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Mike Balog

[b][color=CC3300]9. Look with a JOYFUL, pleasant eye at unseen, eternal things.[/color][/b] Look until you feel your heart to leap for joy; look until you find your spirit is revived within you; [b]look until the sight of your eye affect your heart.[/b] Is Christ unseen? Yet not unknown. Do not you now see him with bodily eyes? Yet you do with an eye of faith and love; and therefore may "rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory." (1 Peter 1:8.) When you look up unto the heavens, and see, and say, "Yonder is the place of my everlasting abode: there I must dwell with God, there I must be with Christ, and joyfully join with angels and saints in praising of my Lord and Savior;" the foresight of this will make you joyful for the present and pleasant in your looking at it.

[b][color=CC3300]10. Look CONFIDENTLY at unseen, eternal things.[/color][/b] With a holy, humble confidence that, by Jesus Christ, upon the performance of the conditions of the gospel, they shall be all your own; that, by turning from all your sin, by repentance and faith in Christ, you trust you shall be possessed of them; that—when you see there are mansions now unseen, there are eternal joys, an immovable kingdom, an incorruptible crown, the eternal God, to be enjoyed; and for all this you have a promise, and you know this promise is made to you by the performance of the conditions annexed to the promise, you trust in time to come unto it, or rather, when you go out of time into eternity, you shall be blessed in the immediate, full, eternal enjoyment of all the happiness that God has prepared in heaven, to give you welcome, joyful entertainment in that unseen, eternal world; that you so eye that world, while you live in this, that when by death you are going out of this world into that, you might have this well-grounded confidence to say, "I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith: henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, shall give me at that day." (2 Tim. iv. 7, 8.)

If you get such a sight as this, as now has been set forth before you, upon such eternal objects as before were propounded to you, you will be able from your own experience to answer the third question contained in the general case. But yet I will proceed unto that branch question in. [b]What INFLUENCE will such an eyeing of eternity have upon us in all we do?[/b] Will its influence be so universal? will the efficacy of such a sight be so extensive, to reach forth its virtue [b]in all we do?" Yes! "in all we do." Whether we eat, or drink, or go to sleep; whether we trade, or work, or buy, or sell; whether we pray, or hear, or search our hearts, or meditate, or receive, or study, or preach, or sin, or suffer, or die; [/b]it will have a mighty influence upon us in anything wherein we are active or passive, culpable or praiseworthy; in any condition—be it poverty or riches, health or sickness; in any relation—be it of husband and wife, of parents and children, of masters and servants; in any office and employment, sacred or civil. Out of such a heap, because I am limited, I will take a handful; and take them as they come, in some few particulars only.