FOCUS - Make Your One Thing the Main Thing 1

How often have you started something with single-minded purpose only to falter and fail before you finish?

That's the danger of losing focus. Today on Turning Point, Dr David Jeremiah considers why it's essential to fix your eyes on what matters most as you pursue God's plan. From the series forward, here's David to introduce his message, Focus. Make your one thing the main thing. Whatever it may be, God will strengthen you, fulfill you, partner with you to see great things accomplished in your life. That's the message of forward, and we're taking it one step at a time. We started with dreaming, then we go to praying. We finished choosing, and today we're going to talk about focusing.

Make your one thing the main thing. The maestro was born in the northern Italian city of Modena. His mother was a cigar maker. His father was a baker and amateur tenor. It was the amateur tenor part that most touched young Luciano Pavarotti. He loved hearing his dad sing, and he spent hours listening to the family's collection of recordings of great tenors. Father and son sang along with the records at full volume. Mr Pavarotti wouldn't sing in public due to stage fright, but he did sing in the church choir. And at age nine, Luciano joined him. The boy loved to sing, and people loved hearing him.

Your voice touches me whenever you sing, his mother said. But the question of a career was vexing. In those days just after World War II, a musical career was risky. His mother suggested Luciano become an athletic instructor, while his father encouraged him to continue developing his voice. But you'll have to study very hard, Luciano, he said.

Practice harder and then maybe. Luciano continued his musical studies and also enrolled in a teacher's college. And after graduation, he asked his father, shall I be a teacher or shall I be a singer? The older man wisely avoided giving a direct answer. Instead, he spoke words his son never forgot. Luciano, if you try to sit on two chairs, you will fall in between them.

For life, you must choose one chair. And Luciano chose singing. It took seven years of hard study and intense practice before he made his first professional appearance. And it took another seven before he reached the Metropolitan Opera. But Pavarotti lived with a single focus. Ultimately, he became one of the most famous operatic singers in the world, the king of high seas, and a crossover performer who won the admiration of millions who had never set foot in an opera house.

His final performance was viewed by the entire world as he sang Nesim Dorma at the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin. I was blessed with a good voice by God, Pavarotti said. I think it pleased him that I decided to devote myself to it. And now I think whether it's laying bricks, driving a straight nail, writing a book, whatever we choose, we should give ourselves to it. Commitment, he said. That's the key.

You've got to choose one chair. Like Pavarotti, you have been blessed by God. You've been blessed with talents and resources and a dream for the next phase of your life. Once you've prayed about that dream and set the right priorities to achieve it, your very next step is to focus your life on the one main thing. In the Bible, the apostle Paul had that kind of focus. He said he was straining forward, pressing on to reach a heavenly treasure. He wrote to his friends in the city of Philippi in these stirring words. He said, Not that I have already attained or am already perfected, but I press on that I may lay hold of that for which Christ Jesus has also laid hold of me.

Listen carefully. Brethren, I do not count myself to have apprehended, but one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forward to those things which are ahead, I press toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. Paul was writing to a church for whom he had literally shed his blood. When he began preaching in the city of Philippi as recorded in Acts 16, he attracted both converts and critics.

The critics seized him and stripped him, whipped him until the blood ran down his back. He and his fellow sufferers, Silas, were cast into prison, but the church was worth the beating, becoming endeared to Paul and sending him financial help again and again. The church prayed for him as he traveled the empire. It was to these beloved people that Paul openly expressed the deepest longing of his heart and revealed his personal mission statement and the focus of his life. Today as we unpack Paul's words, I'm going to show you four principles that will sharpen your focus and guide you forward toward your next steps in life. Number one, focus on God's purpose. The key to focus on God's purpose is here.

There's plenty we can't do, but there's one thing we can all do. We can follow God's deep desire for us to grow into the image of Jesus Christ. Paul said, I press on that I may lay hold of that for which Christ Jesus has laid hold of me. That's God's purpose for you and for all of us. Of course, he also has an individual plan for your life and he has one for mine, and I'll deal with that in a moment, but first, consider God's ultimate purpose for your life, that you become more and more like his son, Jesus Christ.

Romans 8 29 puts it this way, for whom he foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his son. John Bray was the dean of chapel at Indiana Wesleyan University. He and his wife were popular with students and his chapel messages were full of life and truth. Then Bray was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. The onset of symptoms led him to resign his position, but he simply continued looking ahead.

He continued moving forward. Everybody gets a diagnosis of some kind sometime in their life, he told the campus newspaper. There's no reason I shouldn't. He told his students he's not asking why. He said, I can't change what's happened to me, so why is that a pivotal question in my life? Now, how will I glorify God in the midst of all of this? That's at the heart of almost every major decision a Christ follower needs to make. And speaking of his disability, Bray said, even this, that I don't like, is designed to shape me to be more like Jesus Christ. Now, that's the voice of someone who's grasped onto God's purpose in his life. And no matter what comes at him, he will not let go. When God looks at you and evaluates you, he wants you as a follower of Christ to become more and more like Jesus Christ, to follow him closely and to emulate his life so that Jesus Christ is seen in you more and more.

And that only happens as you put your focus on him. So number one, focus on God's purpose. Here's the second thought. Focus on God's perspective.

The next thing we read is Paul talking about seeing life through God's eyes. He speaks about his past and said it wasn't worth focusing on. He said, brethren, I do not count myself to have apprehended, but one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind. That's an interesting thing, isn't it?

To forget those things which are behind. It was back in 1954, Roger Bannister was a medical student who enjoyed running. He entered a race in Oxford on May 6th of that year and he made history, becoming the first athlete to run a mile in less than four minutes. Bannister's time was three minutes, 59.4 seconds. And half a globe away, Bannister's rival John Landy of Australia took notice. A month later, Landy beat Bannister's record by one second.

The media turned their spotlights on these two runners and thousands of people watched later that summer when they lined up at the British Empire Games in Vancouver, Canada. It was called the Mile of Century. The racers shot from the starting blocks and Landy took the lead which he maintained.

The roar of the crowd was deafening. With only 90 yards to go, Landy made a fatal mistake. He glanced behind him and at that exact moment, Bannister streaked by him and won the race by less than a second. The race became known as the Miracle Mile and the Vancouver sculptor created a bronze statue of the two men at the moment when Landy glanced back. Landy later said, Lot's wife was turned into a pillar of salt for looking back. I am probably the only one who got turned into a bronze statue for looking back.

The apostle Paul would have loved that story because that's what he was talking about in Philippians 3. He spoke of forgetting the things that are behind us, using the word forget in the sense of minimizing the negative impact of our past. So stop allowing things from the past to control you in the present. Paul shook things off.

He didn't let them cling to him like anchors pulling him down. What do we forget when we forget the past? Well, there's a couple things.

First of all, we have to forget our successes. Here's this great apostle who's accomplished more than most of us could ever accomplish in 10 lifetimes and he said, in effect, I have not yet arrived. That amazes me because I've spent my lifetime studying Paul's life and writing and his influence for Christ is breathtaking.

N.T. Wright wrote about the impact of the apostle's letters and he said this, Paul's letters in a standard modern translation occupy fewer than 80 pages. It is a safe bet to say that these letters, page for page, have generated more comment, more sermons and more seminars, more monographs and dissertations than any other writings from the ancient world.

It is as though eight or ten small paintings by an obscure artist were to become more sought after, more studied and copied, more highly valued than all the Rembrandts, Antitians and all the Monets and Van Goghs in the world. Paul's epistles comprise only part of his ministry. He founded most of the churches in Asia Minor. He was an intellectual giant. Some consider him the greatest man who ever lived apart from Jesus Christ. Yet here is this man in the twilight of his life looking back and saying, I'm not there yet. I haven't apprehended the spiritual quality of life I want for myself. I have not yet been perfected.

I'm going to continue to strive for that for which God has called me. I don't know any man you could say was more successful than Paul, but the key to his success was that he knew he had not arrived. He wasn't proud. He was humble. He didn't look at the past and try to live on his laurels. He lived for the present.

And we need to do the same. Maybe you look back on your life and you had a great career. Maybe you were at the very top of whatever it is that you do, but that isn't going to help you now and it surely won't help you in the future. For you to go forward, you have to learn to forget.

But you know what? Successes may be harder to forget. We like to forget our failures. And that's the second thing I want to talk to you about, forgetting your mistakes.

The other way of taking God's perspective regarding your past is to simply make up your mind to forget those things that haunt you. As Ruth Bell Graham quipped, every cat knows some things need to be buried. The founder of the Red Cross, Clara Barton, was once offended by a co-worker, but she quickly forgave her friend and went on. Years later, someone reminded her of the incident and said, don't you remember? No, said Mrs. Barton, I distinctly recall forgetting.

There need to be things like that in your life and in mine. Distinctly recall forgetting. What things in your past could you choose to forget? For example, guilt is remembering a sin that's already been buried by the blood of Christ. Bitterness is remembering an offense that should be buried by grace.

Discouragement is letting the last setback become a roadblock. Your brain wants to relive events over and over, and if you let it, it will haunt you with failures and shame you with mistakes and keep you awake with stress and lull you to sleep with nostalgia. You can override your brain by giving the past to God and forgetting the things that will pull you back and pull you down.

Let me say this. If you know Jesus Christ as Savior, there's no reason to be obsessed over your past failures. The blood of Christ Jesus frees you from beating yourself up with regrets.

When you become a follower of Christ, you enter into a new life in him, and your past is put behind you once and for all. I've discovered that Satan loves to remind you of your history and all of its failure, but that's when you say with Jesus, get behind me, Satan. Remember, Paul didn't just have successes in his past. He had a wicked past. He cruelly persecuted Christians. He attacked the church.

He helped condemn Stephen, the first Christian to be martyred for the cause of Christ. After Paul's dramatic conversion on the Damascus Road, many Christians remembered what he had done, and they were still afraid of him. What if Paul had continued to live in that past? What if he kept flogging himself for what he had done?

He would have lost his influence, and instead, he acknowledged his past but was full of gratitude for God's grace and for his total forgiveness. I've been a pastor for a long time, and I've noticed that many of God's people get stranded in the past. Some of them get stuck on their successes and rest on their laurels, and some are left high and dry by their failures, and a sort of post-traumatic fear grips their hearts. Does that happen to you?

I mean, be honest. You must glance back and learn the lesson of the past and celebrate your success with humility, but it's one thing to glance back. It's another thing to get marooned in your memories.

The past lends perspective for the future, but if you linger there too long, your recollection will obliterate your dreams and hinder you from going forward. Hear me carefully. Focus on God's purpose. Focus on his perspective. And then, thirdly, focus on his plan. As we continue with our passage in Philippians, notice that Paul becomes more specific, moving from our perspective to our plans.

He says, reaching forward to those things which are ahead. God's purpose for all of us is the same, to become more like Jesus, but his plans for each of us are unique. He has a distinct blueprint for the life of every individual on earth and in history. His plan for you is tailor-made, and it's for you alone. It's perfect for the way he made you and the experiences that you've had.

Everything has prepared you for his next step in your life, but you have to follow him into unknown territory, into the future. You have to learn what it means to walk by faith. The psalmist put it this way. He said, the steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord, and he delights in his way.

We aren't good in ourselves, but we are good in Christ. And in Christ, God not only orders your steps and your stops, he delights in the way he guides you forward. He delights in his plans for you, shouldn't you delight in them too? If God is delighted in his purpose and plan for your life, should you not also delight in those plans? So you need to focus on God's purpose and focus on his perspective, looking back but not staying in history.

Focus on his plan, find out what he wants you to do, and then focus on his prize. Finally, to live a focused life, you need to fix your attention on heaven and the reward that awaits you there. Paul wrote, I press toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. For Paul, the goal and prize were one and the same, not defined in this verse. This is a clear reference to the many promises given to those who are victorious in Christ. Remember the Bible says that when we get to heaven, if we've lived for the Lord, the Lord Jesus is going to welcome us home with these words, well done, good and faithful servant. It embraces the crown of righteousness. I could also refer to what Peter called the crown of glory, which doesn't fade away. Whatever else, this prize and goal will be more than eye has seen or ear has heard.

God's plan for you is to reward you so abundantly, I promise you, you won't believe it. Remember, Paul was using the metaphor of an Olympic race. In the ancient Olympics, if a runner won the race, he was summoned from the stadium to the judge's box, and a wreath of laurel was placed on his head. He received financial rewards and some great fringe benefits. Listen to this, his food was provided to him for the rest of his life, and he had lifelong tickets on the front row of the Athenian theater. But all those runners have been dead for centuries. Their prizes came to an end, their glory evaporated, the food lost its flavor, and the Athenian theater is now in ruins. It was all temporary. The prize of the upward calling of God in Christ Jesus is eternal. According to the Apostle Peter, you have an inheritance incorruptible and undefiled that does not fade away, reserved in heaven for you.

How many of you know how important it is to keep your eyes focused on the future? Florence Chadwick learned that lesson. She was an accomplished long-distance swimmer and the first woman to swim the English Channel in both directions, setting new records each way. It was back in 1952, she was 34 years old, and she set out to break another record.

No woman had ever swum the more than 20-mile channel between Catalina and California. The conditions on the morning of her swim were not ideal. The water was cold.

All of us who live on the West Coast can identify with that. The water was cold, and the fog had settled in. Soon after she began to swim, she could barely see the boats accompanying her, and to make matters worse, sharks trailed her several times and had to be driven off. Still, Florence Chadwick swam on for more than 15 hours, and as the fog grew increasingly dense and opaque, finally physically and emotionally exhausted, she stopped swimming. She was pulled into the boat and taken toward the California shore, which she discovered to her dismay was a little more than a half mile away. After swimming almost 20 miles, she had quit, a half a mile from her goal.

On the following day, she told the news media, All I could see was the fog. I think if I could have seen the shore, I would have made it. Two months later, Florence was back on Catalina Island, stepping into the water to try the swim again. Unfortunately, weather conditions were no better.

The water was cold, and again a dense fog settled over the channel. But this time, she swam all the way, the first woman to make it. What made the difference, she later said that while swimming those last grueling miles, she kept her mind focused on a vivid mental image of the California shore.

At that moment, she said, I knew the real meaning of faith described in the Bible, the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. Boy, does that ever ring a bell with me. I've done that before. I've gotten all the way across the lake, and I could get out and walk to the shore, but since I can't see it, I quit because I'm discouraged. What a lesson that story is, and what a reminder to us is that God calls us to go forward, and not part of the way, not most of the way, all the way. If you stay tuned to this series, toward the end of it, I have a whole message on the importance of finishing, and it's such an important thing to do. Well, we're getting ready for the weekend. I hope you'll go to church if you can. If not, that you follow your pastor on closed-circuit internet teaching. We're available to do that for you from our church, and you can find us there, but wherever you are, make sure you stay connected with the people of God. Hey, thank you for letting me talk to you about this, and we'll see you after the weekend right here in this Good Station.

Have a great one. Thank you. Our message today came to you from Shadow Mountain Community Church, where Dr David Jeremiah serves as senior pastor.

How is Turning Point enriching your faith? Please write and tell us at Turning Point Post Office Box 3838, San Diego, California, 92163. Or visit our website at davidjeremiah.org forward slash radio. Ask for your copy of David's powerful new book, Forward, Discovering God's Presence and Purpose in Your Tomorrow. It's yours for a gift of any amount.

You can also purchase the Jeremiah Study Bible in the English Standard Version, the New International Version, and the New King James Version, all available in a variety of handsome cover options. Visit davidjeremiah.org forward slash radio for details. I'm Gary Hooke Fleet. Join us Monday as we continue the series, Forward. That's here on Turning Point with Dr David Jeremiah. Thanks for taking time to listen to this audio on demand from Vision Christian Media. To find out more about us, go to vision.org.au