At Lifeway Women’s Leadership Forum in 2017, author and President of Proverbs 31 Ministries, Lysa TerKeurst, spoke on how we are prone to steer where we stare and get fixated on things other than Christ.
The entire video is above, and the complete transcript is below.
But you see, what we humans will do, because we have this perspective, so many of us, that God’s Word is too hard to understand and too difficult to live out. We get fixated on something that we think really will, really will right all of our wrongs, fill up all of our insecurities, and ease the aches of our soul. We start to steer where we stare.
You see, I don’t know exactly what happened in the garden of Eden, but all I know is Eve must have been standing there staring at that fruit. For where we stare, we basically hand a script over to the enemy and say, “Tempt me here. Tempt me here.” You see, the enemy cannot read our mind, but he pays attention all the time to where we are fixing out eyes.
The Word makes it so clear. Several times in Hebrews – Hebrews chapter 2, Hebrews chapter 12 – we are told to fix our eyes on Jesus. Fix our thoughts on Jesus. We are to fix our minds on truth. It’s the truth that sets us free. We’re told all throughout Scripture.
The thing is, if we have this perspective that God’s Word is too difficult to understand and too hard to live out, then we will go and find substitutes. And boy, we can get fixated on those substitutes.
And before we start shaking our finger at Eve, who is about to reach out and take this fruit and take a bite. The other night, I was sitting on my bed, and do you know what I noticed? I noticed something that really shocked me. I had my iPhone. I had my Apple TV changer. And I had my computer. And all three of those devices had a piece of fruit with a bite out of it.
We will steer where we stare.
The enemy doesn’t have to get real clever because we just tell him what we’re fixated on. We can be fixated on our computer, gotta achieve more, do more, answer more, please people more, go to websites, shop more, connect more, more likes, more followers. We pick up our phone, we gotta text more. We gotta swipe more. We gotta get more followers. We gotta get more likes. Right?
And the Apple TV. It’s like, “Ugghh, I’m too tired to study the Word of the Lord”. Like, Netflix, Netflix, Netflix, right? I’m not saying you guys do that. I’m just saying, like, us heathens, we struggle with these things, right?
And it’s not real hard for the enemy to start trying to plant this little lie in our mind: that God is the God of restriction. His Word is too hard to understand and too difficult to live out.
And then suddenly, instead of hearing the symphony of compassion with God saying, “Do not eat. You are free to eat from all these trees.” We miss the “free” and we miss the “all these trees” and we just start getting fixated on the one thing we’re not supposed to do, right?
And then we start steering where we’re staring.
