Get Your Focus In Focus

When you get under stress, your life gets out of focus. In fact, when you get under stress you start looking at your problem and stop looking at Christ. When you really get stressed out and the heat is on in your life, you become very preoccupied with yourself. All you can see is your pain. Your focus just gets narrower and narrower when you’re under stress.

What you need to do is get your focus off your problem and back on the Lord.

Do you remember the story of Jonah? It was not just your typical Mediterranean cruise. Jonah did everything wrong. God told him to do this and he did the exact opposite. He thumbed his nose at God and said, "I’m going to go my own way, do my own thing. Forget You." God said go east and he went as far west as he possibly could. He went down and found a ship going the opposite direction he was supposed to go, headed out across the Mediterranean. A storm came up and the sailors thought, "This guy must be the problem" and they threw him overboard. The Bible says that God had prepared a great fish to swallow up Jonah. If you believe that God could create the world, you can believe that God can create a fish that had a man-sized compartment in it. The fish could only stomach him for three days. Talk about a guy literally swallowed by his problems!

What do you do when your problems swallow you up? What do you do when you are so overwhelmed, you’re just engulfed, literally engulfed by stress? You do the same thing Jonah did.

Jonah 2:7 is Jonah’s prayer. He said, "When I had lost all hope, I turn my thoughts once more to the Lord." Some of you are about to lose hope, maybe in your marriage, your career, your family, or your life. What do you do? The same thing Jonah did. Focus on Him.

How do you refocus your life on Christ? Three ways to refocus on Christ when you’re at the breaking point:

-Read God’s word (Psalm 119:143). God’s word is a great stress reliever, particularly the book of Psalms. Go through and underline some verses that mean a lot to you.

-Remember God’s goodness

(Psalm 27). We need to remember God’s goodness because the problem is, we’re usually focusing on the bad and then exaggerate them.

-Rely on God’s power (2 Corinthians 1:9). If God can raise a dead person, He can raise a dead marriage, a dead career, or a dead anything.