What Perspective Is Affecting Your Vision?
The things we dwell on dwell in us.
A theme God keeps highlighting to me this year is the perspective that affects our vision.
It’s only natural to let our circumstances, life experiences, and the culture around us all dictate our perspective on any given day. If we stop and think about it, we know our perspective is limited (we all know the story of the blind men and their different conclusions about what an elephant is!), but we go about our life directed by our own perspective anyway until it becomes more real than anything else, because it’s the most obvious thing we have.
Yet when we dwell on the Living Word of God, meaning His physical word given to us through the Bible as well as the person of Jesus the Word, we start to see more deeply, more accurately, more fully… more wisely.
Over the last several months, God has shown me, and even friends of mine, multiple visions of people with different types of glasses that dictate how they see the world, and shown us Holy Spirit offering Heavenly glasses that impart the ability to see accurately.
One particularly striking vision I had was of a person on an assembly line, choosing things off the conveyor belt that belonged to him. He kept grabbing negative things, saying almost apologetically, “O, that’s mine.”
He didn’t reach for many positive things, and the few times he did, they had nowhere to land in his basket and slipped right out again. He was priding himself on being wise, discerning, and honest in what he was picking, but was wearing thick, dark glasses he’d gotten from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and they were distorting his vision. He’d been wearing them for so long he’d gotten comfortable with them and forgotten about them, until they’d become fused to his face. The glasses twisted everything he saw, filtering it through the lie that God wasn’t taking care of him and was holding out on him. They caused him to believe God wasn’t showing him the full picture he needed to make the best decisions, so he needed these glasses to see what God wasn’t showing. They gave him a false sense of control and pride. But they were making him sick, showing him potential evil and blinding him to actual good.
All he needed a simple surgery by Jesus’ hands to get them off— he simply needed to admit that maybe we wasn’t seeing as clearly as he thought, and choose to receive the true sight that came, not from the deceptive Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil that burdens us with the thought that we can be like God, but from the TREE OF LIFE!
Seeing the vision broke my heart, because I didn’t know if he’d choose the Tree of Life or not. Even now, months later, it still breaks my heart, because so many of us who know how to open our Bible and how to talk to God are still obstinately slamming distorted glasses over our eyes, or refusing to believe we’re wearing a distorted lens at all.
How we choose to see is SO crucial right now. We can’t afford our own limited perspectives. Do we want to continue being the man at the conveyor belt, filling our baskets with negative things we’ve grown comfortable with, convincing ourselves this is our cross to bear, all the while blaming God for our own choices?
The beauty of being a child of God is that we don’t have to live by our own limited perspective anymore. God gives us the “mind of Christ.” (1 Cor. 2:16) He calls us a “new creation.” (1 Cor. 5:17) He transforms us “by the renewing of our minds.” (Rom. 12:2)
When we meditate on the Word — meaning both the Bible and Jesus Himself, our perspective is slowly transformed, until we are overflowing with the very Tree of Life! — I don’t know how to illustrate this complex and glorious reality in any other way than showing a person green with life, flowers blooming straight out of their head.
That person can be me;
that person can be you.
This illustration is featured on the July 2025 calendar page, and is available as an 8x10 print. Click Here to get this art and display this beautiful reminder in your home, or to gift this life-giving truth to a friend!
