Your Focus

I’ll never forget the first day of football camp at the small college I attended. I’d come hoping to be a part of a winning program and perhaps even a national championship. Our head coach had scheduled a team meeting. As he reviewed the goals, he pulled out the video of last year’s national championship—a game we had lost. I then expected him to share his plan on how we would make it back to the national championship game and win.

Instead, he did something I would never forget: he threw the video to the ground, stomped it to bits, and told us if our only dream was to win a national championship, then we had set our goals too low!

That season, I learned what my coach was talking about. We went undefeated and reached the championship game against the team that had beaten us the previous year. We lost in four overtimes, but that’s not what the season was all about. Through the influence of Christian coaches and players, twelve of my teammates made decisions to follow Christ. While most of us will forget that season’s record, those decisions will have eternal significance!

As the Apostle Paul wrote, rather than focusing on what is seen, our vision as Christians should be set on that which we cannot see. That is the faith we’ve been given through Jesus Christ, whose vision for God’s kingdom was why He came to earth. He clung to the hope of eternity with those He loved (us!), and this helped Him endure the most famous execution in all of human history. In other words, He saw beyond this world and into the next! Just as our football coach taught us, our goals, too, should be on the highest level.