Last week, I shared a personal experience of how the Lord is helping me grow in patience. This week, we will look at how just focusing on one thing it can help us have a breakthrough in may other areas, even things we are not focusing on.
This is actually a military tactic that can help us greatly in our personal life. It’s called “concentration of forces.” This is the tactic of concentrating forces at one place along the enemy line to create a breakthrough. Once you have penetrated an enemy line, their whole force has to retreat to keep from being divided or surrounded. This is actually the most common and most successful military tactic. How can it help us personally?
Most Christians still have hundreds of things wrong with them. It is the devil’s tactic to have us trying to fix every one of them at the same time, which will enable his overall strategy to “wear out the saints” to succeed. However, the Holy Spirit will just focus on one or at the most two things for us to work on, knowing that if we have a breakthrough in one thing, it will result in the enemy having to retreat on everything.
For example, when I focused on my need for more patience, I was surprised by how much my faith increased. We see in Hebrews 6:12 how it is by “faith and patience that we inherit the promises…” These two qualities work together, so if you start having a breakthrough in one, you will in the other, which will in turn create other breakthroughs. When I became more patient with others, I would notice things about them that caused me to appreciate or even love them more.
As patience worked in me more, I would grow noticeably in the peace of God. This caused me to be able to walk much closer to the Lord, hear His voice for directions better, which made everything go better. We are also told that the “God of peace will soon crush Satan under our feet” (Romans 16:20), so victories started to come in many other areas.
If you had asked me what my worst flaw was, I would not likely have said patience. However, the Lord knew how my impatience was affecting almost everything else—the way I saw people, the way I failed to see Him, and how this affected my actions in almost everything. As I grew in what I thought was just a tiny bit more patience, I could see major results in other areas to which I had not even given attention. The point is that we must let the Lord lead us in this. He can see things we can’t, and how something we do not even see as related can be the key to our progress in many ways. As Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 4:3-4, “But to me it is a very small thing that I may be examined by you, or by any human court; in fact, I do not even examine myself. For I am conscious of nothing against myself, yet I am not by this acquitted; but the one who examines me is the Lord.”
Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians 13:5, “Test yourselves to see if you are in the faith; examine yourselves!” But in the text above, he says that he does not examine himself. Which is it?
There are ways that we must examine ourselves, and ways that we don’t. There are biblical ways for us to judge others, and ways that we don’t. We will study these, but for now we will focus on the ways that we judge ourselves, and ways we don’t.
We are told in 1 Corinthians 11:31, “But if we judged ourselves rightly, we would not be judged.” The Scriptures are clear about the reasons why the world is going to be judged and the things we should know are wrong. We can judge ourselves in these things if we are doing them. There are some faults or sins that may be a little more ambiguous, and He has given us the Holy Spirit to convict us of these. The answer is to repent and turn away from the sins we are told the world will be judged for, so that we will not be judged with the world.
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