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CONNIE: Is life by any chance looking a bit blurry to you this morning? Want to know how to bring it back into focus? Join us as we consider how to let God do laser surgery on our souls.

Giving God’s trumpet a Certain Sound for 75 years, this is the Voice of Prophecy.

CONNIE: Hello, I’m Connie Jeffery,

LONNIE: and I’m Lonnie Melashenko. We want to welcome you to our broadcast, and to a brand new year!

CONNIE: Our topic today is “Lasik for the Soul.” We’ll be talking about ways to bring our lives into clearer focus in the coming year. Now, Lonnie, you and actually had a Lasik procedure done on your eyes a few years ago, didn’t you?

LONNIE: That’s right, Connie. After years of struggling with glasses—needing one pair for reading, another pair for driving, and wishing for something in between for preaching when I want to be able to see both my Bible and the people I’m talking to, I decided I’d had enough.

CONNIE: So you let a doctor point a laser beam into your eyeball and actually reshape your eye?

LONNIE: That’s about what happened—a procedure to help me bring the world back into focus.

CONNIE: And it was successful?

LONNIE: Yes. There are only a few instances where I still use glasses—overall I was very glad there was this procedure available to help my eyesight.

CONNIE: But today we’re talking about Lasik surgery for the soul—what’s the relationship between eye surgery and soul surgery?

LONNIE: Well, I think it’s important for us to let God point the laser light of His Word into our lives on a regular basis—to reshape our souls and bring our lives into clearer focus.

CONNIE: That would be through Bible study, meditation, that kind of thing?

LONNIE: That’s right. But having said that, I think a note of caution is in order. There’s more than one kind of meditation that people involve themselves in, and I think it’s important to define just what we’re talking about. Our producer Ken Wade and I discussed this for some television programming we did a few years ago, and I’d like to bring him into the studio today to review some of this—he’s done a lot of research through the years on the different types of meditation.

CONNIE: Ken, come join us on this side of the glass, and I’ll slip out for a moment and let you fellows talk.

LONNIE: Ken Wade, welcome to our broadcast!

KEN: Good to be on this side of the glass for a little bit here.

LONNIE: Uyour a producer and a writer, editor, pastor, and you lived for a number of years over in the far East where meditation is championed as a way to get in touch.

KEN: Well, in fact, a number of years ago, I spent a lot of time and did a lot of writing and research in the area of New Age and channels and meditation and that sort of thing. And I began to see a very clear contrast to what the Bible says meditation is and what is promoted in other circles.

LONNIE: So there is a good dimension here, but it can be carried off into other directions?

KEN: Well, Lonnie, one of the things that I noticed as I did a tremendous amount of research and reading about the background of various New Age gurus and channels and such. I began to see a pattern emerging, people like Jane Roberts and others. Often times these people had a bit of a religious Christian background, but they turned away from that, they were unhappy with it for some reason and they began to look for a spiritual vibe outside of Christianity. They wanted to get into more of a meditative mode, and they wanted to empty their minds and see if anyone comes to speak to you.

LONNIE: But, I think that you would agree that God probably designed a vacuum or a vacancy and a need for communing together. We need something to fill that void.

KEN: We have that need and we sense that need, but it’s kind of like going into a totally darkened room and wondering who is going to bump into me.

LONNIE: Now I have friends and some of them are pastors who sense that they have got to get as grip on their lives, so they have actually gone off to a monastery somewhere in Greece and getting back in touch with the monks there. Talk to us a little bit about how people can be led astray. What is the better way to Meditate?

KEN: Well, I think that that sort of thing would be good. As long as you have something to base it on. I found a difference between those who truly meditate with God and those who go off and meditate with mediums and such. The difference I found is that using scripture as a base is the only true way to meditate with the Lord. Not by using all sorts of other methods and mediums. The Lord and the Bible give some guidance, so that you’re not just wandering in the dark some place.

LONNIE: Whereas the person who doesn’t use the Bible as their guide falls short. God would want us to take his word and there is an adage that says be still and know that I am God. It’s fortifying the mind.

KEN: Yes, it’s to keep our minds from just walking off. The principle behind most regular meditation is to empty the mind. Well, and empty mind is the devils playground and many people have gotten themselves into serious trouble through that whereas if you take the mind filled with good things and ask the Lord, and then ask Him to continue to minister as He has promised too, then you’re developing something.

LONNIE: So take a Bible text or a concept somewhere from the New Testament and claim the promise and pray to the Lord and ask God to build your mind around that base.

KEN: Absolutely! You cannot have a solid meditation experience unless you build a base through God and let Him build around you and within you.

LONNIE: Where can a person listening to this program today, right now…Where can he or she go to start this experience at?

KEN: I once memorized the entire eighth chapter of Romans, about God’s work through spirits to give us victory, and these are just powerful passages.

LONNIE: Ken Wade, from the Voice of Prophecy, that you for being with us today.

“I’ll Walk with God”, The Vocal Majority, from How Sweet the Sound CD.

CONNIE: Amen! That music was brought to us by the group The Vocal Majority, and their song expresses our New Years resolution today—to walk with God, not only this year but every year, and every day of the year.

LONNIE: That’s absolutely right, Connie. I’ve told you before I’m not much of one for making New Years resolutions, but this is a resolution that’s good for any day of the year—to be closer to God, and to dig into His Word for guidance for our lives.

CONNIE: If you’re looking for ways to make your Bible study more productive and more interesting, we highly recommend the Discover Bible Course, which you can begin to study right away if you have an Internet connection.

LONNIE: That’s right. You can find it—along with many other valuable Bible resources—on our web page at VOP.COM, and we’d like to invite you to stop by today. The course is absolutely free, and you’ll have a personal instructor to help you with any questions that come up.

CONNIE: You can also take the course through the mail. We’ll tell you how to sign up for that in just a few moments, but right now let’s listen to Pastor Lonnie’s message, “Lasik for the Soul.”

Lasik for the Soul

Say, do you know the way to San Jose? And if you do, have you ever gone there to visit the Winchester Mystery House?

I’m talking about San Jose, California, of course, and the famous house built by the heiress to the Winchester Rifle Company fortune, Sarah Winchester.

If you’ve been there, you know that this 160-room mansion is one of the most peculiar houses on the face of the earth.

From the outside it looks normal—well, almost normal, that is. There is the issue of that second-story door, right at the front of the house that opens into thin air. . . .

But other than that, the place looks like a fabulously ornate Victorian country home, fit for the likes of John Jacob Astor or William Randolph Hearst to enjoy. You almost expect to see horse-drawn carriages pulling into the front portico, and ladies and gentlemen in their 19th-century finery gathering for a festive event.

Come, let’s go inside and see what’s happening. The house is open for tours daily.

But be warned. Once inside you’ll find out just why this place is called the Winchester Mystery House.

There are many oddities to explore. Why, for instance, do all the rooms in the front of the house have cracks in the plaster and lath work exposed? Why don’t the doors open and close smoothly? You’d think the place had been hit by an earthquake and never repaired. (And in fact, you’d be right—more about that in a moment.)

But what about the stairway near the back of the house that ends abruptly at the ceiling? And the million-dollar tiffany glass window with a ten-cent view of a wall? What can explain such strange constructions?

If you take the tour, you’ll soon learn at least some of the secrets behind the mysterious design of this mansion. Some of the spiritual secrets that is.

Because, you see, it is a very spiritual house!

Neighbors testified that during Sarah Winchester’s life the bell in the campanile tolled at midnight every night—summoning the spirits to come and give the mistress of the house directions on how to continue her building project—a project that kept her staff of 22 carpenters working ’round-the-clock every day of the year for 38 years.

But what a confusing maze the house became under the spirits’ guidance.

The front 30 rooms were left in disrepair in 1906 after the great San Francisco earthquake, because Sarah thought the spirits had shaken the ground as a warning to her not to spend so much time and money furnishing those rooms.

If you tour the house, you may feel like your head is spinning around afterwards—confused by the maze of rooms, stairways, and dead-end halls.

But perhaps you will also take away with you a lesson about the results of spiritual confusion. It seems clear that Sarah Winchester was a very confused woman, whose spiritual experiences did little or nothing to clear the muddy waters for her.

You see, there’s more than one way to be a spiritual person. There’s more than one set of spirits that we can get in contact with. And we need to choose carefully—to be wise in our spiritual endeavors.

We hear it often these days. On television, in interviews with actors, politicians, newsmakers of every sort: “I’m a very spiritual person.”

But some of these same people seem to have about as much order and direction to their lives as Mrs. Winchester had in designing her labyrinthine house!

And so as the new year begins, and we begin our series about a dozen practical counsels from the Bible, number one is: Be a spiritual person, but be sure you’re dealing with the right Spirit—the Holy Spirit, that is.

When the Apostle Paul encountered a church in disarray—with some saying go this way, others saying go that way—he reminded his fellow Christians that “God is not the author of confusion, but of peace” (1 Corinthians 14:33, NKJV).

In that great passage in Ephesians 4, where Paul speaks of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, he reminds the church members that the Spirit was given to us to lead us “to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ. We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine,” (Ephesians 4:13-14, NRSV).

But how can we achieve this?

How can we be sure—if we want to be spiritual people—that we tune in to the right spirits?

Here’s my counsel to you today: Start your year at the beginning of the book of Psalms. Listen to the wise words of the psalmist, written so many years ago, but still the best counsel available:

“Blessed is the man

Who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly?
Nor stands in the path of sinners,
Nor sits in the seat of the scornful;
But his delight is in the law of the LORD,
And in His law he meditates day and night.
He shall be like a tree
Planted by the rivers of water,
That brings forth its fruit in its season,
Whose leaf also shall not wither?
And whatever he does shall prosper.
The ungodly are not so,
But are like the chaff which the wind drives away”
(Psalm 1:1-4, NKJV).

Friend, there are a lot of things we can focus our attention on these days. Ungodly things. Scornful things. Comedians who make a business of ridiculing everything they set eyes on.

But will such things give us a clear vision for living? Hardly—in the world, you just can’t keep up with what’s “in” and what’s “out.” What’s being praised one moment is being ridiculed the next. And if you follow the fashions of the day, you’ll end up running in circles, building a life that’s as confusing as Mrs. Winchester’s mansion maze.

So, what’s the antidote?

It’s the same as it was 3,000 years ago. And it’s found right in the heart of the first psalm: “Blessed is the man [or woman, or boy or girl, we might add] who’s . . . delight is in the law of the LORD, and in His law he meditates day and night.”

The law of God—and by this the psalmist refers to far more than just the Ten Commandments, or the rules and regulations parts of the Bible. He’s referring to the Word of God as a whole.

Taking time to focus on the Bible every day—day and night—is about the best counsel I can give you for finding guidance toward a successful life. It will keep your mind focused on the good things, the very things Paul points us to in Philippians, 4:8: “Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things” (NRSV). Or, as the New King James Version translates it, “meditate on these things.”

The power of a focused mind—focused on good things, guided by the word of God—is absolutely amazing.

Recently we reread the story of one of my heroes of the faith—a spiritual giant whom you might never have heard of, but who nonetheless has had a powerful influence in bringing millions of people to a stronger faith in God’s Word.

Dr. Siegfried Horn was the dean of the seminary where I took my graduate studies after college. But thirty years earlier he’d been a prisoner, serving hard time in wartime prison camp.

As a German missionary in Dutch-held Indonesia, he suddenly found himself imprisoned when Hitler’s troops mauled their way through Holland. It would be six years before he tasted freedom again, and in the first few months of his captivity he feared he would lose his mind—simply because this scholarly man had nothing of interest to focus his attention on.

Then finally, one day the announcement came that the prisoners’ luggage, which had been taken away months earlier, would be returned to them. Horn writes, “Finally my group marched to the shed where we searched among the hundreds of pieces of luggage for our own suitcases. I located mine and . . . . With great joy I took it to my cage. Now I again had a toothbrush, a pair of scissors and a razor, soap and towels, also a pen and paper, and one item that I had missed more than anything else—my Bible.”

For the next six years, Siegfried focused his attention on studying the Bible, a Bible dictionary, and books on the biblical languages. He even taught classes in biblical Greek and Hebrew to his fellow prisoners.

Once he had his Bible back, he found he had something good to focus his attention on, and he never again feared that he would lose his mind due to his imprisonment.

When he was finally freed, nearly a year after the end of the war, he immediately enrolled in college and completed his education, earning a doctoral degree at the University of Chicago.

In the ensuing years he contributed countless articles to scholarly and popular journals, served as editor of a major Bible dictionary, and led out in archaeological research in the Holy Land that has helped many people better understand the Bible and bring their own lives into focus by focusing on the Word of God.

Friend, how’s your focus today? Do you ever feel like your life is going in circles, down blind halls and up stairways to nowhere?

Does your soul need surgery to bring things back into focus for you? Would a little Lasik for the soul be in order as we begin this New Year?

Why not do this: Get out your Bible. Begin and end each day focusing on God’s word. Maybe just a few verses from the gospels, or a brief story from the Old Testament. Or maybe a psalm or section of the Proverbs is what would give you the most help.

The Bible is a trustworthy book, inspired by a trustworthy Spirit. It won’t lead you in circles. It won’t let you turn your life into a maze of confusion if you’ll let it speak God’s wisdom to you. If you’ll go to it prayerfully, asking God’s Spirit to enlighten you as you read.

And one thing more—do more than just read the Bible. Take one verse each day—or several verses—and commit them to memory. Write the verse on a little card that you can carry with you and meditate on when you’re caught in traffic or waiting in line. That’s the way to get God’s Word deep down into your heart where it can help you have strong roots like that tree planted by a river that the psalmist wrote about.

And here’s another idea: Listen carefully in a few minutes when we tell you how you can enroll in the free Discover Bible School. These great lessons have helped thousands bring their minds into focus on God’s Word. So, why not enroll today?

We all could use a little help getting our lives in focus from time to time. Let’s plan to let the Lord do a little Lasik on our souls as we draw nearer to Him, listening to His Word today, tomorrow, and all throughout this New Year.

“In the Garden”, Joe Pearles, from My River of Memories CD.