Jan 16, 2015 Find Focus in a World of Distraction Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. Matthew 5:8 By Dave Peterson Jesus begins his Sermon on the Mount with a description of eight provocative blessings. If you were to think of these blessings as eight mountains in the grand Himalayan chain, I think many would find today’s blessing to be Mount Everest—the most difficult of all—to be pure in heart. Sören Kierkegaard restated this beatitude in this way, “Purity of heart is to will one thing.” When Jesus speaks of a pure heart, he is referring to more than emotions. To Jesus the heart represented the integrated core of a person—a kind of perfect synthesis of all thoughts, feelings, and will. Imagine the independent-minded forces of heart, mind, and will lined up in single file singing, “Hi ho, hi ho,” like the Seven Dwarfs. It is, as the saying goes, like herding cats. When Woody Allen was asked what he believed in, he said, “I believe in the power of distraction.” It’s hard to have a pure heart when life has so many distractions. Here’s what Paul had to say about willing one thing, I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate … I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. (Rom. 7:15-19) So much for purity of heart. While I can’t say that I’ve given it my full effort, I have tried, and I’m sorry to say that so far I’m still in the foothills of my Mount Everest. Some of it has to do with the maddening distraction of sin. And some of it has to do with the 1001 competing demands on my life. If I aim to sustain a singular focus on God, how will I have time for everything else? A while back, I climbed Mount Rainier in Western Washington. A friend invited me to join him. For three days, my life was singularly focused on the great mountain. Everything I ate, wore, and thought had to do with the mountain. And then it occurred to me that the more I focused on the mountain and the higher I climbed, the farther I could see. Ironically, having a singular focus didn’t shrink my world, it blew my world wide open. Maybe that’s what Jesus had in mind when he said, “Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these other things will be added as well.”
Posted on: Fri, 16 Jan 2015 13:55:11 +0000
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