Open My Eyes: A 21-Day Fasting Devotional from Jentezen FranklinSample

Fasting Day 15: Eyes Filled With Pain

Here we go! The third and final week! While this could be your greatest breakthrough week ever, I do want to warn you about a few things. Every commercial you see on television will be a pizza commercial. It will seem as though there are one thousand more restaurants in your city and cheeseburgers will be on every billboard. So you have to be like Peter when he got out of that boat. Don’t look! Keep your eyes on Jesus. 

As We Age – We Must Remain Flexible and our Eyes Must Be Open to New Ways of Looking at Old Truths in New Ways. 

Change is inevitable, and sometimes it’s harder to navigate as you get older. As we age, our eyes have to be recalibrated through new eyes-glasses in the physical and a teachable, flexible attitude in the spirit world. One of the signs that an eye is aging is when the surface begins to harden and becomes less flexible. Things that used to be crystal clear are now blurry. After you pass the age of 40, it’s harder to focus on objects up close. Presbyopia is a normal loss of focusing ability as you grow older. For a time, you can compensate for presbyopia by holding reading material farther away from your eyes, but eventually you will need reading glasses or surgery. The same is true when it comes to your spiritual life. As we age, the world begins to change all around us and what used to be clear becomes blurry and, despite our efforts to compensate, we need God’s help to see what He is doing today. You can try to act like everything is fine – or worse yet, you can dig in and insist you don’t need to change anything. But it’s not long until you are bumping into everyone and everything and creating more problems than you are solving.

No matter what your age, the Lord’s not through with you yet. Allow Him to open your eyes to new ways of doing things and new roles He has for you as you age gracefully but effectively. The church is in desperate need of wise counsel and men and women who have braved the storms of life - seeing the highs and lows - and who are willing to walk patiently with the young.

Prayer:

Let’s pray. Father, thank You that, just like at the Pool of Bethesda, You are still the Healer. You are still the Anointed One, and You’re the same yesterday, today, and forever. I pray for every person reading this to receive a fresh anointing to be healed, and that long-time, long-term difficulties and bondages would break in the name of Jesus while we fast and pray.