Crossroads Community Church

September 9, 2015 · 0 Comments

Sunday July 26, 2015
We joyfully congregated in God’s presence and rejoiced together in music worship.
Pastor Don shared announcements and prayed, “Dear Father God, we come into your presence today desiring to keep our focus to-tally on you. We pray for your guidance, strength and wisdom as we face worldly difficulties and distractions that attempt to draw us away from your loving arms. Let us never lose sight of you, Dear Lord Jesus. We pray all this in Jesus’ name. Amen.”
The sermon shared spoke to the belief that we are often makers of our own problems and we tend to lose our focus. We have a tendency to look at things based on what we can see, feel, touch, smell or taste and these are usually the most important influences in our decision making process. So why are we surprised when our vision doesn’t go as planned and do we then tend to look around and focus on the wrong things?
Well today we studied “Keeping our Proper Focus”. This message is for all of us who struggle in our lives from time to time.
As the Apostle Paul states in 2 Corinthians 5:7 “For we live by believing and not by seeing”, so if we believe in Jesus, we can share the Apostle Paul’s hope and confidence of eternal life with Christ despite what we see here on earth. (1 Corinthians 13:12).
The Christian life is a process of becoming more and more like Christ. So what do we do when we start to lose our proper focus and are distracted by the world’s perspective?
Psalm 73 was written by a man named Asaph, a strong believer in God who lived a Godly life and was identified in the Bible as a successful man in both his public and private life.
(Psalm 73:1) Being good or blessed by God means the experience of hope and joy, independent of outward circumstances, and to find this hope and joy we need to have faith in God and follow Jesus.
(Psalm 73:2) Asaph, a strong, committed believer was slipping and headed for trouble.
In Psalm 73:3-12 we see that as Asaph’s focus was taken off of Godly things, he became envious of the proud, their prosperity and the life of ease which he perceived they enjoyed.
Sometimes as Christians we ask the same questions as Asaph (Psalm 73:13), and some-times we have the same responses (73:14).
How do we fix this kind of thinking? What can we do to correct it? (Psalm 73:15-16) Asaph tried, as we often do, to understand that which had become troublesome.
When we focus on temporal not eternal things we fail to draw near to God and we, too, may start to wonder Why?
We need to remember Psalm 73:17.
The closer we get to God, through prayer, the study of His word, the Bible, worship and fellowship, the clearer we will be able to see things as God sees them.
Have you ever been driving toward Toronto and seen the CN Tower off in the distance? As you drive closer, you are able to see it clearer.
As Asaph drew near to God, he finally understood the destiny of the wicked. He began to regain his proper focus on God and what God can do. (Psalm 73:18-20)
Sometimes, like Asaph, we lose focus (Psalm 73:21-22) and can no longer see the whole picture as God sees it.
As we read in (Ecclesiastes 3:11), Yet God has made everything beautiful for it’s own time. He has planted eternity in the human heart, but, even so, people cannot see the whole scope of God’s work from beginning to end.
Sometimes we look at life’s hardships as evidence that things are going wrong. But sometimes when things go wrong, it is because we are doing things right and it is then, by faith, that we must “believe and endure”.
We must trust God now and do his work while we are here on earth. (Psalm 73:23-26)
Like Asaph, when we come full circle and regain our proper focus (Psalm 73:27-28) realizing our security is in God and His Son Jesus, our Lord and Savior, by God’s Grace, may He continue to bless our “Heaven Bound” journey. Praise the Lord. Amen.