Focused

Here is an honest confession. My vision is messed up. Without corrective lenses I can see things from a few inches to a couple of feet from my nose clearly. Beyond that, it’s really blurry. With corrective lenses I can see everything else but the up close stuff is blurry. So I either wear glasses to see at a distance and take them off to read or I wear contacts and use reading glasses for the up close stuff. The next step is bifocals, I guess. Or expensive surgery!

The point is more clear than my vision: if I continue as I have then something will always be out of focus. I need to make adjustments so that I can see clearly both near and far.

The same can be said for a church…for our church. We can easily lose sight of some things when we focus only on specific things. I’m NOT saying that a church should be doing everything that comes to our minds or across our desk or into our mailbox. Associations, conventions, and parachurch groups always have something NEW AND IMPROVED. What I am saying is that we must focus on essentials and not lose sight of any of them.

For example, we must make disciples. That means we are to share the gospel with people who do not follow Jesus Christ. We must focus on evangelism if we take seriously the task of the Great Commission. And we are to do it all over the planet.

Another example is that we are to assimilate these new disciples into church fellowship, according to the Great Commission. That part of the GC is not a mandate for church membership but an emphasis on the importance of identifying with Christ and with other believers. Only within the context of a local church can a believer mature into the disciple God wants him to be.

The last example of an essential on which we must focus is the maturation of believers. Each one of us can be more mature in following Christ. Nobody has already arrived at full Christian maturity and we won’t as long as we are on this earth on this side of the grave. So the church must teach all that Jesus taught so that we can all become more like him.

Whew! That’s a lot to do. Where do we start? What’s most important? What should be our focus?

All of it. Making disciples. Assimilating disciples. Maturing disciples. When a church takes its eyes off any of these it will eventually lose focus on all of them.