice speak to me, telling me to stop looking at the world through my physical eyes. He told me to close my eyes and look at the world the way He saw it, to see it through the eyes of my heart.

So I shut my eyes and immediately all the distractions on each side of me when quiet and dark. I still has a sense of them being there, but they were dark and fuzzy, they held no pleasure for me. I realized all of a sudden that the reality I thought I knew was not the true reality. It was a fake that was all made up on the outside but on the inside was hollow and empty.

Then I noticed in front of me there were what looked like stepping stones in the middle of the road. These began to glow with an inner light. They were beautiful. I noticed though that they were not very large, just big enough for me to put a foot on. The Lord whispered to me that the path was really much more narrow than I had originally thought and that the only way to stay on the path was to follow Him - to see "reality" through the eyes of my heart, not with my physical eyes.

Now when I start to get tempted by the things of this world or start to feel overwhelmed by the things of this world, this vision comes to mind. That is not to say that I don't sometimes let the distractions of this world sway me. I'm human just like everyone else and I fall. (And it has only been about a week since He gave me this and already I have fallen, more than once!) But eventually I do hear God's whisper and He draws me back onto the path. He wants to guide us back to the path and guide us down it, but we have to give Him permission. He will stay by us waiting for us to ask Him to take us back, but He won't just pick us up and bodily drag us there. He will pick us up and set us back on the path if we ask Him to though.