"The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light, but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is that darkness!" (Matt. 6:22-23). Jesus spoke these words on the Sermon on the Mount.
Of all the amazing things he said, I think these are probably my favorite lines because they are about perception and I am fascinated by the concept of perception. It is a complex subject that involves so many aspects of ourselves: personality traits, temperament, our belief system, what your parents taught you, to name a few. A person's perception is sometimes referred to as a worldview, which serves as a kind of filter for everything we know and believe about ourselves and our environment.
Music stirs our emotions, movies make us cry. But then we move on pretty quickly to the next thing. In our fast-moving, pleasure-seeking society, its hard to stop and think about how we perceive the world on a deeper level. We don't often ask ourselves questions like, "Is there a Creator?" "What is my purpose?" "What happens after I die?" These are existential questions that we may not answer directly, but guess what? We all have some sort of answer for each one even if we aren't conscious of it.
Dr. John Thomas (Thomas & Sosin, 2011), one of my favorite professors at Liberty University, says that a person's worldview is made of four raw materials: cosmology, teleology, epistemology, and axiology. Academic words, but their meanings are pretty familiar.
Cosmology involves the Creationism vs evolution debate. In short, how did we get here?
Teleology concerns the purpose of life and asks "What is the meaning of life?".
Epistemology wants to understand the source of truth and knowledge. A biblical worldview (Judeo-Christian), a man-centered worldview (humanism), empiricism (science), and rationalism (reason) are the most common ones.
Axiology is our concept of right and wrong. Are there universal, God-established moral laws or does man make them up at his convenience?
If you think you've no answer to any of these questions, Dr. Thomas suggests considering your beliefs on these hotly debated topics: abortion, sex outside marriage, gay marriage, and capital punishment. Your answers will depend on how you answer the four "ology" questions above. Jesus' statement that the eye is the lamp of the body means that we view the world and its ever-changing ideas of right and wrong from a much deeper perspective than we may realize. And that view will lead us to either spiritual darkness or light.
People sometimes seek counseling because they are in an internally "tangled" state of conflicting emotions and confused beliefs based on a morally shifting foundation. They have never stopped to consider their perception of the world and instead simply adopted what others say is true. The problem is that, despite vastly different opinions on the answers to the "ology" questions, everyone is supposed to somehow be right!
At the end of his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus describes the fate of a foolish man who "built his house on sand" and a wise man who "built his house on the rock" (Matt. 7:24-27). Rain, flood, and wind slammed both but only the house built on rock, the solid foundation, was left standing. Christian counselors hope to lead hurting people toward building their lives on this foundation and these vital questions can be a great place to start.
Source: Thomas, J. C. & Sosin, L. (2011) Therapeutic expedition: equipping the Christian counselor for the journey. Nashville, TN: B & H.
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