Focus

For most of my Christian life, I feel like I have doing one thing extremely backwards. I think that many of us are doing this same thing wrong. I hope that we can catch the idea and the vision that God has for this situation and follow what He has told us to do. For most of my life I have tried to battle and defeat my "sin issues", by focusing on them and saying, "I am not going to do this." I repeat it over and over into my head until eventually all I can think about is the thing that I don't want to do. Inevitably I find myself indulging in the sinful act that I did not want to engage in. Then I beat myself up, tell myself I'm not worth anything, call myself a lousy excuse for a Christian, and from this I find myself isolating myself from the One who can actually do something to alter the situation.

When I was in the 7th grade I played tackle football. I hated every single minute of it. Not because I didn't like football. I loved football, and still do love football. Not because I was terrible, although I was. Not even because our team wasn't very good, but, because I had a coach who's sole purpose in life it seemed was to let all of us on the team know exactly how terrible we were at what we did. Instead of encouraging us to get better, he continually told us how terrible we were and that we would never amount to anything on the grid iron. We wound up losing almost every game we played that year. We focused not on being better players, but on how bad we were. All we heard was how bad we were, so we always fulfilled expectations. We weren't expected to win, so it wasn't a shocker when we lost. I never played another year of organized football.

My pastor has been sharing over the past 2 weeks that our focus is the one thing that gets us so completely washed over by defeat and discouragement all the time. You may have thoughts like, "Well I want to experience God, but this problem just keeps coming up. I can't face God with the issues I am dealing with. I'll get it cleared up, then I'll go to Him." You know, to the natural mind, that doesn't sound bad. That's talking a good game. No one wants to go to their father with their dirtiest secrets and issues. We see God as being too holy to see us in our filthiness. Please friends, hear me out. I do NOT condone sinful behavior. I do NOT believe that God condones sinful behavior. I do NOT think that God likes seeing His children engage is sinful behavior. But, I think that we place so many barriers between us and God that God has not called us to place there. The only One who can change the circumstances that we find ourselves locked into is our heavenly Father and the lover of our lives. He is a good God. He is a loving God. He is a grace dispensing God.

Ultimately our view of God will determine how willing we are to come to Him with our issues and to seek His face and His grace in our lives. The reason it is so hard for us to come to the throne of grace is that we are continually told that we are dirty. We are continually told that God hates what we do. We are continually told that we are supposed to be better than we are. So we are heaped up and heaped up with this judgmental accusatory mindset that we aren't good enough to come to Christ for His help. Some of those statements are very true. He does hate sin. We are called to live higher. We are sometimes covered in our sinful mess. But, to let that depict whether we come to Christ or not is foolishness. He says that His grace is sufficient for us. If His grace is sufficient for us, then obviously it can't ever run out, right? If He intended for their to be a limit to His grace, then we would all be screwed. If His grace is sufficient, then we should always be able to come to the throne of grace and allow Him to love us out of the funk that we are in.

Wanna know the easiest way to be free and rid of the junk in your life? Change your focus. Instead of focusing on the situation at hand and focusing on the sin and what you don't want to do, start focusing your thoughts and affections on the things above. When you stop looking at the bad stuff and start seeing Christ and His love for you, everything else just fades away. It is really insignificant in the grand scheme of things, because we have a Father that is for us. We have an elder brother who paid our debt for us. Once for all. Never again will Jesus go to the cross, and never again will our debt be brought against us to the Father.

Where we focus is where we will go. Where our eyes are is ultimately where our feet will follow. Where we go we will go head first. Don't be like my junior high football coach, constantly telling yourself how bad that thing is that you are doing. Don't continue to focus on not doing that because eventually you will cave. If you continue to fill your mind with thoughts of the sin, whether or not it is about how much you hate it, eventually satan will take that as a foothold and do everything in his power to destroy you with it. Instead, as Paul tells us in Colossians 3:1&2-"If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth." So set your thoughts on the high things. Seek the things that are above. Focus on Christ and His love for you, and eventually you will see just how great His grace and His love are for you. Then you will be able to make it to the end of the tunnel that is sin and you will be able to truly experience the life God has called you to.