Sunday Message: Focus

There's a commercial on Bott Radio that always annoys me.  Because of its focus on the core message, it kinda misses the way it presents its case.  If you look at the ad the way the creators saw it, it goes like this:
Voiceover lady sets the stage of explaining the stages of a couple's life by starting with "popping the question".
Guy in ad: "Will you marry me?'

The ad then goes to the second stage, where the couple got married in the background.  A baby coos, voiceover lady says, "And the moment when the two become three."

Third stage is the point- that the state of Indiana has a plan to help growing families.  A doorbell rings, voiceover lady goes into her spiel.

But what actually is heard goes more like this- and if you notice, I don't change the order at all from above:

Voiceover lady sets the stage.
Guy says, "Will you marry me?"  Baby coos, sounding an awful lot like it's saying "yes" to the guy.
Voiceover lady says, "And the moment when the two become three", door bell rings as if someone just showed up to join the guy and the baby whom he's marrying.  By this point, the spiel is lost on me.

Point being, focus can be everything.  I encountered that this week as I prayed on the way to work.  I have a FB friend who is a lot like family- technically, he would be the son of my former sister-in-law.  A few years back, he sent us a friend request kinda out of the blue- you see, he's a young man now, and I prolly hadn't seen him since he was 3 years old.  As usual, I thought nothing of it and accepted, keeping in mind that I knew through my son (who actually is family to both of us, lol) that he was gay.  Not a big deal, I'm good at scrolling past things that don't interest me.

But there was a moment in the last year that he made a mention of the affection he held ME in.  Which amazed me, because "3 years old", and it really shook me the ripples that we make in life, and how some of them are so much bigger when viewed through other eyes.

So back to this week, and I am praying about how to handle this relationship, however electronically tenuous it may be.  I know my place is not to barge in wagging a finger.  I also know that doing nothing is not an option if I live my faith.  I asked God what the way to look at this was.

He replied with what I took as, "You sure you wanna know?  This is a lot more involved than you think it is."  With that "Uh-oh", look on my soul, I said, "Okay..."

What followed had nothing to do with sexual orientation, or conversation around it.  It was bit-and-pieced in from several different sources, that seemed to coalesce around something I heard from David Jeremiah.    He was quoting a friend, whom I paraphrase here:  "I used to think I could reach my colleagues for Christ intellectually.  That if I connected the dots for them, and they saw how it connected, they would believe.  But it didn't work out that way.  Then I realized why.  You know why it didn't work?  Because GOD HAS TO TOUCH THEM FIRST."

Combined with the other bits and pieces, I began to see where my focus was wrong, not just about this young man, but in all the social media battles I fight, all my political thoughts and opinions, all the ways I treat people.  And it ties into a concept we looked at in the Wednesday Proverbs messages.

Outside of those who seek Godly Wisdom and understanding through fear of the Lord, we saw four kinds of people.  The simple, who go along with anything, are the first.  They go around seeking "honey" from every source, ignoring the Proverbs admonition that too much "honey" will make you sick, and the physical truth that if all you intake is "honey" and no meat and potatoes (AKA believing everything and never seeking real truth), you end up diabetic and in lousy health.  The second is the scoffer, who seeks his own wisdom and leans on his own understanding, making fun of everything that isn't his or her opinion.  Third is the fool, who says in his heart, "There is no God," but still is more easily turned than the scoffer, because instead of having to battle tooth and nail over EVERY opinion, you just have to change their mind on that one.  And finally, the hopelessly wicked.

And these people are like this because they have not received the gift OF God FROM God.  I may grow in wisdom, but if I don't recognize that they haven't, that many times they can't (as their worlds are currently structured), I do them no good.  I can't look at them as being stupid, hateful, spiteful, misguided, or perverted FIRST;  First, I have to recognize that they are coming from a point where they lack something I have, that was given to me.

I have to realize that they need to see Jesus- ALL the rest is secondary.

One of the greatest gifts that God gave me has been my greatest weakness.  I never once in my life doubted that there was a God, that there was a Jesus.  My knowledge was imperfect, to be sure- when I was four or five, I wondered how many Gods we had, what with God, Jesus, Christ Jesus, Jesus Christ, Christ, the Lord, the Holy Spirit, the Holy Ghost, and so on, lol!  But for me, Divinity was established fact- it made the world make sense.  So I have a really hard time initially, conceiving those who can say there is no God, or don't care if there is one.  And that means by extension, I have a really hard time dealing with Joe Bigmouth who thinks I am trying to "impose my Christian views on the culture", or Jim Catholic who believes I have strayed from "the true church" by seeking Christ.

And sadly, I struggle at seeing the sinner beyond the sin.  God was right; there was more involved in the question than I thought.