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Sermon Illustrations: Focus
If you look at something while driving, you tend to steer off the road. You have to keep your eyes straight ahead.
In the passing of the baton from Elijah to Elisha, Elijah said that Elisha had to see him leave if he was to receive his request of a double anointing. Elisha had to keep watching, because you never know just when God is going to move. (2 Kings 2:9-10)
A gang of thieves broke into a jewellery store, but instead of stealing anything, they switched the price tags. The next day, nobody noticed, and people were spending huge amounts of money to buy cheap junk, while others were paying a couple of dollars for incredibly expensive jewellery. Someone has switched the tags on our planet with the result that people are focusing on the wrong things.
When you focus on something, peripheral vision is blurred. Focus on Jesus so that everything else in your peripheral vision.
The universe is absolutely huge. Even in our local neighbourhood - the Milky Way - distances are awesome. For instance, the nearest that Mars ever gets to Earth is 56 million km. So when they want to send a rocket to Mars, they have to calculate everything right down to the smallest fractions. If they send it in a direction only half a degree out, it will miss Mars altogether. And a miss is a miss whether they miss by 1,000 km or a million km. Life is a little bit like that: A few little changes here and there, a few detours along the way can make the difference between hitting the mark and missing the mark.
Flotsam and jetsam are commonly used terms used to describe the wreckage and debris that floats in the water after a shipwreck. What isn't so well known is that there is a difference between flotsam" and jetsam. Flotsam is anything that ends up in the water resulting from the shipwreck, whether it's pieces of the boat or even some of the cargo. Nobody had any control over it; it's there as a result of the shipwreck. But jetsam is different altogether. Jetsam refers to the cargo and other items purposely jettisoned from the ship to help stabilise it and hopefully to save it from shipwreck. In other words, ejecting the jetsam can often save the possibility of a complete wreck and the resulting flotsam. Life is similar. We often have to make choices to eject things from our lives that we may prefer to hold onto in order to prevent a much worse disaster.
While the troops of Mahomet II surrounded Constantinople in 1493 and it would be decided if the Balkans would be under Christian or Islamic dominion, a local church council in the besieged city discussed the following problems: What colour were the eyes of the holy virgin? What sex have the angels? What happens if a fly falls in sanctified water? Is the fly sanctified or the water polluted?