Don't Be Distracted - Luke 9:51-56 Part I

Don’t Be Distracted - Luke 9:51-56 Part I

Many people fail to achieve their destiny in life.  They fall victim to myriad good and bad circumstances in life.  Actually, their inability to develop focus and discipline mostly accounts for their lack of success.  People who unwaveringly commit themselves to self-evaluation and industriousness eventually succeed.  Interestingly, they are not necessarily the most talented people in their chosen professions.  Practically speaking, they are the people who determine their goals and dreams and work hard to realize them.  They are not the people who are distracted by hobbies, avocations, community service, social justice advocacy, volunteerism, etc.  In order to fulfill your divine destiny in life, you must resist the temptation of permitting various situations to deter you from achieving your eternal purpose.

It is important to discover and define your destiny, a combination of your dreams and goals, which contain an eternal purpose.  Biblically speaking, destiny includes The Great Commandment (Matthew 22:34-40) and The Great Commission (Matthew 28:16-20).  Because life has many distractions, clarifying your personal mission is vitally important.  Otherwise, you will become a victim of circumstances and ineffective choices.  A written mission statement, as Stephen Covey, author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People suggests, sifts the opportunities that life’s presents.  This declaration regarding the use of your time, talent, treasure and temperament helps immensely in utilizing the possibilities that further your divine intention.  Without daily reference to your mission statement, you risks the danger of falling prey to every wind and wave of chance.  Conceivably, you could busy yourself with a lot of good and worthwhile activities.  Yet, time could ultimately reveal the hard and unfortunate fact that none of those commitments possess any eternal worth. 

Focusing upon the practical components of destiny is fundamental to accomplishing it.  It is equally significant to learn from previous, adverse experiences; and channel that wisdom towards some meaningful purpose in life.  How you handle failure is as important as how you enjoy success.  Disappointments and defeat often possess critical lessons which in time contribute to future successes.  John Maxwell, the author of countless books on leadership and management, recommends that we acquire the skill “to fail forward.”  Additionally, Attorney Natasha L. Blackshear, a successful corporate and venture capitalist lawyer, posits that failures supply necessary information in order to succeed.  She reasons that one must ignore the usual tendency to find excuses to explain away failure.  Instead, mine negative experiences for the personal information that they offer.  After celebrating successes, utilize them to further challenge yourself to achieve an even greater goal.  Summarily, developing the habit of turning liabilities into assets helps in avoiding the daily distractions of life.

Again, there are many charitable and worthwhile things to do in life.  Because we face so many social challenges, there are as many meaningful projects to which you can belong in an attempt to resolve these dilemmas.  Problems abound on all levels of government.  Geographically, these situations have no limits.  From combating genocide in Africa to suicide bombers in the Middle East to ruining the wildlife reservoirs in Alaska to protecting the life of the unborn to increasing voter turnout on the precinct level, you merely can choose any numbers of issues.  However, you still face the difficulty of determining what issues to tackle.  We simply cannot be all things to all people.  Hopefully, we do not want to belong to everything yet be committed to nothing.  But, that is exactly the risk that we run if we do not remind ourselves daily of our divine destiny in life.  Almighty God will put upon the fertile soil of our hearts those community service and social justice activities to which we should belong.  The combination of that revelation and our personal mission statement helps us to escape the trap of life’s good distractions that undermine our destinies.

In the preceding text in Luke’s gospel, the Lord Jesus Christ teaches the necessity of resisting the distractions of life.  He never loses sight of His destiny.  He holds Jerusalem in His mind’s eye at all times.  He knows that His destiny which is to achieve salvation for humankind will be actualized in Jerusalem.  Accordingly, He does not allow anyone or anything to prevent Him from entering the holy city.  The disciples, however, become enamored with Jesus’ divine power and their access to it via their relationship with Him.  Because of an insult in a Samaritan village, James and John request permission to call down a heavenly fire on those people.  Instead, Jesus instructs them about the importance of remaining focused upon His destiny.  Likewise, we must focus upon our destiny with the same resolution that the Lord Jesus Christ utilizes in approaching Jerusalem, which leads to Calvary, which in turn leads to the Empty Tomb, which in turns make possible the salvation of the world.