02 Feb Do You Revolve Around God, or Do You Expect God to Revolve Around You?
Blog Series: Renew Your Mind ~ Transform Your Life
Embracing an eternal perspective and maintaining an eternal perspective are two different things.
It is one thing to be initially convinced of the need for an eternal perspective and quite another to live each day guided by an eternal perspective.
We get swamped by temporal concerns.
Our memory dims.
We lose our grip.
Like keeping weeds out of the garden, our mind requires constant attention for the right perspective to thrive.
Mark 4:19 says, “The worries of the world, and the deceitfulness of riches, and the desires for other things enter in and choke the word, and it becomes unfruitful.” Though the context of this passage is related to salvation, the principle can be broadly applied, including the challenge of maintaining an eternal perspective.
We have short spiritual attention spans
I was once an instructor in a clinic that provided remediation therapy for children with learning disabilities. One of the things we helped them do was to lengthen their typically short attention spans.
We put students in a classroom where we gave them instructions on how to complete straightforward exercises in a workbook. We told them to be sure not to bother their neighbors, and to continue working to complete the chapter in the time required. We told them that we would be in an adjoining room behind a large two-way mirror, watching. We explained that if they quit working, or if they started bothering their neighbor, we would come into the room and help them refocus.
In spite of all of those instructions, the students typically would not be able to maintain their concentration. They would either stop working and just start goofing around at their desk, or start bothering their neighbor. They would sometimes come over to the mirror and try to peer through the mirror into the room behind it – apparently not convinced that there was anything to it.
So, we would come back into the room and refocus them, after which they would typically lose concentration again. But over time, with reinforcement, many of them experienced significant increases in their attention span.
I’ve often thought how like the Christian life that was. The Bible tells us that, even though we cannot see God, He can see us. But because we cannot see Him, and because all the feedback from the world around us deceives and numbs us into thinking He is not there, it is common for Christians to live and act as though God is not watching.
James 1:23 talks about a person looking at his natural face in a mirror, and once he has looked at himself and gone away, he forgets what kind of person he was. That’s what happens. Our memory dims, as we said. We lose our grip.
So, a great challenge of the Christian life is to reinforce an eternal perspective over and over again, bolstering the “unseen” reality to make it take precedence over the “seen” reality (2 Corinthians 4:16—18).
Later in this series, we will get very specific about practical ways to do just that. For now, we just make the point. Maintaining a practical, functional eternal perspective requires constant attention. Like swimming in a river, if we are not moving forward, we will drift backward. Many Christians live, on a day-to-day basis, as though this world is all there is.
We must abandon the temporal in light of the eternal
When James Calvert sailed in 1837 to the island of Fiji to evangelize the cannibal natives, the captain of the ship on which he was sailing tried to talk him out of landing. “You will risk your life and all those with you if you go among such savages.”
Calvert’s magnificent reply was, “Sir, we died before we came here.”
In a similar spirit, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, reflecting upon his time in a Soviet concentration camp said, “The only way to survive in the Gulag is to give up on this world and live for the next.”
Now, God does not ask all of us to buy one-way tickets to a cannibal island or to survive the horrors of a Siberian concentration camp, but he does ask all of us to give up on this world and live for the next.
As Matthew 6:33 says, “Seek first His kingdom and His righteousness.”
Conclusion
Copernicus was an astronomer who lived in the 15th and 16th centuries in Poland. Until his time, scientists believed that the sun revolved around the earth. Copernicus concluded from his observations that the earth revolved around the sun. Time proved him right. The earth was not the center of the solar system. The sun was.
Each one of us is to experience our own spiritual Copernican revolution. We must come to grips with the fact that we are not the center of existence – God is. When we put ourselves at the center of our universe and expect God to revolve around us, it will result in confusion, discouragement, and frustration with God’s refusal to make our lives go as we wish.
When we put God at the center of our universe and revolve around him, then suddenly, we perceive reality accurately and experience God’s rich and full blessing in life.
Next week we begin our look at the three essential beliefs of an effective eternal perspective.
Without a functional and healthy eternal perspective, we are adrift on a sea of subjectivity which, depending on how lucky we are in our circumstances, can be confusing at best, and defeating at worst. So, be sure to come back next week as we begin a closer look at the essentials of an effective eternal perspective!
In case you’re new here
This blog post is part of a series titled “Renew Your Mind, Transform Your Life”, introduced on January 5, 2021. As the series continues, each succeeding post will be added to and available in the blog archives at www.maxanders.com.
If you know anyone who you think might enjoy joining us in this study, please forward this blog to them and encourage them to go to my web site (www.maxanders.com) and sign up for the free video, “Master the Bible So Well That the Bible Masters You”, available there on the home page. This will put them on my regular mailing list and they’ll receive my weekly blogs on this subject.
In addition, I am creating a new online membership site, The Change Zone, that will provide information, strategies and resources to help motivated Christians renew their mind and transform their lives. If you would like to learn more about this and get updates to know when The Change Zone will be available, click here.
I look forward to going through this life-changing journey with you.
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