12-29-13 THE POINT OF FOCUS

Phil. 4:8 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.

I think perhaps it would be impossible

for me to overstate

the value of the concept

we are going to look at this morning,

a concept that will provide us with the perfect end to the year we’ve just lived,

and the perfect beginning to 2014.

The verse we will be studying

during the next few minutes

is the verse that initially gave me

the desire to teach Philippians.

There have been times

during the months we have spent in this book so far

when I have wanted to spring ahead to this verse and scream,

“Look at this! Just look at this!”

Now that we’re finally here

I do hope I can help us

appreciate a little of what’s happening in this verse

and even more

to appreciate the tremendous value it can be to us in real life.

As most of you know by now,

the passage we are studying

in the 4^th chapter of Philippians

is a passage in which

Paul is offering us a concise statement

of the survival tools for hard times

that he has been presenting throughout

all four chapters of this short New Testament letter.

And we have been in this study long enough

so that you also know that

this book was not written

for the cozy, quiet Sunday afternoons of our lives.

This is in-the-trenches stuff.

This is Paul is prison

writing to Christians under persecution.

This is God’s people dealing with “REAL LIFE” at its most REAL.

I know I’ve restated that truth

again and again throughout this study,

and I want you to know I have done so for a purpose.

You see, I know the kind of lies

Satan uses against us

to attempt to destroy the power

of the truths we’ve been studying.

And I know that at the head of the list

is the lie that what Paul says here

is fine for the good times in our lives,

but it doesn’t work for pain.

Satan will seek to tell us that

“Rejoicing in the Lord”

and knowing “The Lord is near”

is fine for those times

when things go our way,

and we feel His presence with us,

but it just doesn’t work

when we see things falling apart around us.

But the truth is

it’s exactly the opposite.

What Paul shares with us here

was written specifically for

the hardest times in our lives,

the times when we feel like

we are the victims of evil forces we cannot escape

and cannot control.

There may be no more terrifying feeling

than the feeling of being out of control.

We talked a little bit about this two weeks ago.

If you were with us

you know we were studying Paul’s instructions to us to:

Phil. 4:6 Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.

And as we were studying that verse

I mentioned that every time we pray

we are affirming the fundamental truth of our lives,

that though we may feel like we have no control over our situation,

we have a God who does have control,

a God who holds our lives

and our futures in His hands.

And when Paul assured us that:

Phil. 4:7... the peace of God, which surpasses all comprehension, shall guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus...

We saw that peace coming

from the assurance that our God

truly does hold that over-arching control of our lives.

But that is not where Paul ends.

In fact, to stop where we stopped two weeks ago

without continuing on to verse 8

would leave us in intense frustration.

You see, we are by design

creatures of action.

If we are to remain mentally and emotionally healthy and stable

we must have a point of mental focus.

Now, left to ourselves,

apart from the presence and guidance

of Christ in our lives,

when the pain hits,

when the hard times come,

when the evil intrudes into our lives,

the point of focus we will select

is that of attempting to fight against

and destroy the person

or the people

we believe to be responsible for our pain.

Now there is no sense in us going through this study

unless we’re going to make it practical,

so we might as well start right here.

I was in a phone conversation some time ago

with lady who does not attend our church,

and is not involved in it,

but who had been given my name

and wanted my advice.

She’d recently gone through

a painful divorce

and was consumed with frustration

over some ongoing issues

between herself and her former mate.

There were children involved

which greatly compounded the problem.

Do you know where her point of focus was?

On her exhusband.

Do you know what she was looking for?

Advice on how she could get him to do

the things she wanted him to do.

At least three times in my life

I have had employers

who, from my perspective,

severely misused me.

There were periods in my involvement with all three of them

when my anger against their injustice

became the point of focus of my life.

I found myself consumed with a longing

to find some way

to fight back

or get even...in a nice Christian sort of way.

If you want help in making this personal,

just ask yourself, “When was the last time I felt as if I was the victim

of someone else’s sin,

or someone else’s failure?”

When was the last time

you saw yourself as a victim

of the evil in someone else’s life?

Do you think Paul didn’t really understand?

Do you remember why Paul was forced to appeal to Caesar,

why he’d been forced to spend

months prior to the writing of this letter locked in prison,

why, at the most crucial time in the history of the church

the man who understood more

about the true nature of the church

than any one else in history ever would

was suddenly yanked out of the battle

and forced to sit on the sidelines?

It was because some petty,

vicious little Jewish leaders in Jerusalem

hated him so much

they told lies about him,

forcing his arrest.

Now, let me tell you what you already know.

Whenever we find ourselves

feeling like the victim of someone else’s evil

our natural response is to attempt to gain control over the person causing that pain

with the hope that we can somehow

defeat them.

And when we enter into that arena

and choose to fight against them

let me share with you two things

we will always accomplish

no matter how the battle itself turns out.

First, we choose to give the person we are fighting against tremendous power over our lives.

“No way, Larry!

It’s because they already have power that I’m fighting against them.

The whole purpose of the battle

is to attempt to break free

from the power they have over me.

The last thing in the world I would ever do

is give them more power over me.”

Well, I hate to be the one to break the news to you,

but when you fight against them

that is exactly what you do -

you give them power in your life.

How much time do you spend

engaging them in mental warfare?

I’m talking about what’s going on in your mind

when they aren’t even in your presence.

How much intense mental energy

do you invest in thinking

and rethinking

and rethinking again

what happened

and why it happened

and what they said

and what you wish you would have said?

How much emotional energy

have you exhausted

every time you reenter that battle emotionally?

Every time you do that

you are saying to the one you’re fighting against,

“Here! Not only do you have power over my circumstances,

but I also want to give you power

over my mind and my emotions.

It’s yours for the taking.

Here - I give you another full hour of my life,

another afternoon,

another sleepless night.”

And we need to be brutally honest with ourselves here -

that is not power they have any right to,

it is power we have freely chosen to give them.

They didn’t take that hour,

or that afternoon,

or that night from us by force,

they didn’t demand and receive

all that mental and emotional energy.

We volunteered it,

we gave it to them freely,

by our own choice.

So the first thing that happens

when we determine to seek to defeat

the person who has done evil to us

is that we choose to give them power over our lives.

And then, second,

we invite the spirit of bitterness

to take up residence within us.

And once bitterness is allowed to take root

and begin to grow

it will become an all-consuming obsession.

It will become the point of focus of our life.

It will become the theme

of every significant conversation we have.

It will become the center

of our reasoning processes

and it will suck our emotional energy dry.

And right now

there are some of you hearing these words

who know what I’m talking about

and you’re saying to yourself,

“Yes, Larry, but you don’t know what they did to me!

You don’t know how they treated me!

You don’t know how their evil has ruined my life.”

And obviously, I don’t know what they did.

But I would respond with some other questions.

How many hours,

how many days of your life

have you invested in your bitterness,

days that could have been invested

in bringing so much good,

so much healing into your world?

How many other people

have been defiled by your bitterness?

How many others have also been forced

to process the evil that touched your life?

All I’m saying is this -

when we choose to place our focus

on seeking to destroy those

who brought evil into our lives

we are choosing to give them power over us that they have no right to,

and we choose to invite a spirit of bitterness

to take root within us.

So what’s the alternative?

What’s the solution?

“Right, Larry! And Pollyanna lived happily ever after!”

No, but Paul did thrive in prison,

and God’s people can find true freedom

over the evil that seeks to consume our lives.

And in order to understand what’s happening here

I need to take us back

to a phrase I’ve used several times this morning.

It’s the phrase, “Point of focus.”

God has designed the human mind

in such a way that we can only consciously focus on one thing at a time.

More than that,

the mind is constantly in search of some point of focus.

Contrary to what we may believe

from the blank stare on some folks’ faces at times,

the mind is always focused somewhere.

Right now there are some of you here who by all appearances

seem to be mentally in “Park”,

but the truth is five minutes ago

your mind started thinking about

all the things you’re going to need to get together

for that project you’re going to tackle this afternoon

and in reality your mind is a buzzing little beehive of energetic activity.

And whatever we choose to focus on

will determine where

both our reasoning processes

and our emotions end up moving.

But the mind can only focus on one thing at a time - it’s the way we’re wired.

A number of years ago

I had a friend who was going through

a very painful time in life.

I could do nothing to remove the cause of the pain,

but I gave them a prescription -

I suggested they get a puzzle

and begin putting it together.

Years later they came back to me

and thanked me for my prescription.

They said it helped far more than they would have expected.

It helped because it provided times of intense concentration that gave them a kind of mental reprieve

while God’s healing process

was taking place within them.

Now, with all of that as preparation,

let me tell you what I see happening

in this verse here in Philippians.

Knowing our strong vulnerability

during those times when evil has intruded into our lives

to be pulled into attempting to lash out and destroy

those who brought that evil to us,

Paul offers us his final great weapon

for survival and success

during the hard times in our lives.

He calls us to an active,

aggressive mental warfare,

a warfare in which

rather than allowing our mental energies

to be led by our emotional responses

to the evil that has touched our lives,

we actively choose to search through

our life and our circumstances

until we see something true,

something honorable,

something right,

something lovely,

something of good repute,

something excellent,

something worthy of praise,

in other words,

something that reflects the presence of our Lord Jesus Christ with us,

something that reminds us

of the true nature of our God,

and we consciously choose

to focus on it.

And then Paul uses

an important word -

he uses the word ‟DWELL”.

He says let your mind dwell on these things.

You see,

we cannot eliminate negative thinking

by telling ourselves not to think negatively.

The only way we can ever eliminate negative thinking

is by choosing to refocus our minds

on something positive.

I saw a beautiful example of this principle

in a little news blurb

about a devastating series of tornados in Oklahoma some time ago.

The reporter had his microphone

shoved in the face of a family

who was standing in a pile of absolute rubble,

rubble that just a day before

had been their home.

He was trying to get them to give their response to the devastation around them.

And the father responded by saying,

“We’re just so thankful to God

because our whole family is safe.”

It wasn’t what he’d lost that consumed his mind,

it was what is God had given him...the only things that really mattered.

The point focus...

Paul, of course, illustrated the principle repeatedly throughout this letter.

Phil. 1:12 Now I want you to know, brethren, that my circumstances have turned out for the greater progress of the gospel,

Phil. 1:13 so that my imprisonment in the cause of Christ has become well known throughout the whole praetorian guard and to everyone else,

Phil. 1:14 and that most of the brethren, trusting in the Lord because of my imprisonment, have far more courage to speak the word of God without fear.

But this principle has far more significant applications

than simply dealing with our external circumstances in life.

One of the great discoveries of my life

has grown out of the way this same principle

has a dramatic impact on our ability

to break the power of certain types of wounds from our past.

Every one of us come into our adult years

with our own personal collection of wounds from our past,

places where we have been hurt by the intentional or unintentional actions

of those who had some measure of authority or control over us as children.

Obviously our parents are at the top of that list for most of us,

but it also includes any adult or older sibling

who had influence in our life.

It is the nature of those wounds

that they can open us up to a vulnerability to certain types of sin patterns

as we move into our adult years.

But there is something else that happens

as we move into our adult years as well -

we become aware

that we have the ability to gain power

over those who once wounded us in the past,

the ability to gain power in a way that causes pain

to those who once caused us pain.

We discover that we can get even.

And as that realization grows

we are faced with what I now believe to be

one of the most significant and defining choices we will ever face.

And it goes right back to this whole point of focus thing.

Will we choose to invest our life into hurting those who hurt us,

or will we choose to grieve through our pain and our loss in the presence of our God,

sharing it with Him,

trusting Him to once again bring good out of evil in our life,

and letting go of our longing to conquer those who wounded us.

And after more than 40 years of involvement in the lives of hurting people,

here is my great discovery.

Most people choose to try to get even,

and in the process they open the door for sin patterns to take root within them,

sin patterns that corrupt their lives forever.

But for the few who grieve through their loss,

and let go of their desire to get even,

and focus on the healing goodness of their God,

they find both freedom from the pain of the wounds

and freedom from those sin patterns that sought to destroy them,

and they literally rewrite their own future for good.

Now certainly there are times in the lives of some of God’s people

when there doesn’t seem to be

a lot to work with in the way of good in the circumstances surrounding them.

It may be that

sometimes the only point of focus we can find

is the presence of our Lord with us,

and His promise that He will never leave us,

and never forsake us,

and His assurance that we will find Him adequate for each day we go through.

And if that’s all we can find,

then that’s what we are called to focus on.

Let me conclude by saying this as plainly as I know how -

every one of us will hit points in our lives

when evil blasts in.

At those times we are faced with a choice

that will ultimately determine

the course and quality of our lives

for years to come.

We can choose to declare war

on the source of that evil,

giving our minds and emotions over to that battle,

and embark upon a road

that will form us into bitter, hate-filled people,

who poison the quality of everyone’s life we get near.

Our cause may be just.

The evil that touched us may be real.

But our response to it

ultimately multiplies the impact of that evil upon our world

a hundred fold.

Or we can choose

to actively seek within our world

those things that reflect our Lord,

and then, when we find them,

choose to focus on them,

to dwell on them,

and allow them to become the dominant theme of our lives.

Any bitter fool

can see the evil in his world,

but only the Spirit of God

can give us eyes to see His presence in the midst of it

and can give us the faith

and the courage

to allow Him to reshape that evil

into true,

eternal,

contagious good in our lives.