Priscilla Shirer - Make Jesus the Object of Your Faith
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Summary
In this devotional, the speaker uses a humorous family story about her mother Lois Evans refusing to fly on small planes to illustrate that the strength of our faith depends not on its size but on the object it’s placed in. Drawing from personal grief and Hebrews 12:2, she urges listeners to intentionally fix their eyes on Jesus alone—looking away from distracting problems, fears, or fleeting things—as the only reliable carrier through life’s storms. The takeaway is that reorienting faith toward Christ brings unshakable hope and peace, even in the face of death or chaos, just as her mother exemplified in her final days.
Opening Prayer
Lord, I thank you so much for the privilege of knowing that you speak to us through your word. Take this little devotional time and help it to change the trajectory of our lives in Jesus name. Amen.
A Story About My Mother’s Fear of Small Planes
One of the things about my late mother Lois Evans that she did not like was small planes. If a trip required her to have to get on one of those little hoppers is what she called them, she was not going on that trip. And you know, my dad and mom travel a lot for ministry. And so, dad would often say, «Come on, Lois, let’s go on this trip together». And her question was always, «What size is the plane»?
Because, you know, oftentimes going from one big city to another, they’ll put you on a big plane, but then you might have to get on a hopper to get to your actual destination if it’s in a small city. So, she’d always call the airline to check it out.
I remember on one particular occasion, uh, my dad and mom were scheduled to go on a trip. Things changed with the airline and they had to change planes at the last minute and my mom decided she was not going. My dad said, «Lois, you don’t have any faith. You don’t have enough faith». And she said, «No, you ain’t got enough plane».
Well, things changed again and the airline ended up sending an email or text message. I can’t remember which one, but they sent a message to say that the plane was changing again. They were going back to a Boeing 737. Mom said, «I’m packing my bags. I’m going on the trip». Dad responded, «Your faith grew». And she said, «No, your plane grew».
The Real Issue: The Object of Faith
You see, the size of her faith wasn’t the problem. It was the size of the object that she was placing her faith in. I want to take just a moment to challenge and encourage you during this devotional moment in your day about your faith. And I want to talk less about the size of our faith. Whether it’s too small or whether it’s too big. I don’t know that it ever could be.
But I want to talk to you more about the object into which you have placed your faith. I want to suggest to you that for the area of your life where maybe you were dealing with the most fear or anxiety, maybe you feel the most concern, whether it’s on a global scale because of what you see happening across continents on the news every day, or whether it’s what’s just happening underneath the roof of your own house.
Whatever it is, I want to encourage you and challenge you with the thought that maybe it’s not that you need more faith. It’s just that you and I need to re-evaluate the object into which we have placed our faith.
Navigating Life’s Storms
Because as we travel from one season to the next, journeying from one stage of life to the next, particularly in these very shaky and unstable times, when fair weather seems to turn into stormy weather at the blink of an eye, we’re going to need to make sure we are situated in a carrier that can actually earn our confidence, that deserves our confidence, that we know is going to get us safely from point A to point B.
That way we know we won’t crumble under the pressure because we are steadfast, unmoved, and unapologetic about the direction where we are going because we know that our faith is situated in the right thing. The object of our faith is what makes all the difference. Our faith is only ever as good as the object in which we placed it.
Because it doesn’t matter how big my faith is, for example, that a chair can hold me up. If that chair is not sturdy enough, is not weighty enough, doesn’t have enough girth underneath it, then it doesn’t matter how much faith I have, the chair is not strong enough. So, we’ve got to make sure that our faith is situated in something that’s strong enough.
My attention then, your attention has got to stop being focused on us and the quality of our faith. whether we’re doing enough, whether we are good enough, whether our faith is big enough, we’ve got to start reconsidering the object into which we have placed it.
The Only Reliable Object: God
And so I want to suggest to you that maybe this is the time where more now than ever before believers in Jesus Christ need to re-evaluate and make sure that our faith hasn’t been illegitimately placed into any illegitimate person or circumstance or situation or ambition, but that it is in the only carrier that we can trust to carry our lives through to completion.
The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The God who was and is and who is to come. The one upon whom the foundation of the entire world was established. The one who created the entire world with just words from his mouth. The one who has eternally won the victory for you and for me. And the one who is in complete sovereign control over your business, over your ministry, over our health, over our children, over our spouses, over our finances, over governments, over the entire universe.
He is the one who has earned the right for us to situate ourselves, fixate ourselves into his comfortable care as he takes us from point A to point B in our lives.
Unshakable in Christ
When we’ve situated ourselves, our faith into an object like that, then 2 Corinthians chapter 4 says that we may be hardpressed in this life, but what we won’t be is crushed. We may be perplexed, but we won’t be driven to despair. We may be hunted down and persecuted, but we’ll never be deserted. We may be struck down, but we will not be destroyed because we have situated our faith in a plane that we know is not going down.
And so I want to ask you, would you think for a moment? Would you pause and just reflect during this devotional time? Where has your faith been placed?
Common Misplaced Faith
Because if your faith or mine is in our achievements, well, those are fleeting. If our faith is in our health, it will eventually fail. If our faith is in our feelings, well, you know, our feelings are fickle. Up one day and down the next. If our faith has been situated in our spouse or any other person, well, you know, he or she is not flawless.
If our faith has been situated in our own plans or our own ambitions, well, those are all left to the whims of the future. Our faith can’t be situated even in our own optimism. Our faith can’t be rooted in our own financial stability. All of those external things, they all change at some point or another. All of these objects are too small. They are too temporal to carry us safely through to our destiny.
The Biblical Solution
Hebrews 12:2 gives us the solution. It says, «Fix your eyes on Jesus. plain and simple, but poignant and powerful. Fix your eyes. Fixate your attention on Jesus and Jesus alone. This kind of sounds like it might be just a little spiritual quote. You know, it can sound like it’s just passive and inactive and just kind of theoretical, but in the Amplified Bible, it actually adds, „Look away from anything that would distract you and fix your eyes on Jesus“.
Do you see how intentional and deliberate that assignment is? It’s a command, not a suggestion, to pivot your attention away from everything. Your own strengths, your own weaknesses, your troubles, your issues, your very valid concerns, the diagnosis, the financial difficulty, the struggles that you’ve had this year during uh the pandemic that we’ve all been through over the past many months.
It’s not that we don’t notice them. It’s not that we ignore them. This is not denial and it’s not avoidance. It’s that you see it very clearly what the problem is or what the ambition is or what the goal is. You recognize it, but then you immediately pivot your attention away and fix your eyes back on Jesus.
Personal Challenge
So, if you’ve been struggling to find courage in the midst of all that’s happened, in the midst of the struggles that we have been facing globally, but then I know you have probably been like me facing personally, then I want to encourage you with this challenge straight from the book of Hebrews. What are you looking at? Where have you situated your faith? What has become your obsession?
Where do you invest most of your time and energy? Focused on the problem, focused on yourself, focused on that individual that gives you the most frustration, or have you situated yourself, seat belted yourself securely into the one who was and is and is to come? Fix your eyes on Jesus.
A Personal Testimony of Loss
Can I just tell you for a moment that um one of the hardest things we’ve ever faced as a family happened last year. Actually, for the past two years, we’ve had a very difficult run. We’ve lost eight members of our family. The last of whom, the last two were my two mothers.
My mother-in-law of 21 years suddenly passed away just several months ago. And just six months before that, my own mother, Lois Evans, died. She died in my arms, actually. She was laying in my lap as she took her final breaths. My siblings were around. My dad was right next to us.
We were all together sort of incubating and cocooning her and loving her and reminding her how grateful we are for her life as she slipped away into eternity. She knew that her time was short.
Mother’s Final Words
The last weeks and months leading up to her death, man, we spent every moment that we could with her because we knew, apart from a miracle of God, that her time was short with us. And she knew it, too. And do you know of all the things that my mother could have said to us during those final days, she kept saying a variation of, „Fix your eyes on Jesus“.
She had so much hope and so much peace despite the fact that she knew she was at death’s door. Any moment she knew she would see Jesus face to face. And even in the face of having to let go of the people that she loves, having to loosen her grip on the things of earth. Even in the face of death, she still had hope and she still had peace.
What kind of internal reserve allows you to still have composure even in the most hopeless of situations? It’s the kind that fixes its eyes on Jesus.