Fixing Our Thoughts

Fix your thoughts on Jesus…. Let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus….
Hebrews 3:1, 12:1-2 (NIV)

One day the church musician, Lowell Mason, met an exhausted man on the street. It was Ray Palmer, 24, who had been working a retail job while attending classes at Yale, teaching at a girl’s school, and preparing for future ministry. Mason asked Palmer to take on another task—writing hymn lyrics. Palmer, too tired to produce anything new, pulled from his billfold a little poem he had written two years earlier. It was a personal prayer for renewed zeal and courage, which he had written one night when very low. Lowell Mason composed music for the words, giving us the great hymn, “My Faith Looks Up to Thee.”

When circumstances get us down, we need to lift our eyes to Jesus in faith and fix our thoughts on Him. The challenge of the Christian life isn’t how to avoid fatigue and failure. It’s learning to move forward with faith, looking up to the Lord and His sovereign Word: “My faith looks up to Thee, Thou Lamb of Calvary, Savior Divine! / Now hear me while I pray; take all my guilt away; O let me from this day be wholly Thine!”

May Thy rich grace impart strength to my fainting heart, my zeal inspire. / As Thou hast died for me, O may my love for Thee / Pure, warm, and changeless be, a living fire!
Ray Palmer