One Focus

Life is simple.  Since early August, I have been learning only one thing, really, over and over but just from different angles.  And I'm starting to see that this just might end up as a lifelong lesson.  One, by the way, I don't mind in the least.  These have been perhaps my best months of my life, and I didn't even really go anywhere spectacular or do much out of the ordinary.  Just people, and just my Bible.  Perhaps that's enough.

On August 3rd, I heard a sermon on Galatians 5: Christian Liberty.  What hit me then, and what I've been coming to repeating, is this notion that when we encounter sin neither do we give in to it nor are we to fight it.  Once you begin fighting sin, your focus is distracted from the only One that can help you through the situation.  Instead, argued this preacher, our focus should remain on Jesus, and everything else will be resolved as a by-product.  This was helpful.  Now that's what I call Christian liberty.

On the tail-end of these last few months, I was reading Hebrews 12 about a week ago, verses I know very well but now see in a fresh light.  We are instructed in the opening verses to "run with endurance, laying aside every encumbrance and the sin that so easily entangles us."  I have heard it said that we run by laying aside the sin.  This time, I saw the real source of energy to run and to lay aside: "Fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith."  Now that's cool.  We run with our eyes riveted on our pioneer, the one who has blazed the trail for us and invites us to follow.  If we would just keep our eyes on the prize just like he did ("who for the joy set before him endured the cross"), and run like mad, yes, thorns will scratch us along the way, yes, branches and bugs will get in our face, but that will never deter us from running and maintaining that singular focus.  And once we learn to keep a singular focus, as I'm slowly learning, life becomes rather simple.

Finally, what got me to actually write this was this Sunday's sermon.  While I am usually happy with my church, this was one of those times when you realize why you're there and why this church is so great.  Brad was preaching on John 15, another familiar passage.  He mentioned four common interpretations of the passage, and then discussed the need to bear fruit and how to get it done.  A couple incidents were particularly helpful.  First, he talked about the nature of pruning (v. 2).  Why do we prune branches?  It's rather obvious.  If you don't prune a branch, it was get entangled in itself and expends most of its energy/juice on growing longer branches instead of bearing more fruit.  If the goal is to produce fruit, longer, more complex, branches are unnecessary and instead harmful.  Pruning redirects that energy from branch extension to fruit bearing.  Connection my life: Filling my life with activities and programs and service projects and ministries and Bible studies and small groups and choir practices and rehearsals and recitals may look impressive and make for a very entangled and overbooked schedule, as well as a sleep-deprived and utterly exhausted human, but it will rarely produce much fruit.  You may think, like I did, of some historical greats that read 6 books a week, wrote hundreds of pages of commentary while working three jobs and raising 11 children, and pulled off with abounding fruit, but can you think of more than a handful of such people in the last century?  While these people do exist, I'm sure the one historical great from our generation has already accomplished this so the rest of us can live sane and healthy lives.  To often, Brad reminded me, we confuse programs and ministries with genuine fruit.  So pruning involves simplifying our focus to just a few things, and doing them well, and producing much fruit in the process.  He then asked the question just about everyone in the building had in their minds, "Well, then, how do you produce fruit?"  Verse 4 gives the simple, yet ever frustrating answer, "Abide in me."  I agree with Brad, I hate that word.  It has always frustrated me.  I have no idea what that word means.  But now, it is welcomed with peace.  Too often, we want to do, we want to achieve.  After all, that is our country's mantra.  Get it done.  Make it happen.  And that's exactly backwards.  Abiding is so frustrating because it requires no action.  There's nothing to do.  You just abide.  The implications are clear.  Just like the branch does nothing to bear fruit other than remain connected to the vine and submit to the pruning of the farmer, so we are to abide, stay connect, soak in the true vine and submit humbly under the kind shears of the farmer in the vineyard.  So the answer is not in doing more--reading the Bible every day, attending 4 church services a week, singing in the choir, leading a small group--but rather to do less and be more.  Wait.  Rest.  Abide.  Not very measurable, which is why we avoid them, but just the stuff we need to bear fruit.  If we keep that singular focus on abiding, on soaking in the word and growing in a real relationship with our vine, and less of a focus on the fruit and the external measurements of that fruit, life becomes strangely simple.  Not easy, but simple.