Keep Your Eyes on Jesus

Looking to Jesus

"Let us run with perseverance 

the race that is set before us,

looking to Jesus 

the pioneer and perfecter of our faith"

(From Heb. 11:29-12-2 )

Helen H. Lemmel wrote this song while experiencing trying times in her life, one being blindness.

"Turn your eyes upon Jesus", one of my favorite gospel hymns, begins like this:

"O soul, are you weary and troubled?

No light in the darkness you see?

There’s light for a look at the Savior,

And life more abundant and free!

Turn your eyes upon Jesus,

Look full in His wonderful face,

And the things of earth will grow strangely dim."

At 55, Helen heard an impressive statement: "So then, turn your eyes upon Him, look full into His face and you will see that the things of earth will acquire a strange new dimness."

One biographer wrote that she said “I stood still and singing in my soul and spirit was the chorus, with not one conscious moment of putting word to word to make rhyme, or note to note to make melody." The verses were written the same week dictated by the Holy Spirit.

In other words, her eyesight was failing, but she saw Jesus in her singing.

One of my core convictions is that singing is the voice of a soul-conversation with God expressing our deepest needs and greatest joys. 

When we need perseverance because we're just hanging on, a song is a soul-conversation with God sharing the hope of enduring the race. 

To celebrate God's presence in our faith journey, a song of praise lets God know our deepest gratitude.

And certainly, being surrounded by a cloud of witnesses singing in a congregation on Sunday, is expressing hope in God's vision of a new creation.

So with them, we join Jesus, pioneer of our faith, with all the voices that have gone before and the voices yet to come singing of that hope in Jesus and God's new creation.