Focus

I’M LOOKING AT WHAT I WROTE LAST TIME. About seeking. And it occurs to me – not for the first time – that I’m not very good at taking my own advice.

I look at what I spend my time seeking…
-- a better income (I’m self-employed).
-- entertainment (I love movies and there are several TV shows I hate to miss).
-- sexual gratification. Let’s be honest. We are bombarded with sexual imagery even if we don’t go looking for it. I’m happily and faithfully married, but I seem to have the same drives I had when I was 16.
-- Things: like a new car, better computers (they’re tools of the trade, after all). I can hardly go through my email without seeing two or three things I wish I could afford. Then, I’m a musician of sorts, so there’s always some new instrument or piece of gear I wish I had. Being a homeowner provides a whole list of Things I’d like to acquire. The list seems endless.
-- Spiritual Things: these are easier to excuse. I’d like my son and my best friend to be healed. I’d like to see something dramatic in the way of revival for our youth group and our church. I’d like to have more impact for my ministry efforts. I’d like to have more of the gifts of the Spirit. But it’s all still ‘stuff’, even if it is stuff from God.

It’s amazing how much time and energy seeking these things requires. It’s amazing how easily any one of them can distract me from what’s really important. It’s sad – pathetic, even – how little time there is left to seek the Lord Himself.

I suspect I’m not very different from anyone else. There are so many things to desire that our focus is split. Shattered is more like it.

Matthew 6:22 is one of those verses that I think has more impact and relevance in the King James.

“The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.”

Both the NIV and NASB translate ‘single’ as ‘good’ and that makes sense in modern English. If your eyes are good, you can see where you’re going.

But the KJV gives it a somewhat different meaning. If your eye is ‘single’ doesn’t have to do with being physically one-eyed, but rather, with being focused. Compare this with what the writer of Hebrews says in 12:2 –

“Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith…”

As Christians, nothing less than Jesus Himself is our objective. If we allow ourselves to be distracted, if we take our eyes off the goal even for a second, we falter. I falter.

This is, I think, not only my problem, but the general problem of the entire Church in the post-Christian West. We have a sort of spiritual ADD where we are constantly being pulled this way and that. We want God, but we also want what everyone else has, what our society with its massive culture of consumerism tells us we can’t live without.

My prayer, first of all for myself, and then for all of you, my brothers and sisters, is that we will take steps to develop a ‘single eye’, a focus on Jesus Christ that cannot be broken.