Where is my focus?

Looking at the story of Moses' interaction with Pharoah this week, I was again amazed at the guts of both of them. Pharoah had guts to continue to defy God. Moses had incredible guts to face not only the manipulation and scorn of Pharoah, but also the wildly vacillating emotions of the Jews.

How did Moses do this? How did he stay focused on what God called him to do.

I think there are two reasons.

The first has something to do with his burning bush experience. That visit and conversation with God was so impressed on his mind, that in the days ahead, when he was tempted to doubt, he could look back and KNOW the God he served. It allowed him to maintain his focus on God's voice, and not be distracted by the voices around him.

I believe the second was he emotional endurance, as Mark Batterson talked about in his blog. Here are two quotes:

• "You have to manage the fear and the discouragement and the anxiety. If you can't, you won't make it. But if you allow the challenging situations to build emotional endurance, you'll be prepared for even bigger challenges."

• "One of the things that has helped me deal with criticism and stress is my perspective. I don't particularly like criticism or stress, but I see it as building emotional endurance. And if I'm going to do bigger and better things for God, then I'm going to need more emotional endurance."

Emotional endurance is not emotional ignorance. I used to ignore emotions and pretend they didn't exist. That may temporarily appear like my emotions are under control. But they are only being stuffed and will eventually explode.

God had taken Moses through a series of experiences to build his trust and confidence in God. He had emotional endurance, so that he could see past the immediate voices of doubt and maintain his confidence in "I AM".

In the New Testament, it tells us to "fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith". This is another member of the trinity, who Moses called "I AM".

God allows stress and difficulty in our lives to build emotional endurance, so that our confidence can be in him.