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February 10 - February 21, 2020
“The average iPhone user touches his or her phone 2,617 times a day.”
What would my life be like if God touched my mind as frequently as I touch my phone?)
in America you can be a success as a pastor and a failure as an apprentice of Jesus; you can gain a church and lose your soul.
Hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day. You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.”
Corrie ten Boom once said that if the devil can’t make you sin, he’ll make you busy.
There’s truth in that. Both sin and busyness have the exact same effect—they cut off your connection to God, to other people, and even to your own soul.
Hurry is not of the devil; hurry is the devil.
The problem isn’t when you have a lot to do; it’s when you have too much to do and the only way to keep the quota up is to hurry.
Obstacles to Growth Survey of over twenty thousand Christians across the globe and identified busyness as a major distraction from spiritual life. Listen carefully to his hypothesis: It may be the case that (1) Christians are assimilating to a culture of busyness, hurry and overload, which leads to (2) God becoming more marginalized in Christians’ lives, which leads to (3) a deteriorating relationship with God, which leads to (4) Christians becoming even more vulnerable to adopting secular assumptions about how to live, which leads to (5) more conformity to a culture of busyness, hurry and
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This new speed of life isn’t Christian; it’s anti-Christ.
Hurry and love are incompatible.
All my worst moments as a father, a husband, and a pastor, even as a human being, are when I’m in a hurry
There’s a reason people talk about “walking” with God, not “running” with God. It’s because God is love.
God walks “slowly” because he is love. If he is not love he would have gone much faster. Love has its speed. It is an inner speed. It is a spiritual speed. It is a different kind of speed from the technological speed to which we are accustomed. It is “slow” yet it is lord over all other speeds since it is the speed of love.
The more present we are to the now, the more joy we tap into.
“I cannot live in the kingdom of God with a hurried soul.”
To walk with Jesus is to walk with a slow, unhurried pace. Hurry is the death of prayer and only impedes and spoils our work. It never advances it.11
For many of us the great danger is not that we will renounce our faith. It is that we will become so distracted and rushed and preoccupied that we will settle for a mediocre version of it. We will just skim our lives instead of actually living them.14
Could it be that Willard was right? That an overbusy, digitally distracted life of speed is the greatest threat to spiritual life that we face in the modern world?
In one generation, Sunday evolved from a day of rest and worship to a day to buy more crap we don’t need, run errands, eat out, or just get a jump-start on our work for the week ahead.
“If you grow dependent on your smartphone, it becomes a magical device that silently shouts your name at your brain at all times.”
right now everything is being intentionally designed for distraction and addiction. Because that’s where the money is.
A company can get your money if, and only if, they can get your attention.
There are literally thousands of apps and devices intentionally engineered to steal your attention. And with it your money.
Reminder: Your phone doesn’t actually work for you. You pay for it, yes. But it works for a multibillion-dollar corporation in California, not for you. You’re not the customer; you’re the product. It’s your attention that’s for sale, along with your peace of mind.
Addiction is the relentless pull to a substance or an activity that becomes so compulsive it ultimately interferes with everyday life. By that definition, nearly everyone I know is addicted in some measure to the Internet.
an overbusy, hurried life of speed is the new normal in the Western world, and it’s toxic.
Hurry kills relationships. Love takes time; hurry doesn’t have it.
wisdom is born in the quiet, the slow.
“Attention is the beginning of devotion.”11 Worship and joy start with the capacity to turn our minds’ attention toward the God who is always with us in the now.
Usually we interpret treasure to mean our two basic resources: time and money. But an even more precious resource is attention. Without it our spiritual lives are stillborn in the womb.
Because what you give your attention to is the person you become.
the mind is the portal to the soul, and what you fill your mind with will shape the trajectory of your character.
But not for those who give their attention to the 24-7 news cycle of outrage and anxiety and emotion-charged drama or the nonstop feed of celebrity gossip, titillation, and cultural drivel.
love how John Ortberg framed it: “Hurry is not just a disordered schedule. Hurry is a disordered heart.”
love Peter Scazzero’s line: “We find God’s will for our lives in our limitations.”10
The whole point of apprenticeship is to model all of your life after Jesus.
If you want to experience the life of Jesus, you have to adopt the lifestyle of Jesus.
Your life is the by-product of your lifestyle.
Jesus doesn’t offer us an escape. He offers us something far better: “equipment.”
What does it mean to follow Jesus (or, as I prefer, apprentice under Jesus)? It’s very simple. It means you live the way Jesus lived. You take his life and teachings as your template, your model, your pattern.
Stephen Covey (of 7 Habits fame) said that we achieve inner peace when our schedule is aligned with our values. That line isn’t from the Bible, but my guess is, if Jesus heard that, he would smile and nod.
If a vine doesn’t have a trellis, it will die. And if your life with Jesus doesn’t have some kind of structure to facilitate health and growth, it will wither away.
Following Jesus has to make it onto your schedule and into your practices or it will simply never happen. Apprenticeship to Jesus will remain an idea, not a reality in your life.
A survey from Microsoft found that 77 percent of young adults answered “‘yes’ when asked, ‘When nothing is occupying my attention, the first thing I do is reach for my phone.’”
The noise of the modern world makes us deaf to the voice of God, drowning out the one input we most need.
Without solitude it is virtually impossible to live a spiritual life. … We do not take the spiritual life seriously if we do not set aside some time to be with God and listen to him.
you don’t set aside time to be alone with God, your relationship will wither on the vine.
If the churches came to understand that the greatest threat to faith today is not hedonism but distraction, perhaps they might begin to appeal anew to a frazzled digital generation.
Ultimately, nothing in this life, apart from God, can satisfy our desires. Tragically, we continue to chase after our desires ad infinitum.
