10-17-2017

      Good Morning All,

                    Deuteronomy 30: 17; “But if your heart turns away, and you will not hear, but are drawn away to worship other gods and serve them,”

      There is a song we like to sing in church called “Focus Your Eyes Upon Jesus”.  It was written by Marie Biesenthal.  It tells us to always keep our eyes and our thoughts focused on Jesus and that we look to see God’s hand in our life and then seek to serve him whenever we can.  It has a key thought of being focused on Jesus; that is crucial in our lives.  For when we lose focus we can be in trouble.

    We have words and phrases to describe what happens when we lose focus.  Sometimes it is called wanderlust; sometimes we call it a mid-life crisis.  Sometimes we call it the seven year itch.  Call it what you like, it can occur at various times in our lives when we seem to lose focus on what is important.  Sometimes we can lose focus in our job and begin to dream about fanciful quests that can never happen.  Sometimes we wake up one day and just feel old and then try some crazy stunt to prove we are still young.  Sometimes after we have been married for a few years, we lose focus on the one whom we love and married and we soon start looking elsewhere.  We lose focus.

    In our verse, it uses the phrase “your heart turns away” or we could think of it as our heart wandering, as if it has lost its focus and is now looking for something else to replace what it had.  Out heart may think it wants something new or different.  It may think that the new will be better but it often isn’t.  In fact it can be, and often is, much worse.  We lose focus on what is true in our life and when our hearts begin to wander, they can wander after what is false and misleading.  They can wander off and follow false gods and evil idols.

    We may think that those little idols are harmless enough but they can, and do, lead us to wander.  So God gives us this warning and this advice.  We need to focus.  We need to focus our eyes upon Jesus as the writer of Hebrews writes and Mrs. Biesenthal sings for us.  That is truly what we need to do is to focus upon Jesus; upon what he has done and what he continues to do for us.

    We have salvation because of his work and we have the blessings of this life because of his mercy.  So we focus on what his love does for us.  We focus on the goodness that he gives us.  We focus on the love of our family and friends and we focus on building that love through the use of God’s mercy and grace by sharing it with those around us.  God gives us the faith to hope, to live, to focus upon his grace to see us through.  Trust in God’s promise and focus on those promises to have life.

Gracious Father, in you we have hope and life and we have it abundantly.  Give us the courage and wisdom to focus upon you so that our hearts do not wander.  Guard us by your Spirit and bring those who are wandering now back into your precious home.  In Jesus’ precious name we pray, amen.

God’s Peace,

Pastor Bret