A Gaze Fixed on God

Welcome to today's encouragement from Our Daily Bread. I'm Wynn Collier and I wrote today's piece titled, A Gaze Fixed on God. 19th century Scottish pastor Thomas Chalmers once told the story of riding in a horse-drawn carriage in the Highlands region as it hugged a narrow mountain ledge along a harrowing precipice. One of the horses startled, and the driver, fearing they would plummet to their death, repeatedly flicked his whip.

After they made it past the danger, Chalmers asked the driver why he used the whip with such force. I needed to give the horses something else to think about, he said. I needed to get their attention. In a world overflowing with threats and dangers all around us, we all need something else to arrest our attention. However, we need more than merely mental distraction, a kind of psychological trick. What we most need is to fasten our minds upon a reality more powerful than all our fears. As Isaiah told God's people in Judah, what we truly need is to fix our minds on God. You will keep in perfect peace, Isaiah promises, all who trust in you. And we can trust in the Lord always, for the Lord God is the eternal rock. Peace. This is the gift for all who fix their gaze on God. And His peace provides far more than only a technique for holding our worst thoughts at bay. For those who will surrender their future, their hopes, and their worries, the Spirit makes an entirely new way of life possible.

Today's Our Daily Bread devotional scripture reading is from Isaiah 53, verses 1-6. Who has believed our message, and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? He grew up before Him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of dry ground. He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to Him, nothing in His appearance that we should desire Him. He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering and familiar with pain.

Like one from whom people hide their faces, He was despised, and we held Him in low esteem. Surely He took up our pain and bore our suffering. Yet we considered Him punished by God, stricken by Him and afflicted. But He was pierced for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities. The punishment that brought us peace was on Him, and by His wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray. Each one of us has turned to our own way, and the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all. Let's pray.

Dear God, our mind can be a scary place, and we fear so much. Please give us your peace. Thank you, Lord. It's in Jesus' name we pray. Amen. Today's encouragement was provided by Our Daily Bread Ministries.