Focus of Attention

We need to take a check of our spirit before entering into discussion about ideas that are new to us. Do we sense an urgency, a feeling of duty to defend the “faith of our fathers”? If so, then chances are very good that we are really justifying some of the prejudice of our fathers in the name of “historical purity”. The faith of Jesus does not need defending by us any more than a small child needs to justify it's natural love for a caring, nurturing mother. Faith is a natural response to an ever-increasing awareness of the beauty and truth about God, not an organized, learned set of rote beliefs, doctrines and arguments.

A desire to defend doctrine and tradition from any ideas unfamiliar betrays a deep underlying reservoir of fear as the basis of our life. Realizing this should give us pause to take warning that we are not living in the truth of God's love, for perfect love casts out fear. The two are mutually exclusive. And although God will use our fears in the initial stages of our journey to turn us to Him and away from sin, that does not mean He intends for us to live in ever-deepening fear as we draw closer to Him. He only uses our penchant for fear to turn our attention toward Him and away from evil with its mesmerizing spell of fear over us. But once we are focused on Him He wants to transform our fear-based bonds into love-bonds which are far more permanent and stable.

So true faith is simply a description of the response in love of a created being to the true revelation of a God completely worthy of trust and compellingly beautiful in every sense of the word. Faith is not something I must work up by will-power and effort – even with help from God. Faith is a natural response, a spontaneous outgrowth and ingrowth when I begin to really see the true face of God.

I must remain constantly on guard that I do not allow myself to unconsciously shift my focus of attention, and thereby my worship, from God Himself to any other aspect or target such as my beliefs about God or my service for Him. This is one of the most subtle and common problems we get trapped into without ever realizing we are doing it. And that may be because we primarily have lived from our heads and not from our hearts most of our lives. Living from our heart and being aware of our spirit and its condition is foreign to most of us and very frightening to many of us to the point where we label it as error or heresy dimply because it doesn't fit into our current concept of religion. But when Jesus spoke with Nicodemus, a man who had a doctorate in religion and was widely viewed as a dependable expert on religion, He plainly stated that “religion” wouldn't even get a person to first base in the reality of heavenly things. In fact, He stated that until a person was completely and radically altered in his way of perceiving what is reality, he was or even capable or equipped to perceive the things of God.

Most of us till are in the shoes of Nicodemus but simply don't want to believe that. We live in our own framework of reality based on a strange mixture of fear and supposed love handed down to us by our culture and family. We tinker with our religion and may even go through years of formal training to align our religion more carefully to our chosen culture and church and then believe we have a handle on truth. But God will not leave us completely in peace about this arrangement. Our hearts, though buried or repressed for many years, yearns for a breath of reality, a vital connection to the Source of real life.

It is at the peril of our souls that we continue to ignore and suppress these God-implanted yearnings of our hearts. True spirituality is not an improved, modified religion. It is death and life in a way we are too often unwilling to face or admit. It results in a passionate, obsessive and exclusive focus on the person of God and nothing else. Not on the Bible, our beliefs about God, our church, our doctrines, our sources of information about God, our prophets.... Although these may assist us, they must never intercept our full attention to God Himself.