What is your focus centered on during these dark days? Is your hope in a governmental party? Is a vaccine your salvation? Does your sustenance rise and fall with the stock market? Or, do you continue to look up for your eternal destiny?

     Our focus this year at CTF is to exhort you to keep LOOKING UP, as the author of Hebrews tells us in the second verse of the twelfth chapter. Fixing our eyes on Jesus is our utmost priority. With everything going on around us, we can be easily distracted. Yet our focus is to stay on Christ, because he is the Author and Perfecter of our faith.

     His authorship obviously began at creation, and this qualifies Him like none other to be our prime focus in these days. We need the only One who has been here since the beginning, the One on whom all rests, the only One who is absolute and almighty, the only One in ultimate authority! All of this may seem quite trite, but if we are real with ourselves, nothing else can sustain. We could try to look else where, but all other avenues lack His authority as Author to guide us through life.

     He is also our Perfecter – the one who perfected this life like no one else could in all of history. Sin has come into the world and marred it. We have blemished the perfection of creation. Our relationship with the Author has been damaged and we have no way to restore it under our own power. The world is in chaos and we keep trying to fix it, but even with our best efforts life continues to spiral out of our control. We are in desperate need of the Perfecter to restore our relationship and life like only He is able. He holds the keys to life because He, as the author of Hebrews relates, endured the cross with great joy in the midst of shame and chaos, so that we may be perfected from our sin and death that we encounter, sometimes it seems daily.

     Our sustenance, salvation, comfort, rest, and hope can only be perfected through the Author of life and conqueror of death. Let us continue in 2021 to keep LOOKING UP at Him, Jesus Christ, and nowhere else. And before you know it, things might start looking up, or at the least our comfort level in the midst of the chaos will begin looking up. Blessings in this year 2021!