The Right Path: A Single Eye

 •  2 min. read  •  grade level: 9
Whatever we have to do in this world—common occupation, business, anything—the great object is to represent Christ. If my soul is knit to Him ("my soul followeth hard after Thee"), I shall measure all my path as to how far I can do justice to Christ. "If... thine eye be single," etc.
There may be a hundred wrong ways, but I must take care to get into the right one. Whether I have made much or little progress as a Christian, I must have Christ my object as the end; Christ will be reflected all down the path and then every step onward will be brighter and brighter. It is not going fast on the road that is the great point, but going always in it (the faster the better, too), "forgetting the things behind, and stretching out to the things before, I pursue, looking towards the goal, for the prize of the calling on high of God in Christ Jesus." Phil. 3:13, 1413Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended: but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, 14I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 3:13‑14) (N. Trans.). We must have our hearts set upon Christ though, in one sense, not nearer Christ at the end than at the beginning; in another, we are a great deal nearer. The fact of our resurrection is not nearer, but we are nearer in the moral effect of the expectation. Of the Church it is said, "that He might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water." In one sense it is perfectly clean, but in another it is getting cleaner through the application, by the Spirit, of the Word to the individual members of Christ's body, and so producing in the whole, moral likeness to the image of Christ. So the outward fact of resurrection is, and may still be, future, but it is the power of the truth of resurrection wrought in his heart that Paul desired.