Most of us have 3 or 4 key things in our lives that we’d like to change. A problem relationship. Perhaps something at work or our finances. And the mistake people often make is they try to change everything all at once. It’s a bit like .. juggling chainsaws.

So are you one of those people who’re trying to juggle four chainsaws with your bare hands? Is that how you’re living your life? You may be wondering why on earth I’m talking about this. Well this week on the program we’ve kicked off a series of messages that I’ve called, ‘The Art Of Living’ because as we look forward to the year ahead one of the things that a few people need to get sorted out is how they’re living their lives.

And over the last few days, just to recap if you’ve missed it, we’ve been chatting about the fact that many a person’s life is drifting. You know we don’t think too much about our lives, somehow we just live them. Perhaps we complain about this or that but very few people think about why they’re not satisfied with their lot.

Is it that they don’t like themselves? Perhaps they’re in the wrong job. Maybe it’s a important relationship that’s going sour or even just not having enough to quite make ends meet. And the upshot of all that is that I’ve been encouraging you to really figure out what it is that’s not working in your life and then to do something about it. That’s the bottom line.

We can just sit back and whinge and complain, we can wish things were better, we can blame other people, we can expect others to do it all for us, that’s including God but at the end of the day a whole bunch of this stuff is up to us.

Sometimes the reason we’re not happy with life is that we have a wrong self image. The hurts and the disappointments of the past have put a negative spin on how we see ourselves. Some people live their whole lives under that sort of oppression. Sometimes the people around us or the social structures tells us, well this is where you fit, this is the box where you belong and that’s it and yet all along you have this potential, this creativity, this dream that’s not being realised.

Some people are just plain in the wrong job. There are so many jobs on this earth given who I am, given who God made me to be that I’m simply not cut out to do. I could never, ever be a good accountant. You would never want me as a personal carer for the elderly. There are so many things I can do but there are plenty that I can’t. See some people spend their whole lives doing a job they’re not cut out to do. A job they don’t enjoy and frankly a job that they’ll never be any good at.

And we’ve seen in this series so far, for some people it’s a relationship that’s robbing them of the joy and the contentment in their lives. For others it comes down to their finances and their resources and what I’ve been encouraging you to do is to really think about your life strategically, beyond the symptoms and down to the root causes. Because it’s when we deal with the root causes that we can begin to think about what we can actually do to make the thing better.

That’s how a Doctor works. They hopefully don’t just give us a pain-killer for a persistent headache, they use the technology that’s available to them to figure out whether there’s something more serious going on below the surface that they need to treat. And I encourage you this week to do just that. As you look at your year ahead what is it that’s robbing you of the satisfaction and the contentment that you’re really looking for? And what are you going to do about it?

But today I want to talk briefly about focus because for many people there is no doubt a raft of issues going on in their lives. Perhaps the things going on in your life are all mixed up together in a way.

Let’s look at one example, low self esteem which lead to problems at work and so then you bring those tensions home with you and that in turn leads to arguments with your wife or your husband and that drags your children in because they sense the tension, they hear the arguments so now they’re on edge and they resent you and so that brings even more tension which in turn causes you to blame yourself, pushing your self esteem to even lower levels.

And if any of that sounds vaguely familiar, hey, you are not alone. That one scenario plays itself out over and over again in the lives, in families and in work places right across the globe but here’s the big mistake that people make, please listen carefully to this, they try to fix all of their problems at once, at the same time and frankly that right there is like juggling chainsaws. A – it’s incredibly difficult to do B – it’s dangerous and C – you have a very high chance of failure.

What’s needed here is focus, a sharp focus on the one thing that’s at the bottom of it all; the one thing that’s the root cause. The one thing you need to sort out before you can address the flow on impacts.

Now have a listen to this story from the New Testament of the Bible, Mark chapter 18, verses 35 to 41:

As Jesus was approaching Jericho a blind man was sitting by the road side begging. When he heard the crowd going by he asked what was happening. They told him, ‘Jesus of Nazareth is passing by’. Then he shouted, ‘Jesus, the son of David, have mercy on me’.

Now those who were in front of him sternly ordered him to be quiet but he shouted even more loudly, ‘son of David, have mercy on me’. Jesus stood still and ordered the man to be brought to him and when he came near Jesus asked him, ‘what do you want me to do for you?’ The man said, ‘Lord, let me see again.

So Jesus said to him, ‘receive your sight, your faith has saved you’. Immediately he regained his sight and followed Jesus glorifying God and all the people when they saw it praised God.

See this man had a lot of problems. He was a beggar because he was poor. He was poor because he couldn’t work. He couldn’t work because he was blind and so he was isolated, unemployed, shunned by society. He had multiple dysfunctions, multiple problems in his life. Does that sound like anybody you might know?

But he knew the root cause of all of them which was his blindness which meant he couldn’t work. So when Jesus came along, this Jesus who had apparently healed a whole bunch of other people before, the one thing he focused on was the one thing he needed.

And that’s how it is with us. We need to get down to the one thing, the most important thing that needs doing in our lives because let me tell you this, just in the same way you and I can’t juggle four chainsaws at once, we can’t fix all the problems in our lives all at the same time.

And you know in my experience this Jesus is always ready to oblige. Sometimes He does things quickly and miraculously the way He did for the beggar but other times He addresses our problems and meets our needs over weeks and months and years, even over a whole life time.

It’s a remarkable thing, whenever you see Jesus touching people’s lives in one of those four Gospel accounts of His life in ministry – in Matthew or Mark or Luke or John, take your pick – He always, always focuses on the one thing that needs doing; the one infirmity that needs healing, the demon that needs casting out, the sin that needs forgiving, just one thing.

He doesn’t try to get people to juggle chainsaws, He touches them and heals them of that one thing and if you’re in that place in your life, where the problems and the dysfunctions and the alienations are overwhelming you here’s what I’m going to encourage you to do.

Go to Jesus and ask Him to heal just one thing, and if you don’t know what that thing is that needs healing ask Him, He already knows. He’s already here waiting to touch you, to heal you, to forgive you, to give you a fresh start in life. How do I know? Because He’s done that in my life and in fact He’s still doing that in my life and from my own experience now I know why it is that they call this stuff the good news.