Science reveals that what you focus on literally changes your mind. The Bible’s encouragement to look to Jesus can have absolutely life-changing effects!

<p>Science reveals that what you focus on literally changes your mind. The Bible’s encouragement to look to Jesus can have absolutely life-changing effects!</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

It Is Written

John Bradshaw

Looking Unto Jesus

Music Mary was born in the village of Wardle, Wardle in Lancashire, Not very far at all from Manchester, in fact about 12 miles north-north-east.

About 40 miles in a straight line to Liverpool, about half that distance to Leeds, which is in Yorkshire in exactly the opposite direction from Liverpool.

Now today Wardall isn't any kind of destination.

It's a pretty typical small English town.

The homes there are virtually all either semi-detached or they're terraced homes, row houses.

The streets in some places are impossibly narrow.

Some of them are cobblestone, of course, Britain, very historic.

And there are dry stone walls, stone fences in the countryside.

They're a couple of hundred years old, those dry stone walls.

There's a village church, which is today an ecumenical congregation, and that's because the other churches in the very secular town have closed down.

And an ecumenical village congregation is just about the only way a church can survive and be viable.

They've been converted for other purposes today.

At the time, Victoria was the Queen, and along with other nations, Britain was warring with Japan.

On the other side of the Atlantic, this side of the Atlantic, Abraham Lincoln was president and the Civil War was raging.

When Mary was a girl, about 12, her family moved to the United States and settled in Wisconsin.

Now she was going by her middle name, Helen.

She was quite a musician, performing and teaching music in southeast Wisconsin and in Chicago, Illinois.

After the death of her husband, Helen turned her attention to religious music, Christian music.

And eventually she wrote more than 500 hymns and poems.

She was involved in music ministry in conjunction with a major Billy Sunday crusade.

And then in 1904, she moved to the Pacific Northwest and settled in Seattle.

In 1918 a friend gave her a tract written by a young woman who had gone to North Africa to be a missionary among Muslims.

Now this young woman had been quite an artist and had been mentored by the foremost British art critic of the 19th century, a man who'd been a close friend of the great preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon.

Now that man said that this young woman would become the greatest living painter and do things that would be immortal.

But she left it all behind to serve Jesus in a difficult mission field.

And the tract that she wrote that Helen read, well, it made a great impact on Helen.

And it spoke of a dandelion, describing how when the sun comes up, that dandelion is so filled with sunlight that it seems to shine, radiating the light that it's filled with.

And then the tract said, So then turn your eyes upon him, Look full into his face, And you will find that the things of earth Will acquire a strange new dimness.

Helen Howarth Lemel, inspired by what she had just read, sat down and wrote a song that was initially called, The Heavenly Vision.

But of course we know it better today as, Turn your eyes upon Jesus.

We will open our Bibles to Hebrews 12, and we will start in verse 1 where it says, Wherefore, seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endued the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God." Now let's look at this passage.

In reality, these 2 verses belong more appropriately in Hebrews chapter 11.

Paul starts by saying, wherefore, or which basically means therefore.

That is, based on what we've just looked at, and what a chapter we've just looked at.

Hebrews 11, it starts, Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

By it the elders obtained a good report." The elders, men of old, the people of past ages, they obtained a good report by faith.

"...Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so the things which are seen were not made of things which do appear." Now this is powerful stuff.

And not that I mean to digress, But let's remember that when you're dealing with creation evolution, of course there are many wonderful scientific reasons why we believe creation.

Have you looked at a human eye, for example?

A retina in your eye has 120 million rods.

The rods help you to see in low light and owing to their position in the outer area of the retina they give you your peripheral vision.

Now There are 6 or 7000000 cones or cone cells in your retinas, in addition to the 120 million rods.

And the cones are the reasons that you see different colors.

If these fail, the rods and the cones, your vision's going to be seriously affected.

What if there were half as many rods, twice as many cones?

Or 10% of the rods and half as many cones?

Can you tell me that these really evolved?

Were there once 1 rod and 1 cone in each eye, and suddenly 1 day there were 2 rods, and then a child was born with 3 cones in his or her eye?

You know, evolution believes in a series of mutations occurring.

So what that means is that maybe there were once no rods, no cones, and something went wrong.

And a child was born with both rods and cones fully functioning.

And over millions of years, because of more mutations, they improved.

You would have to suspend your belief in science to believe that this happened.

You're going to tell me that that saliva just happened, the body didn't have it, and then there was a mutation, that is something went wrong, and lo and behold, as a result of that mutation, the human being now had saliva.

You're not gonna be able to eat without it.

You know that in your eye, when you blink, there are layers that coat your eye.

An optometrist just told me this, a bright man, a doctor.

No, no, no, his assistant, a bright lady.

Everyone's eyes were constantly mucky, but then 1 day a child was born with the eye secreting both mucus and water.

Just 1 child now, and somehow that was passed on to future generations, and then Sometime in the future the body mutated again and a child was born with eyes secreting Voila mucus water and oil every time the child blinked and that mutation was passed on Oh, come on.

You're not seriously going to believe that we have science and common sense testifying that creation is sensible.

Now, I warrant you, I cannot prove creation.

I don't have a video of creation taking place.

I have Scripture, and God has given me every reason to believe the Bible.

Although we have a plethora of great, reliable, eminently sensible, thoroughly scientific reasons to believe creation, The Bible writer tells us it is faith, ultimately, that tells us that the worlds were framed, what we see made by the things that we don't see.

I can believe this and more because I trust the Word of God.

Abel's offering, Enoch's translation, Noah's ark, Abraham's response to God's call, Sarah's motherhood, Isaac's near-death experience, Jacob's blessings, Joseph's posthumous journey, Moses, the Red Sea crossing, the walls of Jericho, Rahab, Gideon, David, Samuel, others, based on this.

Hebrews 12 begins, "...surrounded with witnesses like these, let us lay aside the weight, let us put aside the sin that so easily besets us, and let us run with patience the race set before us." The Bible writer was using a very carefully selected figure of speech there as he alluded to the ancient games.

Every 1 of his readers would have caught the point.

He was capitalizing on their familiarity with those ancient games to make his point.

So when Paul wrote to the Galatians and said, Lest by any means I should run, or had run in vain.

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Looking Unto Jesus

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