Where is your focus?

Where is your focus? To what do you give your attention?

Proverbs 4:25 exhorts us:

“Let your eyes look directly forward,

and your gaze be straight before you.”

Nothing causes trouble like unfixed wandering eyes. In their commentary, Keil and Delitzsch warn that a “purposeless, curious staring about operates upon the soul, always decentralizing and easily defiling it.”

Scripture is replete with examples of costs of an unfixed gaze. Charles Bridges recounts:

“Had Eve done so, she would have looked on the command of her God, not on the forbidden tree. Had Lot's wife looked straight before, instead of ‘behind her,’ she would, like her husband, have been a monument of mercy. Achan was ruined by neglecting this rule of wisdom. David's example may warn the holiest men in the world to have a watchful jealousy.”

Again, where is your focus?

Is it straight ahead?

Are you keeping first things first?

Or have you been drawn off mission by mere curiosities and vain chatter?

If so, Hebrews 11 is a great corrective. It lists example after example of imperfect men and women whose faith was fixed on “a better country, that is, a heavenly one” (v. 16). Their focus didn’t take them out of the world but it did lead through it. It anchored and steady them. It made them strong for this life and the one to come.

Hence, Hebrews 12:1-2 says:

“Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.”

Where is your focus? Is it on Jesus?

If it is, you will throw off the weight and sins of this world and run hard.

If it isn’t, you will be enslaved to everything that presents itself.

Follow the counsel of Matthew Henry:

“Turn it from beholding vanity; let thy eye be single and not divided; let thy intentions be sincere and uniform, and look not asquint at any by-end."