Focus on God, not your problems

Don’t let your fears, your heartaches, or troubles overwhelm you – focus on the One who has control over everything. Dr. Charles Stanley offers encouragement and a personal example from his “In the School of Faith” series.

You can’t stop it from coming, but you can keep the poison from getting on the inside. When you bury negative emotions, they never die. You can’t bottle up the anger, the hurt, the betrayal, and think that it’s not going to affect you. “I can’t forgive them, Joel. You don’t know what they did. I can’t let it go; they hurt me too badly.” You’re not doing it for their sake; you’re doing it for your sake. That poison is contaminating your life. When you release it, you’ll step into new levels of freedom, joy, and victory.

The more you focus on your difficulty, your hardship, or even your pain, when you’re suffering, the more you focus on it, what happens, the bigger it gets.
Well, I, I’ve been going through this and I’ve been going through that and if your friends listen to you and say, oh, I’m so sorry, I feel so sorry for you, the more pity they give you, the bigger it gets and the bigger it gets, the more you doubt God.
And so the issue is focus and I think when I think of focus, I think of many instances in the Bible, but one of the primary ones is Daniel in the lion’s den.
And so, uh the Bible says he slept with the lions all night.
If he’d have been focused on lions, he wouldn’t have been sleeping, he’d have been over in the corner somewhere where all crouching down hoping that they wouldn’t see him or something.
And it brings me back to one of my most favorite illustrations when God just did something for me in one of the most difficult times of my life.
It probably was one up to the very top.
And this lady came to see me and she said, um, I want you to have lunch with me and then I wanna take him up to my apartment and show you something when she was about 70 something and I was 30 something.
So I felt pretty safe. And so, so, uh, uh, we ate lunch and I, I went to see her and I was going through a very difficult time at church.
They were doing their best trying to get rid of me.
And uh so she uh we walked in, she said, now, don’t sit down, I wanna show you something, walked over and showed me this picture of Daniel and the lions.
And she said, now, son, uh I want you to tell me what you see.
So I said, well, and I can still remember looking at that picture, I see this line over here looking up and this one looking down and see the bones.
And so I thought of everything this little lady could possibly have thought about.
And I said, she said, do you see anything else?
I said, no, she said, if you’ll notice this and, and the picture had all these lines and Daniel had his hands behind him.
He’s looking at this ray of light.
She said, what I want you to see is Daniel doesn’t have his eyes on the lions, but on God, it was like, God hugged me that day because from that moment on all of my fears disappeared and all of my uncertainties and uh a lot of other things probably disappeared because she got my focus right.
When you focus on the trouble and the heartache and the burden and the pain, it gets bigger and we feel less confident, less significant and overwhelmed.
Because remember this, Daniel was looking at omnipotence who created alliance.
He could shut the lion’s mouth, he could kill every one of them in a second.
He just let him hang around while Daniel went to sleep that night.
And before he probably went to sleep and when he woke up, he went over and looked up and just reminding of God that he was where he was because he had obeyed God and God delivered him.
God always operates on the basis of principles, not on the basis of feelings and how we feel and so on principles.
For example, the simplest one is we reap what we sow more than we sow later than we sow.
God always operates. He does never change that.
And so, uh for example, one of those principles is obey God, leave all the consequences down.
That means I’m gonna do what he says. I’m gonna let him take care of the consequences.
God always acts, for example, he says one of those principles is that God acts on behalf of those who wait for Him.
And so if I’m going to act on the basis of principle, then I know I’m gonna be heading in the right direction, doing the right thing because God operates on principles and that’s the reason you and I can learn how to relate to him.
Because if I don’t understand his ways, then I’m gonna say God, what are you up to?
Well, he’s just up to doing and being who he says he is.
And so you could come up with most any problem and I believe, give me a little time and I could come up with a principle to say, if you obey this principle, watch what happens because God wants us to obey Him and listen, leave the consequences to him.
Let me ask you a question. Is there any consequence of your obedience? God can handle right?
None. He handle every one of them.
Well, if I obey him and leave the consequences to him, here’s what happens.
I’m going to be able to have peace and a sense of joy and confidence and assurance.
It doesn’t make any difference what’s going on because He’s in control.
And if I’m obeying him, he’s already taking care of it.
Because listen, the only thing that can happen in your life is what God allows.
If you’re a child of God, what he allows, he allows for a reason. I may not like it.
And there’ve been lots of times I’ve told him I didn’t like it and you know what? He said?
Nothing, nothing. He just let me hammer away with it.
And, and deal with it until I finally said, yeah, you’re right. I don’t like this.
I know you’re right because that’s what your word says.
And even though I don’t like it, I want you to have your way no matter what, when you’re living with guilt in your life or you’re living with sin in your life, you, you’re gonna have a very difficult time trusting God because sin short circuits the power of God in a person’s life.