Focus on the Lift

It's so easy to focus on our shortcomings and failures.

We've grown so accustomed to look at what we aren't doing right that it feels arrogant and egotistical to think otherwise.

Even after all this time together on our journey, hearing time and time again that, in God's eyes, we are worthy of love and redemption, we fall back to old habits of concentrating on the worst within us.

But who are we focused on when we think this way?

Are we focused on the miraculous gift of Jesus Christ - God's son who came to live a life of service and show us the way to God's love by sacrificing everything on our behalf?

Or are we focused on ourselves, caught up in our own in-security and the lies that try to keep us trapped and held down?

Downward, self-focused thinking is a hard habit to break.

But break it, we will!

Whenever you start to beat yourself up and tune in to the lies that you are not good enough, focus on the lift.

Focus on the one who lifted you up and out.  

Focus on Jesus, who was lifted up to the Heavens, defeated death itself, and is reaching out for you.  

No matter what you've done, are doing, or will do. Jesus will never stop reaching for you and lifting you up.

Jesus isn't like, "Wait, let's see if they get this right." Only then will I love and save them.

Nope. That's not how God's love and redemption works.

Jesus hung out with the outcasts and forgotten, showing us that no one is too far down for God to find and redeem them.

Noone. No one.

You don't have to be perfect for God to lift you up. You can simply reach up and say yes to the offer of help and support.

Let's focus on and reach for God's everlasting, never-ending, unconditional love that lifts us up to redemption and freedom.

Up, up, and away from the downtrodden habits of days gone by.

We are not arrogant or egotistical to sing praises of what God did to rescue and redeem us.

We have come so far. Just look at what God has done!

The view is much better from up here, don't you think?

John 14:1-3

 "Do not let your hearts be troubled. You believe in God; believe also in me. My Father's house has many rooms; if that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me so that you also may be where I am. You know the way to the place where I am going."

Psalm 51:10

Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me. Do not cast me from your presence or take your Holy Spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of your salvation and grant me a willing spirit, to sustain me.

Psalm 57: 9-10

I will praise you, Lord, among the nations; I will sing of you among the peoples. For great is your love, reaching to the heavens; your faithfulness reaches to the skies.