Daily Java: Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory. (Colossians 3:1-4)
It is a fact that you do not hit what you do not aim at. Rarely do you hit the target by accident.
No one ever lived the Christian life well by accident. No one ever got to heaven and said, wow, I didn’t mean to do that.
You live the Christian life on purpose by looking to the motivation: God.
I learned how to shoot in the army. I found out that I was a good shot with a rifle. I could hit whatever I aimed at. The key was to look at your target and sight over the rifle. It wasn’t so much a matter of carefully aiming, it was a matter of sighting over the rifle, looking at what you wanted to shoot, and then pulling the trigger.
You hit what you were looking at. If you were not looking at it, or if you were not concentrating on it, you did not hit it.
Guys would complain that they were not good shots and the drill sergeants or others would try to help them (or heap abuse on them, depending on the teacher), but the problem came down to the fact that they were not concentrating on the target.
They would concentrate on the rifle, on the sight, people around them, on their own eyes even, but in order to hit the target, they had to concentrate on the target.
The apostle Peter found this out in Matthew 14. He wanted to walk on the water towards Jesus. Jesus said come on. Peter stepped out and began to do so. But he quit looking at Jesus and looked at everything else. When he did he sank.
Romans 15:4 says everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through endurance and the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope. God told us about Peter in order to show us the importance of keeping our eyes on the target.
To please him, to go to him, we have to keep him in our sights. We set our hearts on things above, we set our minds on things above – we look at him. We don’t look at the Bible, or our lives, or the preacher, or the church or anything else. These are important and play a significant role.
But our primary focus is God, and Jesus Christ through him. If we set our hearts on that, we will hit what we aim at.
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