14

Focus

And he said, “Please, show me Your glory” (Exodus 33:18).

When Adam walked with God in paradise his attention

was constantly focused on Him. Adam was totally
absorbed with God, one with Him. He entirely existed to
reveal the glory of his God and Father. He was created
fully alive to God, a perfect living soul. His emotions,
mind and memory were filled with God. Just by being
Adam he blissfully loved his God and Father
spontaneously with all his heart, with all his soul, with all
his mind and with all his strength. The members of his
body were in harmony with his perfect soul reflecting the
righteousness and compassion of the Lord made
manifested in divine wisdom. Adam was created the son of
God (Luke 3:38). All of his attention was focused on his
Father’s business. His entire being, his spirit, soul and
body, were dedicated to bring joy and fulfillment to God.
As he was doing the will of God he delighted himself in
his Creator. His delight in God sustained his focus.

When sin entered Adam, conflict entered his soul. Then his
focus wandered outside of God to seek joy and fulfillment
in the delusion of his confused heart, separately from God.
When he betrayed God’s love he died to God in his spirit,
soul and body as a branch being severed from the Vine.
Because he fell from the glory of God that was in him, he
was unable to manifest the Word of God. He was no longer
in Christ, which upheld him by the glory of His presence.
Since the transgression he was divided in himself. His soul
started to war against his spirit for dominion over his
body. The goodness of God that he manifested made room
for evil he did not wish to practice. Joy left his soul as he
fell from liberty of the supernatural realm of paradise to
bondage of the natural realm of a broken universe. Joy and
peace of security in God made room for doubts and fears
of the insecurity of his confused mind and emotions of his
imperfect soul.

As man is locked into the natural realm of the flesh he lost

the ability to sense God with his body and soul. Since that
lamentable day man could not observe God with his
natural senses. Fallen man started to call on the name of
the Lord that he might find life, peace and joy in God in
the chaotic universe that he lives in, which he created
through his rebellion against God.

Focus is attention and awareness in clear vision. Without a

clear vision you will perish. Unless you are born again you
cannot see the kingdom of God. To have spiritual vision
you need to be born from above. A spiritual focus is
developed when you constantly seek godly wisdom and
understanding with all of your heart that you may know
God in all your ways. To have a spiritual focus is to be
constantly tuned into the will of God for your life. This is
to be sensitive for the leading and guidance of the Holy
Spirit. If you practice it long enough it becomes second
nature to you. Spiritual focus is a prerequisite for having
spiritual perception and revelation.

The evidence of spiritual focus is when all of your

attention is absorbed into the Lord so that He may impart
into your spirit an ever-expanding revelation of Himself,
so much so, that all other things come into sharp contrast
with His beauty. Focusing on the Lord is a requirement for
change. When you behold Him you change into that
measure of His glory that you see by revelation. Your
change is according to the measure of your faith.

Spiritual focus is the concentration of your faith or fears.

For faith to grow, it needs to be focused according to the
anointing that is working in your life, which is the perfect
will of God for your life. Fears are the lies of nightmares
that are raging in your bewildered mind against the word
of God.

Focusing is the attraction of interests, curiosity, desires or

concerns of your heart. Where the treasure of your
fascination with God or fear of terror is, there your heart
will be also. King Nebuchadnezzar was concerned about
what would happen to his kingdom when he would be no
longer around. He focused in meditation on his concern,
on his bed, and God gave him the answers to the questions
of his heart in a dream.

I spend sufficient time in prayer everyday to get to know

God in all my ways. I am not telling you this that you
should do the same but that you may know that God often
reveals deep things to man in prayer. Some time ago, as I
was praying I saw a vision about an old prophetess
teaching a young prophetess how to see visions. She told
the young prophetess to be focused but to be relaxed while
believing God to see visions. She must look intensely, yet
relaxed, with believing eyes of the heart until she sees. You
do not see visions all the time but you need to persevere in
faith every day if you wish to see visions. Visions have a
lot to do with the focus of your faith. Ask the Holy Spirit,
your Helper, to help you with it. When I will write my
chapter on Visions, I will give you guidelines on how to
see visions.
Jesus, our Lord and Savior, taught the multitudes about
focus while preaching the sermon on the mountain. If your
focus is vindictive you murder someone in your heart. If
your focus is to lust after a woman you have already
committed adultery with her in your heart. Let not your
focus be concentrated on to be seen by others when you do
charitable deeds, praying or fasting like the hypocrites. Do
not be concerned what you will eat, drink or wear. Do not
be judgmental toward others but remember you also need
to walk by faith while living your life in the flesh. Do not
gather for yourselves treasures on earth. Focus to have
treasures in heaven where neither moth nor rust destroys
and thieves do not break in and steal. Where your treasure
is, there your heart will also be (Matthew 5 to 7). If you are
a Christian set the focus of your mind on things above, not
the things on the earth (Colossians 3:1-2).

From a very young age Jesus’ focus was already set on His
Father’s business (Mark 2:49). When Jesus was tempted in
the wilderness by Satan, Jesus brought the focus of His
conversation with Satan every time back to His God and
Father (Matthew 4). David prophesied of Jesus, saying, “I
delight to do Your will, O my God, and your law is within my
heart” (Psalm 40:8). Jesus told His disciples that His food is
to do the will of Him who sent Him, and to finish His
work (John 4:34). The Master Himself sets the example
where the focus of our hearts should be.

A constant focus on the Lord is necessary for the

development of a deep relationship with God. It is like
looking many times a day at the photo of your beloved. He
is your pearl of great price and the treasure (Christ within
you) hidden in the field (your humble body of flesh).
Christ within you is the only hope of glory God has given
you. The only image God has given you to conform to be
Jesus. You shall not conform to any image – any likeness of
anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth
beneath, or that is in the water under the earth but Jesus.
A focus on the Lord requires openness to the Holy Spirit
that He may reveal the Lord to you in your spirit. A focus
on the Lord is a sensitive relationship with the Holy
Spirit. Focusing on the Lord can be compared to tennis or
any other ball game; your eyes must always follow the ball,
likewise your heart must be focused to follow the Lord
wherever He leads. You need to be focused on Him should
He choose to reveal Himself or you will miss Him. Jesus
taught the Jewish people daily. Though they were
impressed with His word, healings, deliverances and
miracles, they still did not know who He was. He turned to
those closest to Him and asked, “Who do men say I am”
and they replied, “Some say John the Baptist, some Elijah,
and others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” Then He
asked them who they thought He was and Simon Peter
replied and said, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living
God.” Jesus blessed him because the revelation had not
come from flesh and blood, but the Father had revealed it
(Matthew 16:13-17). Deep calls unto deep. Spirit calls unto
Spirit. The people were focused on healings, signs, and
wonders and to have bread and fish when they are hungry
but they were the ones that eventually cried out, “Crucify
Him.” Peter focused on his relationship with the Lord and
the Father revealed His Son to him.

We are running with endurance the race that is set before

us, looking unto Jesus who is the author and finisher of
our faith. To those who eagerly wait for Him He will
appear a second time, apart from sin for salvation
(Hebrews 9:28). Those who see Him do not have their
focus on the passing scene, the past or the future; but they
have an expectation: momentarily expecting the Lord to
reveal Himself. The focus is on the unseen. By faith Moses
endured, as seeing Him who is invisible (Hebrews 11:27b).
Moses’ focus was not on the Israelites he was leading
through the wilderness, but on the Lord. He could endure
because he was seeing Him who was invisible. And
everyone that has this hope on Him purifies himself, just as He is
pure (1 Peter 3:3). The Lord will appear, but not to those
who are not focused on Him.

When Jesus lived His life on earth unto God, His focus was
on you and me. For the joy that was set before Him, He
endured the cross. The righteous Servant of God justified
many because He suffered the iniquities of us all and made
intercession for the transgressors. He had this hope in
Him, His focus, to see His seed, a harvest of sons. His
focus is all the time on pleasing His God and Father.

Let us occupy our minds with the things in how we will

please the Lord and how we will serve one another to the
edification and benefit of all. If we do these things we do
well. If we do not love we do not know God, because God
is love.

We have not yet come to know what mercy and grace

means. It is love. All godliness is rooted in love. How we
have become distracted and alienated in our minds from
the simplicity that is in Christ. We have not yet learned
that love covers a multitude of sins. We disassociate from
others that do not maintain the same doctrinal viewpoints
that we have, yet these people are our brothers and sisters.
How carnal we have become by creating divisions in our
thinking. All these unimportant things absorb our
attention away from Christ, which are deception.

All these things happened to us because nobody ever

taught us how to maintain a steady focus on the Lord. No
wonder we are so distracted from our course to grow up
into all aspects of the image of the Son of God who is Lord
of all things.

When the Lord was tempted, He was tested on His

sonship. In Matthew 4, Satan said two times to Jesus, “If
you were the Son God.” Jesus is the Word made flesh and
in Him was life, and the life was the light of men. The war
is over the Word. We are tested on the word of God within
us – “Has God said.” God instructed Joshua, before
entering into the Promised Land, as to where his focus
belongs. This Book of the Law shall not depart from your
mouth, but you shall meditate in it day and night, that you may
observe to do according to all that is written in it. For then you
will make your way prosperous, and then you will have good
success (Joshua 1:8). Without the focus of faith you cannot
please God or be prosperous or have success.

Enoch focused so much on God that eventually all of the

glory of the Lord was made manifested in him bodily. I am
convinced it is the will of God for all men to know God
like Enoch did. Yet, not Enoch but Christ in us is the only
hope of glory we have, which is His godliness made
manifested in our flesh. James Quinn’s version of St.
Patrick’s ballad of focusing on Christ is as follows:

Christ beside me, Christ before me,

Christ behind me, King of my heart;
Christ within me, Christ below me,
Christ above me never to part.

Christ on my right hand, Christ on my left hand,

Christ around me shield in my strife;
Christ in my sleeping, Christ in my sitting,
Christ in my rising, light of my life.

Christ be in all hearts thinking about me,

 Christ be on all tongues telling of me.
Christ be the vision in eyes that see me,
In ears that hear me Christ ever be.

This ballad teaches you to keep your spirit open to God. If

you focus pure love on the Lord, everything else will
become dim and disappear into oblivion; and the devil
cannot use anything against you. There is no law against
love. Godliness is profitable for all things. If you focus
your love on the Lord, the devil will find nothing in you
and the blood of Jesus will cleanses you from all
unrighteousness.

I believe that the Lord wants us to come to the place where

we love Christ so deeply that we have no other focus but
His will. Our reasonable sacrifice to Him is to present our
bodies a living sacrifice. Though our bodies are dead to
Him because of sin we live our lives that we live in the
flesh as if our bodies are alive to Him. So, we live our
earthly lives as if we are in heaven. Father, Your will be
done on earth as it is in heaven.

We need not to take years to grow up in the Lord. Let it be

to you according to the measure of your faith. In the spirit
realm things can happen fast. It still necessitates a
discipline of your spirit. When I went to university I saw
which students first went to the army to complete their
military training and those who came directly from high
school to study. Those who completed their military
training before coming to university were much more
disciplined and mature in all areas of their lives.

I have also learned much about discipline during my

athletic career and I apply much of those principals today
in my spiritual living. I am convinced that you also have
life experiences, which you can draw on for making things
work for you in your walk with God.

The first decision that you must make is to decide if this

walk with the Lord is for you. If you have decided to go all
the way walking with the Lord you must get spiritually fit.
It means you must practice to have a constant focus on the
Lord. You cannot falter between two opinions. If you want
to know the Lord then press on to know the Lord. If you
want to do something different then do it with all of your
heart otherwise you will have a miserable life. You cannot
serve God and have other gods in your saddlebag.

Few people have learned to keep their focus on an object

for more than 40 minutes before it starts to wander. To
train your focus to be steadfast on the Lord you need to
make a conscious effort to focus. It will not happen by
itself. God made the focus of man, which is the eye of the
mind to function with pictures of the imagination. Without
an imagination man is a zombie. Without pictures of a
vision man perishes. Focusing is taking time looking at one
picture or scenery at a time. This type of focus normally
happens when you meditate on a passage of Scripture,
dream, vision, or problem for which you need an
interpretation, answer or solution from the Lord. Often in
prayer and intercession you sense you do not know what
to pray for and you will describe it as running out of
words. It may be that you need an answer or solution but
for the moment you are only focusing at the problem. This
type of focus is like being a watchman on the wall. It is like
hunting in Africa, you do not know when you will
encounter some prey. You do not know what type of
animal it will be, whether you can use its flesh or not, is it a
dangerous animal, its gender or its weight. You must know
how to search out different kind of animals otherwise you
will miss them. When the Lord wishes to reveal Himself to
you He can be more unpredictable than hunting animals.
So the attitude of your heart should be to have a humble
and sincere focus on God otherwise you will miss Him.
Without sincere faith you will miss God.

When you waiting on the Lord you change your focus to

love. It is your personal worship to Him that is of
importance.

Many bubbles of illusion will burst on practicing to focus

on the Lord. It is like training athletics. In the beginning
you will have unrealistic expectations. Many things will
not work out according to your expectation. It is because
you do not your potential and condition of your body and
because of a lack of patience. Alter your expectation and
way to focus on the Lord until it works for you. Take it one
step at a time, one day at a time. For precept must be upon
precept, precept upon precept, line upon line, line upon line, here
a little, there a little (Isaiah 28:10). The keys are patience and
perseverance. Without patience and perseverance you will
not get very far – I guarantee you that. (It is not my
intention to be hard or harsh; I only desire the best for you.
So, I need to speak the truth). The Holy Spirit will lead you
into all truth. Trust the anointing of the Holy Spirit in you.
To trust the anointing is like starting a new relationship.
Trust must be build through faith. Trust me, the Holy
Spirit will never let you down. The moment you think He
is not there He is trying to show you something different.
All the time, be alert and sober but be relaxed.

Do not give up. Our walk with the Lord is through faith
and not by feeling. There will be times of refreshment in
the presence of the Lord but most times you will have to
walk by faith. The proof of our dedication is to persevere
through faith. Without faith you cannot please God.