Are You Paying Attention? | Torah | Deuteronomy 8

[MUSIC] >> Welcome to 10 Minute Bible Talks. >> Where we connect the Bible to your life. >> And the time it takes to get to work. >> I'm Jensen Holt McNair. A few days ago, I was at home getting my lunch ready. My son, Jude, was down for an app, and I was reheating some leftover pizza in the oven. So I start the oven, I put the pizza in, I make a mental note, check on it in a few minutes, and then I started a load of laundry. I picked up the playroom, and I sat down the couch to fold a load of laundry while I caught up on a show. And then 40 minutes later, my son started crying. So I got him up, I fed him, I changed the diaper, and I headed to the playroom to hang out. And on my way, I passed the kitchen, which smelled kind of funny, which is exactly when I realized that my pizza no longer resembled pizza. It was instead a very burnt brick. We went to Chick-fil-A for lunch instead. Now besides bragging about my super healthy diet, this story exposes a chronic problem that I have in my life. I'm easily distracted. When my husband and I go out to dinner, he purposefully takes whatever seat will keep me with my back to the rest of the restaurant. He knows that a table full of people stressing a waitress out or a couple having an argument, or a baby, or a TV, or a car having a hard time parking outside will all pull my attention away from the table in front of me. And the conversation he's trying to have will be hopeless. Now I'm sure you've probably heard that humans now have the attention of a goldfish, but that's wrong. We've actually dropped below the goldfish now. We've gone from a long nine seconds to an eight-second attention span this year. A 2020 Harvard study showed that our minds are wandering 47% of the time. On average, people spend 147 minutes a day on social media apps that are designed to grab your attention with new and exciting entertainment every few seconds to keep you hooked. Articles and blog posts are getting shorter, so people stick around and actually read them. See, our world is operating at a high speed. We're bombarded by ads, pictures, sounds, tasks, errands, kids, work, emails, notifications, chores, and so much more every single day. There's so much to do, so much to manage, so many examples on social media of other people doing more than you, faster than you, better than you, that it's hard not to feel like you need to do more, do it faster and be better. But then, that magical, addicting little screen in your pocket gets a text, and 45 minutes later, you've been doom-scrolling and haven't gotten anything done on your very long to-do list. You're distracted. I'm distracted. Our world is distracted, and oftentimes it's keeping us from productivity, but what if it's keeping us from something even more important than our to-do lists? In his book, "The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry," which I highly recommend to you, John Mark Comer writes this. What you give your attention to is the person you become. Put another way, the mind is the portal to the soul and what you fill your mind with will shape the trajectory of your character. In the end, your life is no more than the sum of what you gave your attention to. That bodes well for those apprentices of Jesus who give the bulk of their attention to him and to all that is good, beautiful and true in this world. But not for those who give their attention to the 24/7 new cycle of outrage and anxiety and emotion-charged drama, or the non-stop feed of celebrity gossip, titillation and cultural drivel. As if we give it in the first place, much of it is stolen by a clever algorithm out to monetize our precious attention. But again, we become what we give our attention to for better or for worse. Later, he writes, "Attention is the beginning of devotion." What are you devoted to? Who are you becoming? See, my fear is that living in this world, Christians would become distracted out of their devotion to God. And instead of becoming like Jesus, our distractions would trick us into becoming more like the people we follow on social media. And that is a dangerous road to travel. Deuteronomy devotes an entire chapter, chapter eight, to imploring the people of Israel to remember the Lord. Remember what he has done for them. Remember his commands. Remember that he provides that he delivers. Remember that he is the Lord their God. Why? Well, because forgetting the Lord is a dangerous road to travel. Verse 10. When you have eaten and are satisfied, praise the Lord your God for the good land he has given you. Be careful that you do not forget the Lord your God, failing to observe his commands, his laws and his decrees that I am giving to you this day. Otherwise, when you eat and are satisfied, when you build, find houses and settle down and when your herds and flocks grow large and your silver and gold increase and all you have is multiplied, then your heart will become proud. And you will forget the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt out of the land of slavery. He led you through the vast and dreadful wilderness, that thirsty and waterless land with its venomous snakes and scorpions. He brought you water out of hard rock. He gave you mana to eat in the wilderness, something your ancestors had never known, to humble and test you so that in the end, it might go well with you. You may say to yourself, my power and the strength of my hands have produced this wealth for me, but remember the Lord your God, for it is He who gives you the ability to produce wealth and so confirms his covenant which he swore to your ancestors as it is today. When distractions keep you busy, when your mind wanders to your to-do list, when your schedule gets filled up so quickly, our minds and hearts can forget God. We look back on our weeks and we don't see any trace of Him. No time for reading the Bible, our prayers were interrupted by the buzz of a phone and our minds raced with to-do lists rather than resting in truth. The problem is that what we give our attention to matters. When we devote ourselves to things other than the Lord, when we start becoming like the things we fill our time with, our hearts forget the Lord and fill up with ourselves. It wasn't the Lord who provided but me and my hard work. It wasn't the Lord who delivered me from anxiety, but my dedication to self-care. The Lord doesn't get to tell me what to do. I make my own choices. See, our pesky distractions have the power to slowly orient our whole lives towards a new and dangerous trajectory. A path that Deuteronomy 8 tells us leads to destruction. So what do we do? How can we fight to remember the Lord? I think that there are a lot of small steps we can take to do this. I've had friends put sticky notes of scripture on their mirror. I've set time limits on my phone. I've deleted social media. You could set alarms on your phone that reminds you to pray. You can schedule actual time on your actual calendar to spend time studying scripture. See, fighting distraction will take a lot of work and accountability. But I also don't want to miss what Deuteronomy 8 has to say about how we can fight our tendency to forget our God. See, verse 10, it tells us that when we have eaten and are satisfied that we need to praise the Lord our God for the good land He has given to us. And that's what I want us to do this week. Every morning, after you've woken up and before you go to work or school or start taking care of the kids, take five minutes, five minutes to sit down and physically write down five things you're thankful for in your life that God has provided to you. And then take another five minutes to praise God for those ways that He's provided them. I've been doing this imperfectly in my life and on the days that I take time to do it, I find it harder to forget the Lord throughout the day. I find that as little things happen that I'm thankful for throughout the day, I'm more likely to attribute that to the Lord to take the time to praise Him for those things. As in my hope is that from this, we would slowly reorient our minds and attention back to the Lord that we would remember He is at work. He is present. He is asking for our attention, our dedication, our obedience, our devotion, our whole lives. Because He wants to provide for us. He wants to bring us into His family and His kingdom. He wants to partner with us in bringing love, justice and mercy to a world that desperately needs it. But we cannot do that if we are distracted out of remembering that God even exists. We are on a dangerous road, one that will keep us from ever accomplishing the mission of God's people. Who are you devoted to? Take the time this week to fight your distraction, to draw your attention back to the Lord, your God, and see the ways that He is present and calling you to partner with Him and His mission. Before you forget, sign up for the 10 Minute Bible Talks newsletter. Hit the link in the show notes and you'll get an email every Wednesday that will help encourage you in the middle of the work week and bring you deeper in your walk with Jesus. Thanks for listening. (gentle music)