Staying Focused on Jesus Amidst Life's Trials

is how we should behave, what are some of the things that we should be doing? And today, we talk about single-mindedness. This weekend, I had the privilege and the opportunity to judge some of the speech contest out at the high school. I like doing that. I used to participate in those kind of things when I was in high school, and I've judged for several years at other locations and other things over the years, and I really enjoy just watching these high school students as they begin to just illuminate their faces and their voices have these great inflections, and every now and then, they would just make me chuckle and laugh or cry or just with a great way to express themselves, and I just loved it. I mean, they were so focused on what they were doing and nothing was going to interrupt them except for my very first student at my very first start yesterday morning, this young little girl, and I mean, she could have been a freshman. I don't know. She looked very young, and she was very nervous, and so she started her presentation to me, and all of a sudden, I realized that I had not turned off this silly thing, and I got a text from my son, and it gave its normal notification sound right in the middle of her presentation, and I said, I am so sorry. It was right at the beginning of it, and I said, let me turn that off, and then she looked at me, and she said, can I start over? And I said, sure. That was my fault, not your fault. You just feel free. Go right ahead and start over, so I'm telling you today, if your cell phone goes off in the middle of the sermon, I'm gonna stop and say, can I start over? Can I start over? Can I start over? Can I start over? Can I start over? Can I start over? Can I start over? Most of the time, these students are just so focused that even that would not have interrupted them, and today, we're gonna talk about what it means to be single-minded, to be single-focused. There are so many distractions, just like cell phones tend to be a distraction. They can be a great tool, but they distract us so much in our world today, and they distract us sometimes from being holy and from doing things that God wants us to be and do, so we're gonna be reading in James 1 2-8 in just a moment, but before we do, let me just lead us in a word of prayer. Father, I know in this building, there are a lot of needs. There are a lot of things going on in our world, even in our state, in our community, as we've lost loved ones in our lives, Father, as we deal with health issues. Father, it is so good to see Carol Elliott here today, Father, Father, bless her. Continue to heal her and Don as well. Continue to do miraculous things in their lives. We thank you for their faithfulness, for their friendship. Father, I know there's other needs in this community, in this room. Our Lord, may we cry out to you right now. Hear our prayer, oh God. Father, we're so distracted, sometimes we forget. In fact, prayer becomes the last thing we do, and it ought to be the first thing we do as we focus on you, as we focus on calling out to you and you hearing our prayers and answering them. So Father, today speak to our hearts as we talk about staying focused, in Jesus' name, amen. James chapter one, verse two through eight, you can read it on the screen, you can read it in your notes, but more importantly, read it in your Bible. So if you have your Bible, I would invite you to turn there in chapter two, James chapter one, verses two through eight. It starts off in verse two, count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing. If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given him. But let him ask in faith with no doubting. For the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea that is driven and tossed by the wind. For that person must not suppose that he will receive anything from the Lord. He is a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways. The opposite of being single-minded, perhaps James would call it being double-minded. Now, what does that mean to be double-minded? We're gonna catch that meaning in the last point this morning. But this morning, what does it take for us to be focused on God, on Jesus Christ, when we are bombarded with all the chaos, with all the things that are going on in our world? That means even us right here in our little community, things are just on top of us. And how do we stay focused? How do we stay connected with Jesus Christ? The first thing that I want us to look at this morning is that we need to keep our focus on Jesus regardless of the circumstances. Look there at verse two. Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds. Folks, you and I, I know personally that you have gone through trials. You know that my wife and I have gone through trials. And one of the things that James says is count it all joy. Now, that's a very difficult task to do for us when our trials, our circumstances have such grave effects on our lives. It's hard to find that joy. But we're implored to do that. We're implored regardless of the circumstances to find joy in the Lord. There are a lot of biblical accounts that we could look at and we could study this morning, but none better than that that we find in Genesis. When we look at the story of Joseph, you know the story. Most of you know the story. If you don't, let me summarize the story. Joseph was a brother to 12 others, 11 others, and they were quite jealous of him because he seemed to appear to be Jacob's favorite son. And they would do all kinds of things to him, trying to get ahead of them. And eventually they said, let's just take care of it. Let's go throw him in a pit and let him die and tell his father that he died. Or they changed their mind and someone came by and said, we'll just buy him. And so they sold him into slavery. And then as he went into slavery, he ended up in Egypt. And we know that while he was there, he wasn't always treated fairly. He ended up as a slave in Potiphar's house. His wife betrayed him. He ended up in jail. While he's in jail, he would be called an interpreter of dreams. And the cupbearer would say, I'll remember you. And he kind of forgot him. He's left in the jail basically to kind of rot. But eventually the cupbearer remembered him and Joseph rose to prominence. In fact, he rose to second most powerful leader in Egypt. As the time would go on, we know the story that there was a great drought where Jacob and all the brothers was living. And they had to go to Egypt to find food, to find some kind of sustenance. And when they got there, Joseph recognized him. They did not recognize him, but he recognized his family. And when it all came down and Jacob died, the brothers might have thought that Joseph would bring revenge and retribution upon them, but that's not what Joseph did. And here's the key verse that I want to read to you out of Genesis chapter 50, verse 19 through 20. But Joseph said to them, do not fear for I am in the place. Do you not fear for I am in the place of God? As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good. To bring it about the way many people should be kept alive as they are today. Joseph could have been mad. He had every right to be angry, but he was not. In fact, I would think that he very much epitomizes what James was talking about, counted all joy when we go through various trials in our life. Joseph certainly went through all kinds of trials and circumstances, but in the end, he would simply say God meant it for good. Regardless of our circumstances, folks, we need to understand that God has a purpose. God has a plan. God wants us to understand that what we're going through is still yet to be for His glory, that we are to yet proclaim who He is and that this life here is simply temporary, that what we have is an eternal life with God. If we've come to know Jesus Christ as our real and personal Savior, we have eternity with Him and that God has created each and every one of us on purpose and He wants us to live in life. Now, on purpose, I don't understand. I'll be quite honest with you. Why did Joseph have to go through all of those kinds of trials? I read the book of Job and I certainly don't understand why Job went through all the suffering, all the trials, losing all of his family, losing all of his land, losing all the things, but in the end, Joseph simply says, I understand, you are God. You are sovereign and I love you. God meant it for good and things turned around for Job. Things turned around for Joseph. God has a purpose. God has a plan for our lives and that we are to keep our focus on Jesus regardless of those circumstances. I can't always explain to you why we go through them, but God has a greater plan and we must believe that. The second thing that I want us to understand this morning is that we keep our focus on Jesus because it allows our circumstances, our trials, to produce maturity and completeness in our life. Look at verse three and verse four. For you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness and let steadfastness have its full effect that you may be perfect and complete, lacking and nothing. Now that word perfect and complete really is talking about maturity. Let those trials, let those testings that come in our way produce in us a spiritual maturity and a spiritual completeness in our life. Now, let me ask you a question this morning. How do you measure your spiritual maturity? If I could give you a scale, a zero to five, would you say that you're very spiritual mature? Would you give yourself a five? Or would you say that I'm still an infant on milk? I'm just a baby that I am not spiritually mature. Now, the truth of it is we don't have a Myers-Briggs for spiritual inventory given to us in the scripture. It just says that we are to need to be spiritually mature. I think Paul would explain it in Philippians chapter three, verse 14 through 15. I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upper call of God in Christ Jesus, which I think is an eternal prize, which I think is talking about living a life forever that we have through Jesus Christ. Verse 15, let those of us who are mature think this way. And if in anything you think otherwise, God will reveal that also to you. One mark of spiritual maturity that Paul talking about is this desire to live life with Christ, not only in eternity. but while we live here on this earth, He wants us to live and to walk in faith with Jesus Christ. The truth is, most of our lives are far below the exalted position in Christ. In fact, most of us live below our own spiritual capacity that God wants us to live. How we handle trials sometimes will define where we are in our spiritual maturity. I've talked to several people that are going through difficult times in their life and the question invariably always comes, and it's not a bad question, why did God allow this to happen to me? And in time, we begin to understand that. I think it takes time for us to understand why those things occur in our life that occur for them, but I know that God has an eternal plan for all of us. I remember several years ago, my son was just about two years old, and we had built a house and one of the things that I never got fixed in the house was a drain cover for the shower in our bathroom. And one day I got up and I always left for work at 7.30, I had to be there at 8 o'clock. And this particular morning, I could not find my keys anywhere. They were completely missing. And so I finally started asking all my family members, Jeanette, have you seen my keys? No. Kendra, have you seen my keys? No. Wes, have you seen my keys? And he couldn't talk very much at this point in his life. He simply said one word, shower. He had taken the cover off of my shower drain, threw my keys down into the shower, and he knew what he was doing because he stuffed a wash rag on top of it. I could see just a glimmer of silver down there in the bottom before that little trap down there. And so I had a magnet, a long magnet, about that long. I was able that time to go down and get it and pull it up, and they were just positioned just right to where the magnet was strong enough to bring them up. And I made it to work at 8 o'clock, which was late, because my boss said if you weren't here 15 minutes early, you were late. So at 8 o'clock, I was late that morning, even though I was on time. Well, that was okay. Two weeks later, I could not find my keys at 7.30 in the morning. Jeanette, have you seen my keys? No. Kendra, have you seen my keys? No. Wes, have you seen my keys? Shower. This time, I went and tried that magnet, and I pulled them up just for a while, and then they dropped and they went deeper into the shower. And finally, I went and borrowed a tool from one of my friends that had a clip, and I was able to get it out. Bottom line is, here's the point. Why did I not learn from that first time to fix it? After that second time, I went and secured that little cover on top of that shower so that Wes could never, ever do it again, and life was good after that. I've always kept my keys in a good place. That's not true. I lose them every now and then. But that's the point. There was a circumstance in my life that happened. It happened twice. I should have learned from it the first time. I did learn from it from the second time, and I matured physically. I fixed it so that it would not happen again. Now, that may seem like a very simple illustration, but here's the point. When we go through trials, we need to keep our eyes focused on Jesus, and it ought to be the first thing that we focus on and not the last thing. Because if we look at the world, the world will give us all kinds of answers, but Jesus will give us the answer. He will give us the reason. He will show us in the end why we're going through what we're going, so that we can be a blessing to Him and that we can glorify God in the end. Amen? Amen. The third point this morning. We need to keep our focus on Jesus because it prevents me from wavering. I want you to look at verses 6 through 8. Let's read those again. But let him ask in faith with no doubting, for the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea that is driven and tossed by the wind. For that person must not suppose that he will receive anything from the Lord. He is a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways. The word double-minded there really means facilitating, vacillating. I mean vacillating, moving from one place to other. That's where I got the word wavering. We just kind of go from this place to that place. We are not to be double-minded. We are to be single-minded. So the picture here is me that if we're doubting our life and faith, if we're doubting our relationship with God, we're on a kind of wavering. Do you think that maybe James might have been thinking of Peter when he talked about a wave of the sea that is driven and tossed? When Peter had his eyes focused on Jesus, when he got out of that boat and he began to do some water walking, but when he took his eyes off of Jesus, what happened? He began to sink. When we go through our trials in our life, are we wavering? Are we trusting the ways of the world? Are we trusting in God? And we keep in single focus on God. One of the things we used to love to do in Houston when we lived there was to go and see some musicals. We got to see the premiere of the Beauty and the Beast. Beauty and the Beast, man, a fantastic musical there with full orchestra and the cast from New York was there to open up. It was a great, great time. Afterwards, we would usually try to catch a matinee and then we'd go eat kind of a late lunch. On this particular one, I can't remember what musical we went to see, but on this particular one, we went to one of our favorite places to go eat. It was called the Strawberry Patch. They had great salads there, and I think my wife and I had a salad, and my son had a humongous, big hamburger with a lot of French fries. Well, all of us finished our meal. We were through eating, and Wes still had a half a hamburger and a lot of fries, and my wife was kind of picking at his plate because the salad just doesn't ever do it, right? So she'd eat a French fry here or there, take a bite of the hamburger here or there, and finally the waitress, he'd taken our plates already, and finally the waitress came up and said, Are you through with your plate? And he said, Yes, sir. So the gentleman bent down to pick up the plate, and just perfect timing, Wes simply said, But my mom's not. And we as a family just broke out in laughter. And so the waiter, he's just kind of like, Okay. And I think my wife probably said, No, you can take it. And he went like this, and it was kind of this wavering, kind of like, What am I supposed to do, okay? That's what happens in our Christian walk sometimes. We're in this middle trying to say, Where am I going to go? And the first thing we need to go is to Jesus Christ. James uses this other term, double-minded, one more time in chapter 4, verse 8. He says, Draw near to God, and He will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Purify your hearts, those of you who are wavering in your faith. Purify your hands, cleanse your hands, those you sinners who are wavering in life and not choosing to be singly focused on Jesus Christ. Let me tell you something, wavering creates unstable situations. It just does. Randy Frazee, who preached this sermon some time ago on this subject, I go and listen and try to get more insight to these sermon ideas. And by the way, he shared during that sermon that he was having some thyroid issues and he asked his people to pray for him. And so the man that we see on Sunday School on Sunday mornings was going through some health issues himself. Just as he was talking about going through trials and circumstances and keeping singly focused, he had to deal with his own trial that he was going through. I don't know what the result of that is, but pray for him. But he shared a story or a fact that I didn't know. There's a navigation rule that some of you, if you're flyers or you've been in navigation, you know the 1 and 60 rule. As I did a little bit of research, I discovered it's not exact, but it's pretty close. That if you're headed 60 miles straight and you vary one degree, you will be one mile off. Now, here's an interesting fact that Randy brought up. The Magi traveled 1,000 miles to find Jesus. If they had been one degree off, they would have been 17 miles away from where Jesus was. King Herod lived four miles from where Jesus was and he could not find Him. Are you wavering so much? Are you just a degree off in your faith this morning that you are missing Jesus completely in your life? If you're an unbeliever, you need to come to faith. You need to understand that without Him, your life is completely off-kelter. You cannot keep focused on Jesus because Jesus is not there in your life. Surrender all that you have to Him. If you are a believer, how often it is that we let the world bombard us. We let the cell phones interact in our life. We let those things distract us and get us off a little bit from where we need to be moving. Double-mindedness is indicative of insincerity and basically hypocrisy. Let me just simply summarize or paraphrase Hebrews chapter 12. Since we are surrounded with such a great cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every sin, every weight that entangles us. And let's run the race with perseverance, the race that has been marked out for us. Let us run that race that's been marked out for us. Fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author, the finisher of our faith, for whom for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross and now is setting at the right hand throne of God. We must fix our eyes on Jesus. We cannot lose our focus. So if we are to keep our focus on Jesus, we will find joy in our trials regardless of the circumstances. If we keep our eyes on Jesus, we will move to spiritual maturity and we will grow and we will be complete and we will find that completeness when we go to heaven. If we keep our eyes on Jesus, we will not waver. We will not be double-minded. We will stay focused. If we keep our eyes focused on Jesus, we'll cast aside the weight, the sin that entangles us. And if we keep our eyes focused on Jesus, we'll get in the race. Get in the race. I don't know that I've been able to adequately convince you this morning. Most of you here today have a day by day relationship with Jesus Christ. One of the things we talked about in our Sunday school this morning was that coming to church and giving one hour a week is not enough to keep your focus on Jesus. It's a 24 seven part of our lives. Every aspect of our life needs to be simply focusing on him and allowing him to permeate every aspect of everything. I know this sounds silly, but when I lose my keys now, I don't go ask Wes where they are. I know this sounds silly, but I honestly do this. God, I need you to help me to find my keys. Would you help me find them? That ought to be the first thing we do when we go through our life is to go to God, even in the simple things. And if he will help us in the simple things, will he not help us in the difficult things? This is yes, this is no. He will, he will. Father, speak to our hearts today. Father, I've given what you've told me to say today. I don't know how it's gonna affect everybody in this room, but Father, I pray that you would take care of that, Father. And I pray, Father, that as you speak through the Holy Spirit to these folks in this room today, that they would respond accordingly. Father, if there's someone here who needs Jesus Christ and they need to start their focus on him with a fresh new way today, Father, may they surrender, even as I am praying now, may they surrender their life. Lord, not by what I say, but by the power of the Holy Spirit who will convict them and convince them that they need Jesus. And Father, like most of us here are probably just like me, Father, in that I waver sometimes, I take my eyes off Jesus. I think I can do it better and I can't. So Father, I surrender to you fresh and new again today. So Father, as we move to this time of commitment, Father, have your way, have your way with me, have your way with this congregation. Lord, use us, guide us, and we will give you the praise and the honor in Jesus' name, amen. Would you stand with me as we sing our invitation to him this morning?