Where’s your focus?
If life is going to be something more than a go-through-the-motions, tread-water, maintain-a-daily-existence kind of endeavor, it has to have a focus. And the focus itself has to be the consequence of intentional choice. True enough: choosing not to have a focus—I’ll just continue to go through the motions, thank you very much—is a focus…of sorts. But there should be more to life than just living. There should be meaning. And meaning requires focus.
That said, you can focus your life in all sorts of ways, on all kinds of things—collectively, referred to as “things of this world.” It’s what the world teaches: focus on money, job, status, stuff. It’s what I meant when I wrote about live small, the very first of the discipleship practices. And let’s be clear: money, status, and stuff are not necessarily bad things to focus on providing such focus is in service to something bigger than ourselves…providing, that is, money, status, and stuff are not the primary, the most important focus of our lives. Discipleship needn’t be a call to scarcity.
Following Jesus—if we’re really to take this seriously—demands that the primary, most important focus of our lives is the Kingdom. Not the church. The Kingdom. Which is to say that the focus of our lives is to be living in such a way that what we do and who we are bears witness to the values and ethics and understandings God desires for all God’s children. That’s the point of all these discipleship practices, to direct us toward living not for a paycheck or a party but for something bigger, something, if you will, higher. The higher purposes of the Kingdom.
What, exactly, are the higher purposes of the Kingdom? Let me suggest five:
• Lordship of Christ—acknowledging that because Jesus is over all things, we are to follow Jesus in all things; we cannot be what we cannot see so, in knowing the life of Jesus, we know what it means to be a follower of Jesus
• love of God, love of neighbor—“Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and strength” Scripture tells us, to which Jesus added, “And your neighbor as yourself,” summarizing what is most important for us to do
• humility—it’s not about you because you don’t belong to you, you belong to Jesus who bought you at a price and calls you to be a vehicle by which others can come to know the love of Christ
• mercy—in a broken world, reaching out to and coming along side people to aid them in their suffering
• justice—working in the ways of Jesus to bring about the love of Jesus, that the shalom God desires for all people can be manifest
It’s no coincidence that, one way or another, each of the discipleship practices I’ve written about are implicit in these higher purposes of the Kingdom because the goal of discipleship is a Kingdom-focused life.
Some Scripture: Deuteronomy 6:5
Matthew 22:34-40
Philippians 2:6-11
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