philippians on Open Eyes

Dear Lord, I pray that You would open my mind to the truth of Your Word by means of the Holy Spirit. Open my eyes to see Jesus. Open my heart to love Him more and more. Open my will to do only that wh...

Our loving Father, You’ve loved us from everlasting to everlasting. While looking into the future we see only mist and shadows—you see it all with clarity and precision. That which we can only guess a...

“He stands by you:” A drowning man cannot pull himself out of the water by his own hair. Neither can you do it. Someone else must rescue you. This is the good news of Christmas. He who stands by you a...

Sometimes our successes can be more devastating than our failures. We fight, strain, and struggle in pursuit of something or someone that looks to be good, and after days or months or years, we obtain...

Pastor: Heavenly Father, You created a wonderful world for us. You give us all we need for our body and life. We thank You for all the blessings that come from Your hand: food and drink, house and h...

Pastor: Lord God, Maker of heaven and earth. You are amazing and powerful, yet You love each of us dearly. We give You thanks for sustaining all of creation and remembering Your covenant faithfulnes...

My friend and colleague Keas Keasler, who teaches a class on spiritual formation, recently asked the class to close their eyes and picture God. After a few moments he had them open their eyes and, if ...

Because of this we have hope: Two men look out through the same bars One sees mud, one sees stars.

Abba – Father: Because of Your love and strength, we trust You … believing You are faithful, true and gracious. Thank You for coming into our world when we could not and would not come to You. You wal...

AIM commentary Ancient lens What's the historical context? Original Passover If you frequent any web sites that have thread or message board formats, you occasionally run into the acronym “...

When we lose sight of beauty our struggle becomes tired and functional. When we expect and engage the Beautiful, a new fluency is set free within us and between us. The heart becomes rekindled and our...

By the way, I have terrible eyesight. When I don’t have my glasses on, I can see shapes and forms and colors, but not much else. And that’s sort of what I think it’s like to look at God without Jesus....

Paradoxically, if we wish to become more aware of others and their concerns, there is perhaps no better work we can do than developing self-awareness. Consider the findings of a team of psychologists ...

Lord, high and holy, meek and lowly, Thou hast brought me to the valley of vision, where I live in the depths but see thee in the heights; hemmed in by mountains of sin I behold thy glory. Let me lear...

Truth consists in the mind giving to things the importance they have in reality.

Eternal God, lead me now out of the familiar setting of my doubts and fears, beyond my pride and my need to be secure into a strange and graceful ease with my true proportions and with yours; ...

I begin with humility, I act with humility, I end with humility. Humility leads to clarity. Humility leads to an open mind and a forgiving heart. With an open mind and a forgiving heart, I see every p...

Hope sees the invisible, feels the intangible, and achieves the impossible.

Sisters and brothers, go into the world with the mind of Christ. Go into the world to be the hands of Christ. Go into the world filled with the love of Christ. Amen.

The mission of Christian humility in social life is not merely to edify, but to keep minds open to many alternatives. The rigidity of a certain type of Christian thought has seriously impaired this ca...

God of grace and mercy, how often we choose to set our eyes on things below rather than things above. We allow ourselves to be ruled by our calendars rather than our King. We honor our own comfort bef...

[I]f we chose to project the human figure forward out of an unhuman world, we could only say that one of the animals had obviously gone mad.

R. C. Sproul recounts an unusual healing by Jesus. In Mark 8, when Jesus visits Bethsaida, a blind man is brought to him to be healed. Jesus leads him out of the village, puts saliva on his eyes, and ...

The apostle Paul said, “If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on thin...

If you see a thing whole—it seems that it’s always beautiful. Planets, lives… But up close a world’s all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life is a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You ne...

If the too obvious, too straight branches of Truth and Good are crushed or amputated and cannot reach the light—yet perhaps the . . . unexpected branches of Beauty will make their way through and soar...

During each full moon, believing himself equal to the Roman gods, the Roman emperor Caligula would summon the moon goddess to share his bedchamber. When he asked Aulus Vitellius—a member of the Roman ...

Each of us, Lord, has failed to fully observe your beauty. We fall in love with our own image and are left disappointed and alone. Please be faithful to us, Jesus, even when we turn from You. We...

One of the most critically acclaimed fantasy films in recent years was a piece of science fiction called Arrival . It is the story of beings from outer space who arrive on earth, igniting a wildfire ...

Emerson once observed, Do you love me? actually means Do you see the same truth? Or at least . . . Do you care about the same truth?”