daily Broadcast

Understanding the Power of Focus, Part 2

From the series Living Above Your Circumstances

What’s the toughest situation you’re facing today? A relationship? Maybe a negative boss? Financial pressure? What is it that’s really messing with you right now? Well, join Chip as he shares some specific truths from God’s Word that will begin to neutralize that issue in your life and allow you to experience peace in the midst of your most perplexing problems.

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Message Transcript

Feelings always follow our focus.  Write that down.  You know what?  If you want to get your feelings readjusted, your feelings always follow your focus.  If your focus is upward, I guarantee, in time – you just choose; your feelings will follow.  If your focus is inward, I’ll guarantee, your feelings will follow there, as well.

Notice, the apostle Paul, in chains, has an upward focus: “I thank my God.  I pray with joy.  I’m confident that He’s in charge.”  But notice, now, his outward focus, in the next section, here.  He says, “For it is only right for me to feel this way about you all” – why? – “because I have you in my heart, since both in my imprisonment and in the defense and confirmation of the gospel, you all are partakers of grace with me.  For God is my witness, how I long for you . . . with the affection of Christ Jesus.”

Where’s his focus?  It’s not just upward to God.  In fact, you want to get a picture of where his focus is?  You ready to do a little Bible study?

By the way, the reason I have you underline and circle stuff, the way I get insights from Scripture is the way God gives it to you: You do basic Bible study.  You read the text over a few times, and then, you make observations.  What’s there?  Not what I think is there, what’s really there.  And then, you say, Okay, now, what does it mean?  Interpretation.  And then, you say, What does it mean to me?  And one of the great ways of making observations is, look for words or concepts that are alike.

Notice five concepts that are alike.  Circle the word feel: “It’s only right for me to feel this way about you . . . because I have you in my” – circle the word heart.  So, there’s feeling.  Something emotional is going on.  Where’s it happening?  In his heart.  Well, where?  “Since both in my imprisonment and . . . defense and [the] confirmation of the gospel” – in other words, “Since I got caught in this whole process” – “you all are” – circle the word partakers of grace with me.  It’s a very interesting Greek word.  It has the idea of something being interwoven or interconnected together.

He goes, “Man, I’ve got this feeling for you, and it’s deep in my heart, because, man, we went through it together!  Remember how tough it was? We went through it together, and God showed up.  And we were in this cause at Philippi, and I was getting all kind of pain, and they were persecuting you, but man, in the wee hours of the morning, we were praying, and you helped me and I helped you, and man, we locked hearts.”  It’s a relationship.

“For God is my witness” – notice the word how I long – “how I long for you all” – and then, circle the word affection.  Circle long and affection.  Feel, heart, partaker, longing, affection – he has an outward focus.

Let me give you three observations about verses 7 and 8 that I think help us develop an outward focus.  The first is this: Difficult circumstances reveal our true affections.  You are like a sponge, and I’m like a sponge, and there’s something in your sponge.  And when circumstances begin to squeeze your sponge, whatever pops out of your sponge tells you what your real affections are.

Fire number one – you know what my neighbor’s affections were?  Things, money, status, and pleasure.  And when God removed all that, when He squeezed the vice of that man’s sponge, his heart, what just popped out was, his affections were, his stuff is gone.  His vacations are gone.  His pleasure and his comfort are gone.

When you take the apostle Paul and squeeze him, you know what comes out of the sponge of his heart?  People.  He lives for people. What oozes out of him is affection.  What was on his heart, what mattered to him, was not his personal peace and prosperity.  What mattered to him was other people.

In round one, my brother had a fire; things came out.  In round two, he learned, people came out.  I still remember, within 48 hours, he told me, he said, “I am so encouraged today” – two days after the fire.  I said, “Why?”  He said, “I’ve got 11 carpenters that have families to feed, and I got a job for all 11 of them.” Was his focus on his little, spiritual naval, whining about, “I wonder how much the insurance is going to pay?”  His energy was trying to figure out, How do I take care of these other people?  And as his focus was upward, praising God, then outward, to help people he was responsible for, then, what happened to him?  He got the lift.

The second observation is, living above our circumstances occurs when our hearts are so full of people there is no room for self-pity.  There’s no room for self-pity when your hearts are full of people.

I had a very unique opportunity in Asia, and one was to meet with a house church pastor.  He came down from China.  We met in Hong Kong, and we’re doing some work through the official church.  And this particular fellow was a house church pastor.  And we had dinner one night, and we did a bunch of teaching.  Phil and I did teaching in a number of churches and leadership development stuff – great experience.  And then, one night, we got to kind of wind down – and his name is Abraham.  And I got to hear Abraham’s story.  Looked kind of a youngish – 35 to 37 – been a house church pastor, vibrant Christian.  And he began to tell me this story.

He said, “On March 18th of this year, I was out preaching the Gospel.”  And boy, these house church pastors – I mean, man, they have a heart for lost people.  And he says, “While I was gone, the police came, and they arrested my wife.  And then, they took her down to the police station, and then, they beat her to a pulp.”  And, you know, I’m waiting for, “And oh, my gosh, you know, I don’t –”  You know I’m waiting for him to say, “I couldn’t make it through it, and . . .”  I don’t know.  And he said, you know, “I’ve been arrested three or four times and been beaten.”  And listen, you talk about the power of perspective.  As he’s telling me this story, I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop.  I’m waiting to hear about how he went through it and how he nursed his wife back to health, and . . .  And we never got there.

When he got to, “They took my wife, and they beat her,” and then, there was a – it wasn’t joy; it was a gleam.  All I can tell you, it was a gleam of the sense of the awe of God.  And he said, “I’m so proud of my wife, because she loves people so much.  She did that because she knew I was the pastor.  She claimed to be the pastor, and she said, ‘No one’s doing anything,’ but she was trying to start a church.  So, she did that to protect me.  She did that to protect the church.”  He said, “Can you imagine being counted so worthy to suffer for the Gospel of the Lord Jesus?”

And I just had to think of what my real, private thoughts were, and I thought to myself – and made no facial expression – Buddy, there are two people in this room that are believers in this conversation, and there’s one really, really mature one, and there’s one not too very mature.  And the one that’s really mature speaks Chinese, and the one who’s not very mature speaks just English.  Because I thought, If my wife got beaten, I would not be where I’m at in my life, rejoicing at the fact that it was an awesome privilege to suffer for the Gospel of Christ.  And the reason is, is because I would be focusing on what’s half full, because that would be so traumatic.

And what I want to tell you is, I met a man who, what he experienced is so normal, he looks at it not through the lens of circumstance.  He looks at it through the lens of Scripture, and he said, “You know something?  Jesus said those who love Him would be persecuted.  The apostle Paul said all those who long to make a difference for Christ will be persecuted.  Jesus said, “In the world you’ll have tribulation.  Blessed, happy are you when you are persecuted for My sake.  Bless those who persecute you.”  And those are parts of the Bible that, you know, we just read over very quickly.  I’m telling you, that guy clings to them.  And what I realized is, when you are squeezed and have an outward focus, your heart is so full of people, there’s no room for self-pity.  And I was humbled by that man.

And by the way, when I got done praying for the people in Russia last week, when I was depressed, and then, I got done praying for the people of Florida, literally, it was like a video tape went on.  This ever happen to you, where God kind of pushes a button?  It’s like a video tape just went on, and I could just see myself sitting here, and Abraham, and him telling me this story.

And it was like, that was the breakthrough moment – Bang!  You know what, God?  I think this pity party is over.  I think that I’m going to get up with my little spilled milk and quit feeling sorry for poor little Chippy and his schedule, and he’s had to travel, and my, my, my, today’s going to be really hard tomorrow.  And I didn’t get a full night’s sleep, and golly, gee whiz, God, I hope You make everything wonderful, and . . .  You know, I just want to go, Ughh!  You know, Ingram, you are so ridiculously carnal and self-centered at times, you make me sick, and I have to look at you every time I shave.

And so, I repented of that, and I said, “Lord, I’m sorry.  Bless Abraham.  Thank You for what You have ahead of me.  You know, a lot of people have had a day’s work with no sleep, and I bet I can do it too, by Your grace.  Now, let’s get up, let’s get on, and let’s get after it.”  And you know something?  I had a great day.  I had a great day.  You know, my circumstances didn’t change one iota.  I had a great day.  I had a great day because I chose, I prayed, I had confidence in God’s promises – upward, outward focus.

Final observation here is this: Sometimes God allows adverse circumstances to realign our affections.  That’s what happened with my neighbor.  You know, that fire?  Does God have more wood and more cabinets?  Yeah.  Well, what do you think God was doing in the guy’s life?  I mean, we get this deal: “If God really loves me, how could He have a fire burn up my business?”  Maybe He loves you so much that that business is an idol in your life, and He needed to burn down your business so He could get your heart.

Maybe God loves you so much that He brings difficulty into one of your sons’ lives because He’s becoming a materialistic, self-centered, narcissistic kid, who’s filled with himself, and you unconsciously believe that his grades in school and his athletic achievements, and how he looks on the outside and what other people think, because it makes you feel good as a dad, it makes you feel like a significant person because he’s successful – maybe God loves your son so much and loves you so much, He’s going to put a little wrench in that little game and get a hold of his heart, and make him significant and godly, instead of outwardly successful.  And maybe He’ll get your attention in the process.

Maybe God loves you so much, that you’re so busy and moving so fast and don’t have enough time for Him, that He gives you a little biopsy report that’s got you scared spitless.  And those little dilly prayers that you pray, you know, in traffic, like, “Lord, bless me a little bit.  Lord, make my business go well.  Lord, help me out with my family.  Lord, you know, I don’t have time for You.  I’d really like to read the Bible.  I know it’s really important.  Lord, You know that You want to use my spiritual gifts in some day, some way in my church, because, you know, I heard that and I felt a little guilty, but I can go into denial.  I’ve gotten good at it.  But I’ll be real busy, and I’m going to make money, and then, later, I’ll help You, someday, some way, somehow.”  No one ever thinks like that, but just in case you have, ever, maybe God loves you enough to bring something into your life to say Errrrttt!  Sometimes God does that, to get your attention, and get mine, to change your affections.

In summary, our focus always follows our affections.  See, our feelings always follow our focus.  Whatever we focus on – upward, outward – our feelings follow it.  But our focus always follows our affections.  What we focus on always reveals what’s really in our heart, what matters.  Is it things, or is it people?  Is it me, or is it others?

At this point, you might ask, you know, “I would really like to think this way.  I’d like to have that kind of perspective.  I’d like to learn to pray those kind of prayers.  I’d like to have this upward and outward focus.

But, you know, Ingram, you’re a pastor, and you’ve been doing this thing a little bit longer than me, and, you know – you kind of know how to pray.  If I really wanted to do this, how do you pray?  I mean, what would you ask?  What would you say to God if you wanted these kind of things to happen in your life?”

And what you’re going to see, just in these last three little verses is, you’re going to get to eavesdrop.  The apostle Paul is on his knees in a Roman cell.  And he’s going to let you overhear not just, “I pray for you all with joy.”  He’s going to let you eavesdrop, and he’s going to let you hear exactly what he prays.  In verse 9, he’s going to say, “I’ve got a request for these people, God.”  In verse 10, he’s going to say, “God, here’s my reason for this request.”  And then, in verse 11, he said, “Here’s the resource I know they already have, so I know You’re going to answer it.”

Let’s pick it up in verse 9.  He says, “And this I pray.”  Notice the forward focus here – upward, outward, now forward.  “And this I pray, that Your love may abound still more and more in real knowledge and all discernment.”  Put a box around real knowledge and all discernment.  This is his prayer.

Notice, he didn’t pray that everything would turn out right.  Notice, he didn’t pray that everyone would feel happy tomorrow.  Notice, he didn’t pray that they would never have any more persecution.  He says, “And this I pray for you, that your love, your” – right? – “your affection” – the things that are inside your heart that, when it gets squeezed – “what I’m praying is, is that your love and your affection would grow in a direction, and I want it to grow in a direction of a real knowledge of God, instead of for more success, instead of for more comfort, instead of for more ease.”  That’s our human nature.  He says, “I’m praying that your love, your desire, your passions, your affections would be cultivated to have a real knowledge of God.”

It’s a very interesting word.  In the New Testament, a couple basic words for knowledge.  One is a knowledge that is data or information. It’s a physics equation: I know how to do that equation.  It’s a math equation.  It’s, “I read the New York Stock Exchange, and I know what certain companies did at certain times, at certain days, and how much they went up or down.”  That’s data knowledge.

There’s a different word for know, like, “I really know my wife, and she wouldn’t want that color; she would want this color.  I really know my kids, and they wouldn’t want to go to a camp like that; they’d want to go…”  It’s a knowledge by way of personal relationship.  He uses this word, and then, he intensifies it with a prefix, so it’s like, “I want you to have a super intimate knowledge.

I’m praying that God would create in you a love, a passion, a desire for an intimate, personal knowledge of Him,” and the second word is discernment, and it means “the ability, in all this mess and complexity of life – it’s the ability to ascertain truth.”  It’s the ability to know, This is good; this is bad.  This is good; this is better.  This is better, but this is best.  This is wrong; this is right, in this decision, in this business deal, with your child, with your time, with your priorities.  So, he prays, “I want your love and affection to grow in the real, personal, intimate knowledge of God, and I want you to have this ability to discern what’s good, what’s not.”

But notice why.  Look at the reason.  Little key verse, word, here: so that.  “So that you may approve” – and you can write the word test above that, because that’s the idea of the word – “So . . . you [can] approve” – or test – “the things that are excellent.”  The word for approve was, they would take metal, and you would drop certain acid on a metal to find out how much gold is in it or the quality of the gold.  That’s this word, in the ancient times.

He said, “I want you to have your love so connected in personal relationship with God, and have the ability to discern, in all circumstances, good/bad, so that you can test, or evaluate, or approve, things that are excellent.  Give your life to what counts.  Give your life to what matters.  I want you to have the ability – I’m praying for you, that you would have the ability, when, you know, part of it is, ‘Is it half full; is it half empty?  What about all those issues right on the line?  How am I supposed to look at them?  And based on how I look at them, should I do this, or should I do that?’  I want you to have such a sense of how loved you are and what you possess, that your desire for God and ability, so that you could approve, test, live a life that’s excellent, in your speech and in your behavior and in your relationships.”

And then, notice, there’s a purpose statement.  “Well, why would you pray this?”  Here’s why: “In order to be sincere and blameless until the day of Christ.”  The word sincere means “to be tested by sunlight,” and the word blameless means “to be morally pure.”  He says, “I want you to approve what’s excellent, so that how you would end up actually living is that if the Spirit of God –”  If you were a stained-glass window, or if you were a bay window, and the sunlight came through it – what do we all know?  You can clean it, and it looks real clean, and then, the sun comes up, and what’s it do?  It reveals all the smudges and impurities.

He says, “I’m praying for you, that you would so know God, have such an ability, be so connected to Him, have this ability to know right from wrong, and then, test what’s excellent, that your whole pattern and lifestyle would be one that, when people see your life, and the sun would come up – no smudge marks.”  No smudge marks.  You’re sincere.  You’re real.  You’re authentic.  No phoniness.  No image casting.

No pretending.  No talking one way, living another way.  And you’re morally pure – no Internet stops.  No staring too long at Cosmo as you buy some things as you go out of the grocery store.  No delayed second, third, and fourth looks at the lady with the very tight sweater and the even tighter skirt.  Lord, thank You that You made her that way.  That’s not sin.  Not going any farther than that.  Thank You, for those of you that have a wife, that You have given me a wife.  And thank You that charm is deceitful, beauty is vain, and I want my thoughts to honor You.  Can’t ever get away from temptation, it’s a fallen world.  But as Martin Luther said, you cannot let the birds build a nest in your head.

And then, notice what happens.  He says there’s a resource. He says, “Having been filled.”  And put a parentheses around having been filled.  It’s a tense of the verb – it’s the perfect tense.  Perfect tense, in Greek means this: “Something occurred in the past that has – an actual event occurs in the past, with continuing impact into the present, and on into the future.”

He says, “I’m praying this for you, so that you can live this kind of life, out of this kind of knowledge.”  And then, he says – here’s the resource – “Having been filled.”  The moment you received Jesus Christ, you were justified.  You were taken from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of light.  The Spirit of God entered you, sealed you with the Spirit, and you were filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God.  When God sees you as His son, when God sees me, He sees you as completed in Christ.  Your position, legal standing, is, you’re pure.  You’re loved.  You’re accepted.  The Christian life is not seeking to get that or attain that.  It’s living out of what you already possess.  And so, that’s what he says, “That’s what I pray.”

Out of that, I draw one final principle, and that’s this: Our feelings always follow our focus – we’ve got that one – our focus always follows our affections, but our affections always follow our thinking.  That’s the key word.  Our affections always follow our thinking.

If you study verses 9 through 11 carefully, notice the word knowledge.  It has to do with your thought life.  Discernment – the ability to think between this and that.  You can approve – testing, evaluating with your thought, cognitive ability – that which is excellent.  So that behaviors change, sincere and blameless.  Why?  Because you have been already made righteous with Him.

The three timeless principles I’ll give you – we’ve hit them, but just by way of review – is that our feelings always follow our focus.  Let’s just wrap it up with this.  Feelings are what I live with – get my focus upward and outward, they’ll follow.  Okay, my focus is always going to follow my affections, and God will reveal my affections by the difficult circumstances in my life.  But my affections – if you really want to change, long term, my affections – what’s on my heart, what really matters, what’s important – that is always a result of my thinking.

And so, Paul is literally praying that they can think in a new way about what matters, and that will flow out of a personal, living, intimate relationship with Christ, and the ability to discern in this complex world, what’s good, what’s bad.  You test things, and you test them in such a way, where, moment by moment, day by day, you make little, incremental decisions, so that your life progressively is sincere and blameless.

C + P = E.

As we wrap it up, I’d like you to think about that most difficult circumstance, and I want to give you 30 seconds to decide where you’re going to put your focus, your perspective, before we close.  And let’s just ask God that, just for today, just for today, you might experience grace and peace because you choose to look at what you do have, instead of what’s missing.