While in a supermarket, I watched a young girl pout and cry when a bright colored lollipop was given to her from a stranger but the father decided to place it in his pocket for another time. Minutes later she was distracted when her father announced ice cream while passing by the freezers.
Even as adults we are very easily distracted by the important and trivial things of life.
What distracts will attract us. Eventually, it will shape our perception and understanding which can strengthen or weaken our faith. That it's why we must have supernatural vision to see Christ as attractive. Isaiah 53:2b says, "He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him." (NIV)
Still, He is more beautiful beyond human comparison or any other earthly object, if only the Holy Spirit takes away the veil from our eyes.
The challenge for many us who have so often failed Him is that we feel ugly and shameful. We believe such a holy and wonderful God appears to us as something other than His own loveliness. We hold up an image of an angry or vindictive even hateful God. Sadly, our sin blinds us to see Him as truly attractive and inviting. The Devil wants to distort and mar the image of God into something that reflects our own condition. But remember we are made in His perfect and beautiful image not our own!
So when we draw near to Christ we are attracted to the Otherness of our nature. God is holy, just and true. He never fails nor does His word lie. In that moment, whatever distracts loses its pull and lure. James 1:25 says, "But whoso looketh into the perfect law of liberty, and continueth therein, he being not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work, this man shall be blessed in his deed." (KJV).
Beloved, the longer we gaze at Him we are transformed into His likeness, into the very nature of Christ (Hebrews 12:2, Colossians 3:2).
Turn your eyes upon Jesus,
Look full in His wonderful face,
And the things of earth will grow strangely dim,
In the light of His glory and grace.
(Helen H. Lemmel, 1922)
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