Ever hear one of those sermons that hits you so hard that it’s painful to listen to? That’s how I spent my afternoon. And I listened to not one, but two of them.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the importance I place on God. Of course I say He’s important and all, but does my life show it? Probably not as much as it should. Ok – I know not as much as it should. And I’ve been absolutely consumed for the past year and a half or so with whether or not I’m doing what I should be doing, blah, blah…
So sermon number one today was all about that. It wasn’t a sermon really. It was a two minute video. But it preached. Louie Giglio gets the credit. He made the simple point that instead of asking God to place us in the center of His will that we should instead focus on keeping our eyes on Him. I realized that my usual prayer is “God, please show me where you want me and put me there.” which sounds like a very righteous prayer until you hear the other unspoken half (that God hears) that says “…because I really don’t want to do the hard work of keeping my eyes on you all of the time. I’d much rather you just pick me up and put me somewhere. Yeah. That’d be a lot easier.”
The second sermon was courtesy of Francis Chan. He was speaking on the love of self and I realized that I love myself a little bit too much. He described self-loving people as those who are so focused on their own problems that they can’t see anything else. These people would much rather talk than listen. And…that would be me too.
So my first impulse was to call a bunch of people and apologize for being so self-loving and stupid, until I realized that I should probably just apologize to God and move forward with this new found revelation as my guide.
What would happen if all of us stopped worrying so much about our own selves and spent more time looking into the eyes of God? My guess is that we would start seeing the reflections of the things that He sees and we would be moved to do something.
Giglio sums it up beautifully at the end of his video. He says, “How can you make the wrong choice if in your heart what you really want to do is honor God?” I think I should concentrate a little less on my choices and a lot more on honoring Him for a change.
