FOCUS

Learning to adjust your focus is so essential because whatever you focus on expands. Whatever you focus on grows larger, or appears larger to you. Your perception frames the reality you live in. So, your focus or your perception becomes extremely important.

Psalm 34:3 says, “Oh, magnify the Lord with me, and let us exalt His name together.”

To magnify means to MAKE BIGGER. How do you make the Lord bigger? Obviously, you can’t…last I checked, God is already pretty big. You can’t make Him bigger, but you CAN make Him bigger TO YOU.

Did you ever burn ants with a magnifying glass when you were little? If not, you probably saw it on an old movie or something. When it’s a sunny day, if you take a magnifying glass and hold it over an ant, the sun will magnify and burn the ant. Did the sun actually get bigger? Did it get closer or did it get stronger?

NO. But to the ant, IT DID!

The SUN was there the whole time. But when the sun was magnified it suddenly became a lot bigger or a lot more powerful to the ant. That’s a cruel example. But in the same way, GOD IS ALWAYS THERE. He is always BIG, He is always strong, He is always GOOD; but we all know what it’s like to take for granted the fact that He’s there. So, David says, “MAGNIFY the Lord.” Make Him bigger. There is nothing you can do to actually make God bigger; but you can make Him bigger TO YOU, or bigger in your mind, when you change your FOCUS.

If your perception is that you have BIG problems and a SMALL God, that’s a recipe for living in fear. God is not taken by surprise or caught off guard when things go wrong in your life. He knew it was going to happen before it happened. Maybe your perception of your problems leads you to think, “I’m in trouble. This is over. I better just quit now. I don’t have what it takes to keep going forward.” But the problem itself is not the problem. The problem is that your perception of God isn’t big enough!

Magnify the Lord! You have got to change the way you perceive what’s in front of you. What if we could start looking at our problems through the lens of the faithfulness of God? What if we could start looking at our problems the way heaven looks at our problems?

Heaven sees things very differently. Heaven looks at 5 loaves of bread and 2 fish as the food supply to feed 5,000 men and says, “Great, this is more than enough.” Do you realize that food was multiplied twice in the gospels? They fed 5,000 on one occasion and 4,000 on another. Did you ever pay attention to those stories? When they fed 4,000 men, they actually started with 7 loaves and had 7 baskets of leftovers. When they fed 5,000, they started with 5 loaves and had 12 baskets of leftovers. Now, I’m not GREAT at math, but I know that 5,000 is more than 4,000 and I know that 12 is more 7. When they had MORE people to feed and started with LESS food, they had MORE left at the end.

God is not limited by your problems or by your lack of resources. When the challenge was bigger and they had less to work with, they fed more people! What if we could start to SEE the way heaven sees? Instead of looking at the circumstances surrounding us and breaking down in fear and frustration, what if we could look at it and say, “This is a perfect recipe for breakthrough”?

David, in Psalm 23 says, “Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil for you are with Me.”

David recognized that the HELL he was going through was just a SHADOW. He didn’t say He was in the valley of death. He called it the valley of the shadow of death. He recognized that he was in a place that had the APPEARANCE of death, but His perception of God was bigger than anything else.

A shadow has no substance, but if we live in reaction to the SHADOW the result is fear and stagnation. Did you notice that David said the HE WALKS THROUGH the valley? A lot of people get into the valley, it appears intimidating, and they decide that it’s not a good idea to move forward. So, they set up shop in the valley, saying, “I guess I’ll stay here until things calm down, until things get easier.” But the problem is the more you FOCUS on the shadow, the more you allow it to overshadow you.

My all-time favorite definition for FEAR came from the movie After Earth. In the movie there are creatures that can SEE fear. They are big and terrifying, but Will Smith’s character in the movie discovered that if you are unafraid they can’t see you. He was the first one that learned how to control his fear and become invisible to the creatures. In the movie his son asked him how he learned to do that. In explaining to his son how he first discovered that he could control his emotions to become invisible, he said these words, “Fear is not real. Fear can only exist in our thoughts of the future.”

FEAR will cause you to stay where you are, to stop moving forward, to never advance, to go back the other way…but fear is always built on a LIE. The lie says that you aren’t good enough, that you problems are too many, that the circumstances are too great, that the probability of failure is too high. It is nothing but a lie because it factors out the simple truth that GOD IS WITH YOU.

Psalm 91:1 talks about another shadow. “He who dwells in the secret place of the most high shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.”

So, the question is, what overshadows you? Is it the shadow of fear? The shadow of death that gives the appearance that you don’t have what it takes? OR is it the shadow of the Almighty?

We have to stop living in reaction to the things that are happening around us and instead learn to live in response to the shadow of God’s protection over us. You won’t be so concerned with what it looks like when you understand that God is for you, that He is good, and that He is your shepherd. Adjust your focus! STOP paying attention to the size of the problem, and START paying attention to the size of your God.