FOCUS FOR EFFECT: Hope | Mac Hammond
 
Recap
 
Pastor Mac gave the second installment of his new series entitled, “Focus for Effect.” This series is all about focus, meaning where do you give your attention. This is important because whatever you give your attention to will determine how hard or difficult your life will be. And conversely, it will determine how easy and carefree it will be. Teaching on 1st Corinthians 13:13, Pastor Mac says you can gain the clarity you need to succeed in your life by focusing on matters of faith, hope, and love.
 
Dive Deeper
 
Being attentive to the right things at the right time is a major contributor to our success in any arena of life.
 
We should not examine our lives in light of secular wisdom or natural circumstance.
 
We need to look at and be attentive to the unseen realm through the Word of God. It is the Word that reveals the unseen realm to us.
 
There’s a war raging in the unseen realm—between good and evil, light and darkness, heaven and hell, God and the Devil. The good is in the spiritual arena. The evil is in the natural world.
 
The war, in effect, has already been won. The Lord has won the battle for us. But the battle we’re talking about now is the battle over your soul and your life. That’s what spiritual warfare is all about.
 
It’s a matter of which realm influences you the most. Whatever realm you are most attentive to will determine whether it’s darkness or light that influences you in a way that changes your experience of life.
 
When you’re in Christ and you’re functioning according to the revelation that comes in the eternal realm, then you’re going to experience the blessing and the will of God.
 
However, if your attention is distracted and your decision making begins to focus on natural criteria, you are being taken out of that realm of life and blessing into the realm of death and cursing.
 
That is the challenge in a nutshell.
 
Focus means to give something enough attention and concentration that clarity begins to come.
 
1st Corinthians 13:12–13, “For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known. 13 And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.” (NKJV)
 
This scripture says that right now, we see as though through a glass darkly, meaning you can’t focus on eternity in a general sense. There are things you can’t possibly know that relate to the interaction between the unseen realm and the seen realm, resulting in our seeing “as though through a glass darkly.”
 
What that means is that we don’t lean to our own understanding. When we don’t understand why something happens, we need to just put it on a shelf. We don’t let that become definitive of our theology. When it’s appropriate, He will reveal it to us in due time.
 
The next verse gives us direction on how to focus our attention on that realm: “And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.” (NKJV)
 
The New Living translation says “forever”: “Now, abides faith, hope, and love, forever.” Meaning this is the part of eternity that we are able to see clearly. We see through a glass darkly now, meaning everything’s fuzzy and we can’t get any good definition of a lot of things in general in this arena. But in the meantime, you can gain the clarity you need to succeed in your life on this earth by focusing on matters of faith, hope, and love.
 
Read About It
 
2nd Corinthians 4:17–18, “For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory; While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.”
 
1st Corinthians 13:12–13, “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.”
 
Discussion Questions
 
In a nutshell, give the definition of what it means to “focus.”
 
In your walk with the Lord, has there been a time when you didn’t understand something and the Lord revealed to you the answer at a later time, when you were older in the Lord?
 
In your own words, explain what it means to “see through a glass darkly.” What was the apostle Paul trying to say?
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