Singleness of Eye # 3

Singleness of Eye # 3

I am not, for a moment, questioning your motives. I cannot question my own motives as I know them on the surface. You would all say, "All that I am and all I have is for the Lord; it is at the Lord's disposal. I do not want to have any secondary interest at all." We are all like that, but so often we are our own greatest enemies, and I am not speaking to you about the things of which you may be conscious. We shall, of course, have to face things which come into this realm as we know them; as we are able to discern them, we have to face them quite seriously. But I know this, that "the heart is deceitful above all things, and it is exceedingly corrupt" (Jer. 17:9). Deceitful - and we really do not always know our own motives, and the motive is only manifest sometimes when the Lord has given us a little extra rope of liberty and blessing, and then we begin to be very pleased with it and with ourselves, instead of humbly, broken-heartedly, going down before the Lord in worship that such as we, could ever be considered in the realm of His using. It is what is there. That is why I speak of circumcision of heart, getting right down inside.

Well, the opposite to singleness, of course, is dividedness, and you know how often the Lord Jesus, when He was here in the flesh, used that word "cannot," and how often He used the phrase that is here in our portion: "No man does this or that to things." "Men do not put new wine into old bottles" (Matt. 9:17) - two opposite things; "men do not put a piece of new cloth upon an old garment" - two different things. "Ye cannot serve God and mammon". "Unless you leave all, you cannot be My disciples". These "cannots" just touch this: there can be no two things where the Lord is concerned, only one thing, singleness of eye. Pride and jealousy are only forms of self-interest. When David returned from slaying the giant, the women came out and sang, "Saul has slain his thousands, and David his ten thousands". Saul said, "They have ascribed David ten thousands, and to me they have ascribed but thousands. And Saul eyed David from that day and forward," eyed him with an evil eye. He was jealous, and I think it was David's singleness of eye hat was the great characteristic of his life.

The Heart the Seeing Organ

The eye is the seeing organ, and eye and body here must not be interpreted physically. The Lord is not talking about the literal, physical eye, and the literal, physical body. He is speaking in symbols, as always in the Gospels. The eye and body here are symbolical. If you follow through the rest of the New Testament, you know that the heart is the spiritual eye of man, and the body is his personal presence in any location. If it is the heart that is the seeing organ, then it is an affection. The heart is the seat of affection, of love. Love then becomes the great seeing organ, the thing which is the lamp of a man's presence, that makes him luminous in this world. Love - not teaching, not what he has, but what he is: the embodiment of Divine love. Now we are caught. All of us are brought right to the last issue by that. For is not love essentially singleness? True love is single, has one object, one interest, one motive. A lot of other things have got to be done, but they are done  in order to get them out of the way in order that the object of love might be the occupation.

Love is singleness. Love is utterly selfless. Oh, God have mercy upon us that our love is so often not that kind of love. We think it is love, but there is a good deal of selfishness about what we call love, drawing to ourselves, making even the object of love, our professed love, serve our ends. That is the tragedy of the world today, of married life. It is called love, but what is it? Serving the selfish ends of man. But true love "seeks not its own" (1 Cor. 13:5) says the apostle, but is utterly selfless, and when it is like that, we are luminous. Men can see by our presence, they can see God, see Christ, see a lot, perhaps all that they need to see, by our being here or there. We are luminaries - not by a teaching, not by what we have, but we are that. That is singleness of eye, that is purity of heart, and again I say at the end, that is the only ground on which the Lord is free to commit Himself to us. If we turn the light of the Lord's glory upon every situation, every matter, and we do not say, "This is quite permissible and harmless" for that is negative. We are positive; we say, "Is this to the glory of God?" That is the positive side, that is the single eye. The Lord grant it to us!

~T. Austin-Sparks~

(The End)