When James Garfield entered Hiram College, he was a youth with limited preparation but one clear purpose: he purposed to obtain an education. That singleness of purpose allowed him to squeeze six years of study into three and enable him to earn the coveted degree.
Having that single purpose, young Jim Garfield taught school to feed himself. Beyond that, he “shut the whole world out from his mind save that little portion of it within the range of his studies.” He readily admitted to knowing “nothing of politics or the news of the day, reading no light literature, and engaging in no social recreations that too his time from his books”1
It was with this singleness of focus that young James eventually found it possible to win a coveted seat in the United States Congress, and to finally live in the White House and serve his country as the Presidency of the United States of America. The intensity of Garfield’s purposeful focus revealed itself when he reflected on the words of his severest critics regarding his presidency. Garfield concluded, “I would rather be beaten in right, than succeed in wrong.”2
What captures your attention? What holds your focus? Jesus taught his disciples to seek the Kingdom of God first, ahead of everything else. Having done that, Jesus announced that they would discover their needs being met (Matthew 6:33). Achievement in life requires a well-focused faith, but it is through such faith that we acquire dividends that can be found in no other way than by focusing purposefully on the will of Our Heavenly Father.
To maintain your focus when walking with Jesus, means you prioritize God’s will above all else; you pursue Kingdom issues first, and above all else, you focus on His Presence. Private citizen, John Egglen, was a simple man, an ordinary deacon in a local Methodist church in Colchester, England. One snowy night, John pushed purposefully forward but found only a handful of people in attendance at the scheduled Service. Even the Minister failed to make it to church, but John was there.
What resulted that night was this: very ordinary deacon John found himself preaching a simple, and poorly-prepared sermon, but he was there according to his purpose. Deacon John’s sermon touched a thirteen-year-old visitor, who found shelter in the church from the stormy weather and who later said, “Then and there the cloud on my heart lifted, the darkness rolled away, and at that moment I saw the sun.”
We know that thirteen-year-old visitor today as Charles Haddon Spurgeon! Within five short years, the still teenaged Spurgeon took charge of a small congregation at a place called Waterbeach, Cambridgeshire. By the time Spurgeon achieved twenty years of age, he moved into to London where he became pastor of the famed New Park Street Chapel.
Spurgeon’s immediate popularity required the construction of the famed Metropolitan Tabernacle of London in 1861. Spurgeon often preached to as many as 10,000 people on any given Sunday. His sermons were published weekly from 1854 forward and were collected into fifty volumes, and Spurgeon’s sermon series bless the library shelves of many a Pastor yet today.
Singleness of purpose enabled citizen, James A. Garfield, to first acquire an education, and then to qualify himself as the future President of our United States of America. Because of his singleness of purpose, John Egglen obeyed God on a stormy and snowy night. That singleness of purpose led him to preach such as he had available in his simple and limited circumstances.
God, however, took John’s simple sermon and blessed it, as he blessed the five small fish and two loaves of bread with which Jesus fed a Multitude. John’s sermon led to the conversion of a man who became one our best-known preachers in the second half of the recent nineteenth century.
When you can live with singleness of purpose, Jesus tells us, we can “Seek first His kingdom and His righteousness: and all these things shall be added to you” (Matthew 6:33, NASV). This is walkingwithwarner.blogspot.com.
1 General James S. Brisbin, James A. Garfield. Philadelphia: Hubbard Brothers, 1880, p. 72.
2 Garfield, p. 28l.
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