day no. 17,494: look away to see what's right in front of you

"A call to look away from your heart is not a call to ignore your own condition, it is the only healthy way for you to ascertain your condition... Look to yourself, and you will be sucked into a black hole that only the grace of God can free you from."  — Douglas Wilson, So Come and Welcome to Jesus Christ

You cannot perform your own eye surgery. If something is wrong enough with your eyes that they require incision to remedy, you are not seeing well enough to see that.  Or if you can tell that something is wrong from first hand experience,  you no longer have the ability to see the source (or the potential remedy).

The same can be said about heart surgery. You cannot be both the surgeon and the patient. If you need a new heart, you cannot be the one to perform the procedure.

Jeremiah 17:9

The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?

The same is true of our spiritual eyes and hearts. We cannot identify our vision problems because our eyes have logs in them. We cannot renew ourselves because we cannot die and resurrect ourselves. We could rip our old heart out, but even then, we likely could not finish the job before succumbing to the violence of the procedure. 

All that to say, if we are going to see or be saved, we need outside assistance.

James 1:25

Whoso looketh into the perfect law of liberty, and continueth therein, he being not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work, this man shall be blessed in his deed.

We cannot look inside, we must look outside. We must not look to our own conscience, we must look to the perfect Law of God. That mirror will give us a glimpse of how bad it is and the ability to be made new. Without God, we do not see and without Him we die from heart disease.