For those of you that know me well at all, you should know that Hebrews 12:1-3 is my life verse. It is the passage that I try to live by daily and for me, it is the verse that holds everything together. How can one passage hold everything together though? Well, I believe that we have to understand this passage before we are ever going to get the rest of what God has in store for us. There is another thing that I would like to explain about this passage before we get going too much on this post. This passage is where I get part of my blog name. I’m not crosseyed in the medical sense. I am a Crosseyed Jesus Freak because I have my “eyes fixed on Jesus” as verse 2 tells us we should. That’s where the name for this blog is inspired from.
As I said earlier, this passage is what I would consider my life verse. But it wasn’t until just recently that I realized that another one of my passions for the church and Christianity can be found in this passage too. Let’s first start with the passage itself. Hebrews 12:1-3 states, “Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles; and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him, endured the cross, scorning its shame and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider him who endured such opposition from sinful man so that you may not grow weary and lose heart”. This passage has always meant a lot to me. It tells me that we have a great support system of those that ran this race before us. It also tells me that all we have to do is fix our eyes on Jesus and everything will be alright, no matter what difficulties must come.
I have always had a passion to see unity within the body of Christ, and while I know that we will probably never truly see unity among all of us, I was encouraged the other day as I was thinking through Hebrews 12:1-3 again. This passage truly tells me that without unity, we have almost no chance of running this race that is marked out for us. How can I sit here today and type that? I can because I see it this way. This passage tells us that we have a great cloud of witnesses that are encouraging us to run this race…these same witnesses have already run this race so they know what encouragement we need. Without unity, how are we getting their encouragement? Without unity, I feel that it is extremely hard to see “the great cloud of witnesses”. You see, without unity, it is almost impossible to run this race marked out for us because we have no encouragement. And that’s just the first verse.
How can we “fix our eyes on Jesus” and not be unified with those that claim to believe in Christ just like we do? I would claim that it is impossible to fix our eyes on Jesus and not truly feel a sense of unity among other Christians.
Stop fighting amongst ourselves and let us all truly fix our eyes on Jesus. I hope that all of us can truly become crosseyed!
Thoughts from a Crosseyed Jesus Freak 