Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.' Mark 12:30
I have been preaching a series titled "Directionally Challenged." The series is birthed from some truths I learned from Andy Stanley's book The Principle of the Path. (a book well worth the read.)
The Principle of the Path is a simple, profound, and unavoidable truth and reality in life. Direction, not intention, determines destination. All the good intentions in the world will not take you where you want to go. The only thing in life that takes us to the right destinations in life is making the right decisions to go in the right directions.
The biggest issue with direction and intention, however, is attention. Another truth and perhaps my favorite out of the series and the book is the role of attention. What gets our attention determines our direction, and ultimately, our destination. (per Jesus…where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.)
I believe the majority of church-goers read Mark 12:30 and say I want to love Jesus like that. They give that thought their undivided attention until they step outside of their stain-glassed buildings and the sin-stained world begins to distract them. The things of this world begin to quickly rob each and every one of us of the attention we desire to give to the most important things in life.
The problem that I see in this real issue is that we must come to grips with the biggest reason our attention is stolen. The issue is not what we like to consider. We like to consider the symptoms or the actions in our lives, but the real issue is not about our actions…it is our heart. We do not love the Lord with all of our heart because we love other things with too much of our heart and our soul and our mind and our strength.
In this past week's message I shared the five main attention stealers I see in life. I have gotten some good feeback on this and would like to share it in my blog, then I will wrap up this blog with a little information about this next Sunday.
Attention Stealers…
1. Self – You will never give your full attention to God (or to others in serving Him) while living life to fully attend to yourself.
2. Wounds – If you continue to focus on the wounding in your life you will never experience healing in your life.
3. Disabilities – Living focused on what you cannot do will rob you of the ability to do what you can.
4. Failures – Giving today's attention to yesterday's failures will rob you of tomorrow's successes.
5. Good – Living life for that which is good often prevents us from experiencing that which is God.
The comment about failures…Giving today's attention to yesterday's failures will rob you of tomorrow's successes...is the thought I want to wrap the series up with this weekend.
The truth is we have all failed, but some of you are locked down by it. Your life has been taken captive by your failures (or the failures of others against you). You are living life in a stand still spiritually, emotionally, and relationally.
The direction you took yesterday is preventing you from dealing with the destination of today and robbing you of the intention you desire to live out tomorrow. This Sunday I am preaching on where do you go from there?
What do you do when God says, "Road Closed"?
If you are a part of Fellowship and know someone who is living life frozen at the "Road Closed" sign, bring them Sunday. It is time they learned the value of a detour with God and the joy of the Road Ahead.
See you Sunday!
