Open our eyes

WHAM! The bird slammed into the sliding glass doors of the deck and fell to the ground stunned senseless.

Poor little thing. One minute he’s flying along oblivious to what lies before him; the next he’s blindsided by something he never saw coming.

Some of us go through life this way – never seeing what’s coming, blindsided by the snares the enemy lays in our path. WHAM! We run into the snare and are rendered ineffective for the Gospel. But this is not God’s intention for us.

In Ephesians 1:17–18a, Paul prays “that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give to you a spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of Him. I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened, . . .”

Paul understood that we needed God to give us supernatural ability to discern things spiritually in order to move forward in our walk with God.

Sometimes we feel “stuck” in our spiritual lives. We’ve come up against an invisible wall and don’t know how to get past it. We think we’ve done what we can, but we’re not moving forward. When this happens, we need to ask God to open the eyes of our spiritual understanding, to help us see clearly the next step He would have us take. And then we need to ask that He would embolden us by His Spirit to take that step, to not resist His direction.

I wonder if the last thing that little bird saw was the shocking reflection of his own face rushing up to meet him. It takes a supernatural gift of God to identify and overcome spiritual barriers (or snares), but it takes an act of our will to seek God, believe for His help, and obey him. If we don’t do this, we set ourselves up to fall right into the enemy’s trap.