Focus

I want to begin today by telling you a story, it is different from the stories I usually tell. Usually I tell a story and then relate it to a passage, I tell you the meaning and the moral of the story and explain it to you, but today I want to do something different. Today I want to give you the facts of the story and ask you to figure out what is going on and what happens in the story. The story is not my own story, I got it from a police detective. This man spent years investigating crime and even spent some time investigating cold case crimes trying to solve the unsolvable crimes still on the books. As he told this story to me I now tell it to you.

A man leaves home jogging and he runs to the corner and turns left. He then runs to the next corner and turns left again, one more time he runs to the corner and turns and heads for home. When he gets home there are two masked men waiting for him, what is going on in this story and what is the most likely outcome? I will give you some time to think about this story and we will return to it later.

I also want to introduce to you the passage we will be looking at today. It is

Philippians 4:4–9 NASB95

Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice! Let your gentle spirit be known to all men. The Lord is near. Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all comprehension, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, dwell on these things. The things you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you.

Rejoice in the Lord always, do you find it hard to rejoice sometimes? When someone you love is sick, when you have a bad day, when things just seem to go wrong. When the end of the money comes way before the end of the month? Of course Paul did not say to rejoice over all of these things, he did not say to rejoice over your trouble but to always rejoice in the Lord. Not everything that happens to a child of God is something to rejoice over but there is always something to fall back on, something good to think about and to dwell on, even in the worst of circumstances we can rejoice in our salvation, in our future, in our Lord. Even when the present is unpleasant we can rejoice in the future that we have been promised so that we can always rejoice in the Lord.

By the way, did you ever notice that when you are having a bad day or sick or in a bad mood everything seems to be worse than it is, it makes you grumpy. Have you ever noticed yourself becoming irritable and hard to get along with. Have you ever noticed that sometimes everything, even good things, seem to rub you the wrong way. How do you get out of that kind of a funk? How do you keep from letting your difficulties make you a bitter and angry person. I have a person in my life who seems always angry and bitter about something. In fact they seem to go out of their to find something to be mad about. If they can’t find something they create something. I think she is only happy when she is miserable. She likes the sympathy she gets from singing oh woe is me all day long. I know others who seem to never have a bad day. Now I know that the first persons life is not as miserable as she makes it out to be and I know that the second person has struggles too so what makes the difference?

Philippians 4:5–7 NASB95

Let your gentle spirit be known to all men. The Lord is near. Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all comprehension, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

How can you have a gentle spirit, by remembering that the Lord is near, He is in control, He is watching out for you. He does not want you to be miserable or anxious he wants you to be comforted because your father is near and is taking care of you. God tells us he is nearby and tells us to pray and be thankful for all he has done for us, but he doesn’t stop there. God wants us to ask him for what we need and what we want, he does not promise to give us everything we want but he does promise that He is nearby and He loves us and has our best interest at heart. God wants us to trust him and rely on him, to not worry or be anxious. God says that we can have peace that passes understanding. That does not mean that we will get all the answers or that we will figure it all out but that we can trust in the one who does have all the answers and has it all figured out so that we can relax and trust Him. We can have peace even in the midst of trouble because we have a God who loves us and we can trust in him. Of course that is easier said than done.

Remember the story I got from my detective friend.

A man leaves home jogging and he runs to the corner and turns left. He then runs to the next corner and turns left again, one more time he runs to the corner and turns and heads for home. When he gets home there are two masked men waiting for him. What is going on in this story, can this man have peace, or should he panic?

Philippians 4:8–9 NASB95

Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, dwell on these things. The things you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you.

Paul tells us to focus on the good things, the pure things, the lovely things, the excellent things. Have you ever had a pity party. Just sat by yourself thinking about all the things that make you miserable. Did you know that you can take a bad day and turn it into a miserable life by focusing and concentrating on it? Have you ever been told that you should try to find the good in every situation, that there is a silver lining to every cloud. What does that mean? Well for one thing it means that if we focus on the worst we will expect the worst, we will look for the worst and inevitably we will find the worst. If all that you choose to see in any situation is the worst possible outcome you can train yourself to ignore the good and always seek out the worst, you can make yourself miserable.

You have another choice. You can choose to focus on the best things in any given situation. Sometimes it is easy to see the good and the best, sometimes it seems much, much harder to find the good and the best looks impossible. But, if you focus on finding the good, if you focus on whatever is right and pure and excellent you will find yourself straining and looking for these things, you will come to expect what is good and pure and excellent and you will find it no matter how hard it hides. By determining what to look for, by searching for the best and expecting to find it you will change your attitude and by changing your attitude.... over time you will change your character. God tells us to focus on the pure, the lovely and the good because he knows that if we look only for what is bad that is what we will find and if we look only for what is good we will find that too.

By changing your focus you can change your attitude, by changing your attitude you can eventually change your character, by changing your character you can change the way you see the world, by changing the way you see the world you can actually change the world itself. Maybe the circumstances won’t change but the way you see those circumstances will, the way you react to them will, the way you respond to everything around you will change. You may not actually change the world, but you will change your world. And if you change your world you will change the world of the people around you, the people you love and who love you, the people you work with, the people you meet. You are part of their world and if you change yourself and the way you interact with them you not only change your world but you change their world as well. You literally change the world.

Is that hard to believe? Think of the person in your life who you least want to be around, that person you dread meeting or seeing. Think of someone you would just rather avoid all together but for some reason you just can’t completely avoid them, maybe they are family or they work with you. What if that person changed their whole personality so that they were a joy to be around. What if they changed so much that it made your day better just to see them or talk to them, how would that make you feel, would that change your day, would it change the world you life in, would you act or react differently, of course you would.

Now think of the person whose presence you enjoy most in the world. The one who makes you feel good and brightens your day just by being near you, what if they suddenly became bitter and angry and miserable, would that change how you act and react, would it change your world, of course it would. You have that same power in the lives of the people around you.

Do you doubt that what you think about and what you focus on can change your actions and reactions. Lets return to the story my detective friend told. I want you to think about what you thought and felt when I told you this story given to me by a man who spent his life prosecuting hard criminals. I want you to remember what you thought the end of the story might be and where I might be going with this story. I want to tell the the story one more time but I want to change your focus. I want to point your mind in another direction that you may have gone before. I want to show you how changing the way you think about something, even when given the same set of facts can change how you see the world.

(Show a picture of a baseball diamond)

A man leaves home jogging and he runs to the corner and turns left. He then runs to the next corner and turns left again, one more time he runs to the corner and turns and heads for home. (change to a picture of an umpire and catcher) When he gets home there are two masked men waiting for him, what is going on in this story and what is the most likely outcome?

I gave you the exact same facts, but the story has changed. I did not change the story but I changed your focus. When I told you I got this story from a detective who investigated hard criminals your mind went somewhere dark, when I told you about the two masked men it reinforced that idea. When I showed you a baseball diamond and a catchers mask it changed everything. The facts did not change, it was the same story, but how you saw the story and what meaning you put behind the story changed. You can change your world by changing how you choose to see it, what you choose to look for.

Philippians 4:8 NASB95

Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, dwell on these things.

Choose to dwell on the good things, the pure things, the excellent things, choose to focus on what is good and what is Godly and you can change the way you see the world. Change the way you see the world and you can change how you react to it, how you life in it, who you are. Change who you are and you can change the world you live in, you can change the world for yourself and for those around you. Change the world for those around you and you might just change their world. Change their world and they too will change the world and so on, and so on, and so on. That is God’s plan, that is God’s command to all of us, will you get on board, will you change the world, its up to you.