Where to Focus #3

Ron Simkins – September 16, 2025 2 Comments

Here is installment #3 on the Where to Focus series of essays from NCF Pastor Emeritus, Ron Simkins. What follows is a much-needed prescription for all the dis-ease we face in and around us today. May we find healing and wholeness, individually and as a community, as we seek Jesus. -Melissa Logsdon, NCF Associate Pastor

In my last two essays, I have suggested that if we wish to grow spiritually, WHO to focus on precedes WHERE/WHAT to Focus on. This time I want to pursue the same thought, but with a different twist.

Sometimes, the WHO (“Yahweh,” “God,” “The God and Father of our Lord Jesus the Messiah,”) encourages us concerning where to look, and what to look at, if we wish to receive more wholeness. A few years ago, the singer Lauren Daigle recorded “Look Up Child.” The song captures a true, but difficult, part of spiritual growth. In the song, she mentions all that seems to be going wrong in life and in the world, and then says she hears God’s voice saying, “Look Up Child.”

There is an event recorded in the Hebrew Bible—a somewhat weird and unsettling one I admit—that powerfully illustrates this point. Jesus reminds us of the event, and reapplies it in one of his teachings.

Numbers 21 tells us that the people following Moses out of slavery to the Empire and across the wilderness began to complain that Yahweh wasn’t taking very good care of them. God is tired of their complaining and allows deadly snakes to infest the camp. The people cry out to God and to Moses for relief. God tells Moses to make a replica of the snakes, put it on a pole, and anyone who looks up at the image of the snake will be healed. 

Sounds almost too easy—until you think for a minute. How difficult would you find it to quit looking down to see how to try to avoid the snakes around your feet, and instead look up for help and healing. And, isn’t it a bit strange that God would have God’s people look up at a reminder of the horrible things that were destroying them in order to find God’s gift of wholeness and healing and forgiveness.

Then we hear Jesus’ words: 

“Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who trusts in him may have eternal life. For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever trusts in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.” (John 3:14-17)

When we look at Jesus “lifted up” in execution on the Roman cross, we also find we are looking at Jesus “lifted up” in exaltation and completion by God after the execution (Hebrews 5:7-10; 2:5-18). But we do first have to look at all that is destroying our world. All we humans are doing that creates bent and broken systems—Empires, Nations, many of our institutions, and sadly many of our Churches and Religions– that thrive on greed, domination, and creating fear. And, it was Empire, Nation, and Church whose leaders put the innocent and righteous Jesus on that cross. Also, it was the fears that lead people to sacrifice anyone, and all that is good, for “national security” that put Jesus on the cross.

And yet, God “lifts up” that very Jesus into the next step in God’s creation project of building a future human society filled with righteousness, justice, peace, love, and joy!

So, with all the potential and present dangers, destructions, and brokenness right here in easy eye sight for us today, can we hear God saying “Turn your eyes up. Look up children! If you look up, you will see that I am able to overcome everything that is destroying you, and move beyond it into the healing that will make humanity, and you individually, whole and complete.” 

As the writer of Hebrews summarizes this call to focus our gaze beyond all that is destroying and see WHO is able to overcome it.

“But we do see Jesus, who for a little while was made lower than the angels, now crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God Jesus might taste death for everyone.

It was fitting that God, for whom and through whom all things exist, in bringing many children to glory, should make the pioneer of their salvation perfect (complete) through sufferings. For the one who sanctifies and those who are sanctified all have one Father. For this reason Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers and sisters.” (Hebrews 2:9-11)

Where to Focus? Look up Children!

-Ron Simkins, NCF Pastor Emeritus