Have you ever noticed when you’re driving that, if you start to focus on something other than the direction in which you want to head, suddenly the car will start to veer off course toward whatever you are looking at? The car goes wherever you focus your attention.
It’s even true with walking. Once, when I was about nine years old, I was walking home with my dad and telling him something about my friend’s house where I had just been visiting. I kept walking as I turned back and pointed and then I turned around and banged right into a concrete lamp post. I almost knocked myself out and quickly got a big goose egg. Another time, I was sitting on a sandy beach and a young man began walking backwards toward me as he played catch. Before I could get his attention he was falling over me. By God’s grace, I quickly ducked my head so that he wouldn’t break my neck as he tumbled with his full weight over me. I think you get the idea! It’s important that we focus our attention on the direction in which we are heading.
In terms of the direction of our lives, we need to first choose the right goal and then keep our focus on it. Our culture would probably agree about the need to focus on a goal. But the prevailing wisdom is that it doesn’t matter what the goal is. Just pick one. Create you own meaning. There is no absolute. Everything is relative. (Ray David addressed this clearly in last Sunday’s sermon “You are chosen”. You might want to give it a listen.)
For some reason, even though I was immersed in the idea that “everything is relative” (especially during my many years in university and working in the field of psychology), I never believed that. I always knew there was Truth (with a capital T) and I was on a search to find it. I had grown up with a just enough Christianity to make me think I had tried it and found it wanting. So I tried on all kinds of belief systems—in no particular order—and kept finding them to be wanting. Finally, I became open to trying Jesus again. In Him I found Truth. In following Him I found a worthy goal. But first I felt as though my life had been turned upside down. In reality, I had been upside down and was now turned right side up—disorienting at first but ultimately wonderfully reorienting. Things began to make sense and to work.
Now the challenge is to keep my focus on the goal of following Jesus, of knowing Him, of becoming like Him—all through God’s enabling ability by His Spirit working in me. (See Mark 1:17-18, Philippians 3:7-9, Ephesians 1:17-21, 1 John 3:2-3.) It is so easy to let other goals distract, dilute and preoccupy. But no other goal is worthy. No other goal will bear fruit that lasts forever. Everything else is temporary and so fleeting. In the last few months we have seen so many people’s lives turned upside down by earthquakes, tsunamis, nuclear meltdowns, uprisings and reprisals, floods, fires, tornadoes. Even where things are comparatively calm, each one of us has to deal with losses and unexpected and unwanted challenges and changes of various kinds.
There are, of course, other secondary goals that we have to focus on–earning a living, dealing with the day to day demands of life. But do we see these goals as of ultimate or temporary value? If we see them in the light of following Jesus and keep that as our overarching goal, then we won’t start to veer off course. But, if these goals become ends in themselves, we’ll end up in the ditch going nowhere.
Finally, it’s important to remember that in setting the goal of following Jesus we are called to set goals in Him but not to let even these distract us from Jesus Himself. In everything we do we are called to trust Him and Him alone. We can only follow someone we trust. Trusting Him in and for everything enables us to keep our focus on Him. And we become like what we focus on whether we realize it or not.
I happened to turn on the television during the day a few weeks ago (which I rarely do) and I heard Joyce Meyer talking about struggles in the first few years of her marriage. While praying about not being able to trust her husband (and she had experienced many breeches of trust growing up with abuse), the Lord asked her not to trust her husband but to trust Him with her husband. The Lord does not want us to put our ultimate trust in any other person—not even in ourselves as we can easily fail ourselves—but to trust in Him with each and every person in our lives and every situation that arises in our lives. By doing this day by day, challenge by challenge we are enabled to keep our focus on the goal set before us—seeing Jesus as He is and in so doing becoming like Him. (1 John 3:2-3)
In this Resurrection season of the Father’s love, let us help one another to keep our eyes on the Goal.
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