{"id":2189,"date":"2012-01-02T16:56:19","date_gmt":"2012-01-02T20:56:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shieldsgroup.com\/?p=2189"},"modified":"2012-01-02T21:30:51","modified_gmt":"2012-01-03T01:30:51","slug":"setting-your-sights-on-spiritual-depth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shieldsgroup.com\/blog\/2012\/01\/02\/setting-your-sights-on-spiritual-depth\/","title":{"rendered":"Setting Your Sights on Spiritual Depth"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the 1800s, in the area of Virginia City, NV, Americans discovered a bonanza<\/strong> \u2014 a vein of silver which is said to have funded a great deal of the Union\u2019s part in the Civil War. The shaft of silver was called, \u201cThe Comstock,\u201d named after one of its early investors. The discovery was so important that it is argued that the city of San Francisco would have been nothing more than a ghost-town, were it not for the Comstock. The Comstock was an unusual mine in that the deeper they dug, the hotter things got due to the hot-springs in the ground. The temperature in the Comstock silver mine was in the triple digits \u2014even around 150 degrees F. When they hit a vein of water, miners would be scalded \u2014 sometimes to death.<\/p>\n

A man named Adolph Sutro<\/strong> put together the money to dig a tunnel, almost four miles long, to meet the miners as they were digging down from Virginia City. The tunnel was one of the wonders of the time, being able to accommodate teams of mules in and out. Sutro\u2019s plan was for the tunnel to meet the mine shaft as it descended.\u00a0It was an impressive project.<\/p>\n

But Sutro set his sights too shallowly<\/strong>. By the time his horizontal tunnel intersected the vertical mineshaft, the digging was being done below his tunnel. Sutro sold out and went to San Francisco. When I first heard that story, I thought of how much we tend to be like that \u2014 missing the mark when we set our sights. Whether you\u2019re speaking about, students in high school, young adults thinking about college, or people choosing a vocation, setting our sights deeply enough is often a struggle. It\u2019s not the end of the world if you do that academically or even vocationally. Anyone who studies human beings can tell you that those outcomes don\u2019t dictate happiness. And I can tell you, as a pastor, that success in life can actually hinder closeness with God, unless you set your mind to prevent that from happening.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, if I may, I\u2019d like to say that often spiritually, we all tend to set our \u00a0sights too shallowly concerning spiritual objectives we might want to reach.<\/strong><\/p>\n

In this podcast, we think about where we want to be, spiritually speaking, down the road.\u00a0 In order to be sure to set our sights deeply, we\u2019ll look at Philippians 3, reading our way through it as we go.<\/p>\n

And we\u2019ll take our cue from the Apostle Paul \u2014 who set his sights on something deep.<\/strong><\/p>\n