Try a quick exercise with me. Take a dime. Hold the dime between your index finger and thumb. Now, stretch your arm out as far as you can. You can still see everything in the room, right?
Okay, now slowly pull the dime in, closing your left eye, pulling it in closer and closer to the right eye. Pull the dime all the way up to your face until it’s right up against the open eye. I bet you can’t see anything other than the dime, right?
That’s how the Enemy sometimes works. He gets you focused on things that ain’t worth a dime.
Sometimes, before you go into battle, you have to get above your circumstances and reexamine how big your enemy really is.
David urged everyone, “Magnify the LORD with me” (Psalm 34:3). However, when an enemy of any kind threatens us, we shift our focus off Him and on to the enemy, and it’s like taking a magnifying glass to an anthill. Through that lens, the ants look significantly larger and more terrifying than they really are.
That’s why the Bible’s instruction to magnify God is so powerful. God is not on an ego trip. He wants us to magnify Him because He knows that, if we do, we’ll be able to defeat any enemy that comes against us and use that enemy as a stepstool for promotion to the next level in life.
Here’s a way to remember this: To get out from underneath the threat of an enemy, change what you’re magnifying.
At the time of the Exodus, most of the spies who returned from Canaan magnified the enemy and described themselves through their condition. They were physically smaller and weaker than the inhabitants of the land, so they felt reduced to comparing themselves to grasshoppers (Numbers 13:32-33). But Joshua and Caleb saw the enemy through their position as the soldiers of almighty God. So they knew that they would defeat the enemy.
Do you know how big your God is? The Bible says God uses the earth as a footstool (Isaiah 66: 1). He takes the whole earth and uses it as an ottoman! You serve a God that big, and you’re worried about your upcoming job review and your car payment?
He knows the number of hairs on your entire head (Luke 12:7), yet how much time do you spend stressing over, worrying about, and looking at your problem? That’s His job. You’re supposed to set your eyes on Jesus, the author and finisher of your faith (Hebrews 12:2).
Here’s the problem with a problem: If you keep looking at an enemy, it fills your field of vision – before long it seems that the enemy is all you can see. That’s why the Bible instructs us to magnify the Lord at all times. If He fills our vision, then we are seeing what is true and ultimately real – a God with whom all things are possible.
Ron and Hope Carpenter appear this Monday and Tuesday on LIFE TODAY. Excerpted from The Necessity Of An Enemy by Ron Carpenter Jr. Copyright ©2012 by Ron Carpenter Jr. Published by WaterBrook, an imprint of Penguin Random House. Used by permission.
