Focus on Christ

     I am easily distracted. My attention span is short. I've been praying lately to keep my focus on Christ. You can imagine my surprise when today as I opened my Beth Moore's study guide and read the chapter title, "Keep Your Focus." She starts out by writing on pages 22-23:
     I have a wonderful and terrible truth for you. We become like the object of our focus. If our focus is on our needs, we become more needy. If our focus is on the harm others have done to us, we become harmful and angry people. If our focus is on material things, we become grasping and greedy. And, praise God, if our focus is on Christ, we become more and more like Him...
     We can easily drift from a pure focus on Jesus. Two of the easiest ways are to become focused on the problems of others or to focus on Satan himself. Sometimes Satan successfully schemes to keep us in bondage by fueling our focus on others' strongholds rather than on our own...I am convinced that as a general rule, strongholds are almost always broken between God and the individual captive. As 2 Corinthians 1:10-11 tells us, we can help others with our prayers, but we cannot fight their battles for them. 

This colorful painting in a church in the Christian Quarter of Jerusalem focuses on the sacrificial death of Christ. Our Hope is in the fact that Christ died and rose from the dead and now lives so that we too can die knowing when we get to heaven, if the gatekeeper asks us, "Why should I let you into heaven?" I can reply, "Because I believe that Christ died for my sins on the cross and overcame death through His resurrection, so that I could be forgiven and allowed into the presence of the One True God."

^{Matthew 22:30} At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven. ³¹ But about the resurrection of the dead—have you not read what God said to you, ³² ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not the God of the dead but of the living.”