Look at Jesus Only!

One of my favorite inspirational books is The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom. Her personal account of her family's arrest and imprisonment during Hitler's nightmarish reign always inspires me when I am struggling in my own life. Corrie and her family were Christians who aided and hid Jewish people in their secret room of their home. I am certain that Heaven richly rewards those who bless and help the Jewish people.

Most impressive to me is the forgiveness and love that Corrie and her sister Betsie ten Boom extended to the very people who were killing and harming those they most loved. In the darkest places on earth known as the Nazi Concentration Camps, where death and hatred enveloped the facilities, the ten Boom family members epitomized the forgiveness and love that our Savior asks that we offer to those who hurt us the most deeply in this life. Corrie wrote in The Hiding Place in reference to a Nazi, "He has been taught wrong. By watching us, seeing that we love the Bible and are truthful people, he will realize his error." Let us think of a person who has hurt us more deeply than anyone else on earth and then ask ourselves if we are looking at that person with the same type of understanding, love, forgiveness, and hope that the ten Booms felt for the Nazis. If not, time with the Lord is warranted.

In my life, learning to forgive my enemies and to love even the vilest of people has been a lesson that took years to master consistently. Still, I fail at times, when I am deeply hurt and my flesh lunges forward, desiring to return evil for evil. Yet, now I more quickly recognize when I have failed in my love and forgiveness walk and I seek His forgiveness and love so that I can better extend forgiveness and love to those people in my life who inflict hurt and heartache.

Sometimes, even people such as these sister saints of God, suffer greatly during this life. Yet just as it is my prayer to remain in His will and plan for my life, never to be distracted by disappointments and heartache, we must be focused and purposeful in living our lives. Otherwise, the enemy of our souls attempts to distract us and tug at our heart strings. Ten Boom prayed, “Lord Jesus, keep me in your will. Don’t let me go mad by poking about outside of it.” All too often I have known believers who are struck with life tragedies and who allow the grief of these events to push them from God’s will for their lives. Now that is a tragedy beyond death, illness, poverty, heartache, or other losses. When we remain solidified in the center of God’s will for our lives, we manage to sail through life storms with the peace that He intended for His children.

Betsie ten Boom suffered a life of physical suffering. Throughout her life story’s telling, I related intensely to Betsie. Fortunately, most people don’t suffer with physical ailments for years, yet for those of us who face chronic health challenges, key to our living productive, happy lives reflective of our Heavenly Father is the ability to eliminate hatred, doubt, unforgiveness, guilt, and anger at God. About Betsie, Corrie penned that her sister lived “in a prison of a crippled body”. Yet in that “prison of a crippled body”, she lived in the walls of the concentration camp and faithfully shared the Gospel with her fellow prisoners. The sisters prayed, not focused on their own desperate needs and situation, but for the needs of people around the world and their fellow captives. And they prayed for those very despicable people who held them captive and killed their family, acquaintances, and friends.

No matter, how desperately Satan wants to take life situations such as illness, imprisonment, or poverty to distract God’s children from our Father, he is inept. He is powerless when compared to the God of the Universe. And the ten Boom sisters continued to live lives that glorified God. They continued to minister in the midst of hellish conditions and situations. They never doubted the provision or protection of their Father. Circumstances never distracted them from the calling on their lives to reflect Christ to others. Corrie wrote: “Whatever in our life is hardest to bear, love can transform into beauty”.

Can we allow our physical experiences and what our physical eyes observe to be transformed and viewed as Jesus would see these experiences? At a desperate time in the concentration camps, Betsie told Corrie, “Don’t look at it, Corrie, look at Jesus only”. So many times in my life this tidbit of advice is exactly what I had to do – the ugliness of leukemia and hospitals and death predictions forced me to look up into the face of Jesus.

Look at Jesus only!