Walking by faith doesn’t mean closing your eyes or sticking your head in the ground, so you don’t know what’s going on around you. Instead, it’s a choice to focus on God. It’s a decision to continue doing things God’s way and trusting Him for the outcome, despite what’s happening in your life.

I’ve heard people say that Christians need to take a blind leap of faith to trust God. The insinuation is that you need to leave behind all reason and follow God solely based on emotion and a lack of thought.

But that isn’t true. God has given us the Bible. In those pages, God has revealed Himself to us. He tells us what He likes, what He hates, where we came from, where we are going, and much more.

As we consider the things we read in the Bible, God invites us,

Come now, and let us reason together. (Isaiah 1:18 (NKJV))

And Jesus told us to “count the cost” before deciding to follow Him (Luke 14:27-30 (NKJV)). Jesus warned us that it wouldn’t be easy. God wants us to ask questions about who He is and why we should follow Him.

It’s only after we decide to follow Jesus that God instructs us to “walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Corinthians 5:7 (NKJV)). Still, the direction is not to close our eyes. Instead, the Bible tells us that we should be “looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith” (Hebrews 12:1-2 (NKJV)). The Greek word for “looking” means to turn our eyes away from other things and fix them on Jesus.

It’s like a horse walking with blinders on. The purpose of the blinders is not so the horse can’t see at all – the blinders don’t go over the horse’s eyes. The blinders are placed on the outer sides of the horse’s eyes to keep the horse focused on the road in front of him. The blinders keep the horse from getting distracted by the things around him. In a similar way, when we walk by faith and not by sight, we must keep our eyes on Jesus.

We can get distracted by the things that are going on around us – things we have no control over.

Every day, the news informs us about people who are killed, storms, wars, disease, and many other horrible things. Our thoughts can be consumed by those awful things.
We can become divided over social issues. It’s easy to get caught up in arguments about whether everyone should or shouldn’t be vaccinated, the effectiveness of wearing masks, and how the government should or shouldn’t be handling the pandemic.

When we get sidetracked by these things, we are derailed from God’s plans for our lives.

Don’t misunderstand me. You shouldn’t ignore the things that need to be taken care of in your life. It is important to care for your family and be a good steward of the things that God has entrusted to you. God has placed people into your life for a reason. He wants you to love those people, help them with their needs, and tell them about Him.

Yet, first and foremost, we need to keep our eyes focused on Jesus. We need to spend time with Him, reading the Bible, praying to Him, and worshipping Him. As Jesus taught us, “I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in Me, and I in him, bears much fruit; for without Me you can do nothing” (John 15:5 (NKJV)).

We are unable to care for the people in our lives the way God wants us to without first being empowered by Jesus. Jesus gives us the strength we need, gives us direction, tells us which way to go, and tells us the things we should do. When our eyes are fixed on Jesus, we’re not distracted by the things going on around us.

There’s a beautiful hymn written by Helen Howarth Lemmel that encompasses this very idea. The refrain of the hymn encourages us,