Living for Christ

Having the Eyes and Ears to See and Hear

What matters in life to you? I’m not sure how you might answer that question, but what matters in life to many people is apparent. Just take a stroll through your local mall or pay attention to television and social media advertisements. And given how algorithms seem to work, the advertisements we see on social media reflect what we spend our time viewing, searching, etc.

I started a new message series on Philippians this past Sunday, and the question of what matters in life is pertinent to what the apostle Paul writes in this letter. Paul even expresses a prayer that the church would gain knowledge and insight in order “to determine what matters…” (Phil 1:10).¹

For Paul, what matters is Jesus Christ. This becomes clear as Paul describes his circumstances of being in prison and unsure if he will live or die. Like anyone would feel, Paul wants to live, but his concern is that Jesus Christ will be exalted, whether in life or death. That is, if Paul lives, he wants to exalt Christ in his life, but if Paul dies, he wants to exalt Christ in death. So Paul says, in what is a very well-known Bible verse, “For to me, living is Christ and dying is gain” (Phil 1:21).

Philippians reminds us that Jesus Christ must become the foundation of our life, the center of our life, the purpose of our life, the direction of our life, the power of our life, and the meaning of our life, just as it was for Paul.² However, that’s easier said than done. Life can distract us from what matters most, from subtly taking our focus from Christ.

So here is the question we must ask ourselves: How do we keep our focus on living for Christ?

To answer this question, let’s recall some teaching about our eyes and ears regarding Jesus Christ. First, when Jesus was speaking about the Kingdom of God, he referred to having the eyes and ears to see and hear (Matt 13:16; Mk 4:12; Lk 8:10). Secondly, Jesus also said in Matthew 6:22, “The eye is the lamp of the body. So if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light.” Then finally, when Jesus was transfigured before Peter, James, and John, God the Father spoke to them and said, “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” (Mk 9:7; cf. Matt 17:5; Lk 9:35).

This teaching suggests that although we all have eyes and ears, it’s not a given that we see and hear clearly when it comes to living for Jesus Christ. In other words, to live for Jesus Christ, we must see and hear Jesus Christ. The problem is that we don’t have Jesus talking and walking among us, so how do we see and hear Jesus and what he teaches about the kingdom of God?

An obvious answer might be reading the Bible more. Sure! I wrote a book about reading the Bible,³ so I’m for reading the Bible more. However, we need to remember that there were people who professed the Christian faith and read the Bible but also supported a system that built gas chambers throughout Europe. Likewise, some Christians read the Bible in America but supported a system where it was okay for men to wear white hoods as they burned crosses and lynched black people. Yes, those are extreme examples, but I hope that grabs our attention because we must understand that just reading the Bible more does not guarantee we live our lives for Christ. This is why we must give attention to our eyes and ears, to what we see and hear.

So we might consider whether what we spend our time watching and listening to has anything to do with helping us live for Christ. We can easily silo ourselves within our echo chamber to the point that we are kept from seeing and hearing clearly.

I’m a reader, and if you walk into my office, you’ll see books about the Bible and theology. Yet I remember being skeptical about reading any book written by someone outside of the Churches of Christ. That’s changed, but about fifteen years ago, someone asked me how many books I have written either by a woman or someone from the majority world. The truth was that a man of European descent wrote almost every book on my shelf. So I was challenged to read more books by women and authors from the majority world because doing so might help me see something about Jesus Christ I had yet to see.

There are other ways we can silo ourselves within our echo chambers. One of those ways is the news, social media, and politics. Regardless of where we fall on the social-political spectrum, we tend to only focus on the people and platforms who say what we want to see and hear. Doing so is a sure way to follow a blind man off a cliff, as has often happened throughout history.

So I’ll finish by asking a slightly different question: What things in life might be keeping us from clearly focusing on living for Christ?

1. Unless otherwise noted, all scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition Bible, copyright © 1989, 2021 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A., and are used by permission. All rights reserved.

2. G. Walter Hansen, The Letter to the Philippians, The Pillar New Testament Commentary, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009, 81.

3. K. Rex Butts, Gospel Portraits: Reading Scripture as Participants in the Mission of God, Eugene: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2022.