Everything we receive from God depends upon our focus. Jesus has made a perfect provision for us, and the Holy Spirit was given to us to help us receive it.
We have to focus on a promise of God, until we receive it as a revelation in our spirit. We have to meditate upon it until it becomes a living word to us personally so that our spirit can lay hold of it.
Faith is a fruit of our spirit, so we have to get the promise in our spirit and not let go of it until it comes into manifestation in the natural realm.
A person may be a believer, yet they may believe for something because of a selfish motivation. Then they are not delighting themselves in the Lord. If we focus on the world, we will find it to be a passing scene. But if we focus on the Lord, we will endure forever. If we meditate upon His Word day and night, He will make our way prosperous. Whatsoever we do shall prosper.
A person’s focus determines the measure of blessing they receives from the Lord. Matthew 6:33 says, “Seek ye first,” the Kingdom of God, and all these other things will be added to you.”
It is a matter of focus. The Lord promised that when we focus upon His Kingdom and upon His will, then these other things will happen to us.
When a person has a business and they are a good steward of it, when the Lord is first in their heart and they really seek Him first, God will bless their business and bring them numerous contacts. Their contemporaries of equal ability will fail while they succeed. The reason is not measured by anything visible; it is intangible and invisible in that their heart is focused upon the Lord.
This focus on God was what made David reputed, by the testimony of the Lord Himself, to be a man after God’s own heart (Acts 13:22). David said in the Psalm 57:7, “My heart is fixed, O God, my heart is fixed.” Whatever else happened, good or bad, his heart was fixed and focused on the Lord. When he sinned and was rebuked, he was quick to repent, and God was quick to forgive. He was a man after God’s own heart because he was focused—his heart was fixed on God.
Although we might have many interests, the longer we walk with the Lord, the more our interest is focused only on Him. We might have to do many things, yet we do them incidentally because our heart is focused on the Lord. God will keep blessing, if we do not worry about other things and simply focus on the Lord.
In the Sermon on the Mount, the Lord taught about focusing the heart, saying, “Do not lay up your treasures on earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt and thieves break through and steal, but lay up your treasures in heaven” (Matthew 6:19–20). In other words, be sure you put all your interests in the right place so that you are focused on God.
In Luke 18:18 is the story of a rich man, a ruler of the Jews, who asked Jesus what he had to do to inherit eternal life. The Lord knew that his interest was upon too many things to serve God, and it was necessary for him to change his focus. Therefore, the Lord said to him, “Go sell all that you have and give it to the poor; then come and follow Me.” He went away sorrowful, because he had too many possessions and interests which he was focusing upon. In essence, the Lord told him to get rid of all the other things that were absorbing his attention and set his attention on the Lord alone. This seemed to be deadly; nevertheless, the Lord would say the same to us. If we want to walk with God, we must be focused on God. If we are focused on something else, we will have to eliminate it to walk with Him.
The basic root of selfishness is deeper than many people think. It is easy for someone to praise God from one side of their mouth and from the other side to voice that which is for their own blessing, a deep ulterior motivation within their heart.
We should understand what we are living for. We need to ask ourselves what we are actually focused on and what we really want. There may be something we do not have, yet our desire for it may exceed our desire for the Lord. It is not always what we possess that hinders us. Many people do not have what they want and are not pleasing God because their desire for those things supersedes their desire for the Lord.
In the Psalms, we do not find such requests as this, “O God, give me this; O God, give me that.” David, a man after God’s own heart, a man whose heart was fixed on God, was always saying, “I bless You, Lord; I love you. You are so great to me.” David always prayed that God would be magnified.
The psalms we written in the tabernacle of David, where they had face to face encounters with the Lord, our prayers are most effective when we are filled with the Spirit.
The Psalms are characterized by one deep undercurrent: “My heart panteth after Thee like the hart panteth after the water brooks. When shall I appear before Thee?” (Psalm 42:1–2). The cry of the Psalms is a hunger after God. David hungered after Him because his heart was fixed on God.
When God calls us to sacrifice, many times He is calling us to face the fact that we are basically selfish and have never focused on the Lord. He said, “Bring your tithes and offerings into the storehouse and prove if I will not bless you. I will do everything for you. I will rebuke the devourer for your sake. Your vines will not abort and cast their grapes ahead of time.” Everything we do will prosper if we meditate in His word both day and night.
Look at the commands that God gave Joshua: This book of the law shall not depart out of thy mouth; but thou shalt meditate therein day and night.… then thou shalt make thy way prosperous, and then thou shalt have good success. Joshua 2:8. What a word for a general! “This is the way you will receive wisdom and insight, Joshua; simply worship God and meditate on Him day and night. Never forget that your greatest problem is not killing Canaanites, but keeping yourself basically, essentially, and primarily focused on God.”
We are in a day of acceleration. The Word is becoming richer, revelation is deeper, and impartation is greater. The Lord is bringing us into deeper revelation and a deeper word. We have only begun.
Our focus determines the condition of our heart. It is alright to believe for things as long as they do not become the focus of our lives.