Focus On Jesus For Greater Impact by Rev. Christie Bature: MP3 Download & Sermon Notes

Impact means to have effect, to have influence, to alter. Focus means a central point of attention, to concentrate one's thoughts and sight. Jesus is already a given; he is already there, willing to carry anyone as far as they want to see and as high as they want to go. Impact itself is already assured, since God has promised that whatever the hand finds to do will prosper. What is variable, what actually determines whether that impact happens, is focus: what a person is looking at, and how.

It Was Just an Interruption

Joseph saw twelve brothers bowing to him in a dream. What followed was a pit, two rounds of slavery, a false accusation, and prison, none of which looked anything like the dream. It would have been easy to conclude the dream was never real. It was not the end of the story; it was an interruption, the same way a paused film is not a canceled one, only a story still waiting to resume.

Moses lived as a prince, then killed a man and spent forty years running sheep through a desert, invisible to everyone who once knew him. That desert was not a demotion from his destiny; it turned out to be the leadership training he never knew he needed. Ruth buried her husband and left everything familiar behind, and what looked like the collapse of her story became the doorway into a far larger one. Esther, an orphan asked to hide her own identity just to enter the palace, found that her greatest losses had quietly positioned her for the greatest assignment of her life. Daniel and Nehemiah were both prisoners of war before they became a prime minister and a wall-builder respectively. Peter's worst night, denying Christ three times after boasting he never would, became the birthplace of a humbler, stronger leader rather than the end of his ministry. Paul's road to impact began in blindness, not on a throne. None of these were full stops. They were interruptions, and there is a real difference between the two: an interruption is something a person eventually presses play again on; a full stop is something they never get up from.

Finding Focus Inside Rejection

Being born the third of what would eventually be six girls in a home that had visibly celebrated its first son meant growing up hearing, plainly, that a female child had no particular value. A mother once remarked, in front of others, that among her daughters this one was the least attractive. Both comments lodged somewhere deep and produced years of feeling unqualified simply to exist in a room, made worse by growing up in a part of Nigeria where women were treated less as people than as property. Even a naturally deep speaking voice, mocked constantly as a child, led to years of staying quiet by constraint rather than by nature, because the enemy of anyone with a genuine voice tends to try to silence it before it is ever used for anything.

What changed everything was seeing, in Scripture, that in Christ there is no male or female; a body has a gender, but a spirit does not, and no one gets to determine a person's worth on a physical, temporary level when there is a spiritual, eternal one that only God defines. That single shift, from evaluating worth by appearance or social status to receiving identity from Christ, is what turned a life shaped by rejection into a platform still standing decades later. Every ridiculed detail, the wrong gender, the wrong face, the wrong voice, was never a full stop either. It was an interruption that the enemy meant to bury a calling under, and it did not work.

Vision Without Clarity

Mark 8:22-26 tells of a blind man brought to Jesus at Bethsaida. Jesus led him outside the village, touched his eyes, and asked what he could see. The man answered, "I see men as trees, walking," seeing shapes and movement but not yet able to distinguish one thing clearly from another. Jesus touched his eyes a second time, the only recorded instance in the Gospels of him praying twice over the same need, and only then was the man's sight made fully clear.

This is not a story about limited power; it is a picture of how revelation often works. Many believers have genuine sight without yet having clear sight, vision without clarity, and mistake that partial stage for the whole answer, when it is only meant to be a step toward it. Spiritually, seeing "men as trees" can describe distorted perception, where people start to feel like objects, ordinary problems start to look like giants, opportunities start to look like threats, and a genuine calling starts to feel like confusion. It can also describe a specific and costly loss of discernment, the inability to tell a healthy relationship from a harmful one.

This matters urgently for mothers raising daughters. A woman who has survived betrayal or abuse and stays silent about it, rather than teaching her children to recognize the same warning signs early, leaves them defenseless, and they often end up walking straight into the same pattern she survived. Charm offered right after cruelty, isolation from friends and family framed as devotion, an apology with no accountability behind it, are patterns worth naming out loud rather than quietly protecting.

Provision Beyond the Numbers

Answering a call to ministry meant leaving a comfortable, rent-free home against every practical instinct, and doing it three years later than obedience actually required. The night that finally forced the move was the night the house was emptied by burglars while its owner was away ministering elsewhere; what looked like devastating loss turned out to be God moving the furniture that stubbornness had refused to move. What followed was a season of real scarcity, secondhand clothes, plastic shoes, a borrowed guitar, and a weekly circuit of five hospitals to sing and pray for the sick, simply because that ministry required no budget beyond transport fare.

One of those hospital visits was to a boy whose eye had swollen dangerously after being mistakenly injected by an untrained chemist rather than treated properly. Singing and praying over him that day, then returning the following week, coincided with the swelling receding completely and his sight fully restored, confirmed by hospital staff who had watched the whole progression. That same hospital ministry, unpaid and unplanned, is also where a lasting friendship began with another woman serving the sick from a wheelchair, someone who would go on to marry, raise two children, and complete a master's degree, against every prediction made about her.

Decades later, a daughter's illness required an extraordinarily expensive bone marrow transplant; the first attempt failed outright, another interruption rather than an ending, and the second attempt, quoted at roughly a million dollars, was somehow completed for a fraction of that cost. Within a week of returning home, an anonymous gift arrived: a brand new vehicle, delivered without explanation, as if to underline that the same God who had already shrunk an impossible medical bill was not finished providing.

Turning Loss Into Assignment

Of ten children in one family, only two remain; the rest, both parents included, were lost to addiction over the years. That loss was, for a long time, simply grief with no evident purpose attached to it, until a clear inward conviction arrived: this was the very ministry being prepared for all along. The same pain, anger, and shame once carried personally became the foundation for opening one of the first drug rehabilitation centers of its kind in that part of Nigeria, work now considered more fulfilling than any pulpit ministry, precisely because it reaches families living through the exact devastation once lived through personally.

The size of a challenge often reflects how much responsibility is being entrusted to a person, not how much has been withheld from them. A plan already underway for a much larger complex, combining a rehabilitation center, a shelter for survivors of domestic abuse, and a home for the elderly, is being pursued for the same reason every earlier obedience was: not because every resource is already in hand, but because the interruptions along the way, however severe, were never actually the end of the story.