Romans 7:15 “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” This episode discusses how important it it to stop missing out on things because of distractions in our lives. Resist the distractions and see how different your life could me. Music:"Adding the Sun" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Distractions, are they from the Devil?
Romans 7:15 “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.”
I really like this verse. It may be one of my favorite verses. I feel as though I may have used it so often in these devotionals you all may have it memorized by now. I use it so often because I find it so applicable in my life. I am constantly finding myself distracted and doing something I don’t want to be doing. I have big dreams. I know God wants to use me for big things, and I have said yes to all God wants to use me for. I have said yes to all the things. And yet, I can’t be available to do those things if I am filling my time with all these other things that He hasn’t asked me to do. God did not ask me to watch 2 hours of TV today. Actually, He tried to get me to turn the TV off by reminding me of my other tasks waiting for me. I am now up pretty late at night doing the episode because I watched TV earlier even though this episode wasn’t done yet. I also needed to type something up for my prayer group and now it won’t get done until tomorrow because I watched TV.
I am not saying watching TV is bad. I don’t think there is anything wrong with watching some TV. However, when I know I have other things I need to do and I don’t get to them because I watched TV, that is frustrating for me. It is frustrating to me because I know it is something I struggle with. I always tell myself this time will be different and this time I will just watch one episode and then I don’t. It is never different. You would think after all these years of being me, I would know me by now. If I watch one episode I will watch another. It is very difficult for me to turn the TV off once it is on. I know this and yet it is still a struggle. I know I am better off if I don’t turn it on. If I could just make it through those quick 10 minutes of awkwardness when I am easting in silence because I didn’t turn the TV on, then I know the rest of my day will be better. And yet, I turn it on. WHY??
Maybe your distraction isn’t TV. Maybe you don’t relate to not being able to turn the TV off. Great, then what is your thing? We all have something that distracts us from our prayer time, our work and our family. Maybe your thing is online shopping. Once you start looking for something online you get lost in time and four hours later, you are still shopping. Maybe it is reading a book. You get so engrossed in you book you forget about everything else you said you would do. What about games on your phone, or social media? How much time are you spending on those and what are you not doing in order to have time to be on your phone? We all have some weakness that sucks up our time if we are not careful. The other day when I was searching for the Screwtape letter for an episode earlier this week, the one called, no condemnation, I came upon this letter. I have not been able to shake what is says. It has stuck with me the rest of this week so I will share it with you. Don’t worry, I am not going to go through all the letters, although you really should read them all, they are amazing.
For those of you who did not listen to the episode earlier this week, let me explain what I am talking about. The Screwtape Letters is a book written by C. S. Lewis. The premise of the Screwtape Letters is a series of Letters from an Uncle, Screwtape, to his nephew Wormwood. Wormwood is a junior demon and his uncle is a high level demon. The nephew writes to his uncle about his “patient” i.e. the man who’s soul he is trying to win for the devil and the book is comprised of his uncle’s replies. It can be a bit confusing because when they talk about the enemy in this letter they are talking about God. When they talk about the father below they are talking about satan. The book discloses tactics the enemy uses to win our souls for Satan. Here is an excerpt from Letter XII:
“As this condition becomes more fully established, you will be gradually freed from the tiresome business of providing Pleasures as temptations. As the uneasiness and his reluctance to face it cut him off more and more from all real happiness, and as habit renders the pleasures of vanity and excitement and flippancy at once less pleasant and harder to forgo (for that is what habit fortunately does to a pleasure) you will find that anything or nothing is sufficient to attract his wandering attention. You no longer need a good book, which he really likes, to keep him from his prayers or his work or his sleep; a column of advertisements in yesterday’s paper will do. You can make him waste his time not only in conversation he enjoys with people whom he likes, but in conversations with those he cares nothing about on subjects that bore him. You can make him do nothing at all for long periods. You can keep him up late at night, not roistering, but staring at a dead fire in a cold room. All the healthy and outgoing activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at last he may say, as one of my own patients said on his arrival down here, “I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked”. The Christians describe the Enemy as one “without whom Nothing is strong”. And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off.
You will say that these are very small sins; and doubtless, like all young tempters, you are anxious to be able to report spectacular wickedness. But do remember, the only thing that matters is the extent to which you separate the man from the Enemy. It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts,
Your affectionate uncle
SCREWTAPE”
This is so sad to me and yet it is something so many of us fall into. We can waste years of our lives doing nothing if we are not careful. Today it is so easy to get sucking into hours of TV. There are no commercials, you don’t have to hit any buttons, you just sit on the couch and the TV keeps playing episode after episode. It can also be so easy to get sucked into playing on our phones, surfing the internet on our computers, reading a book, whatever it is that is keeping you distracting from your real purpose in life. I wonder how many people have failed to live up to their potential because of distractions. Les Brown said, “The graveyard is the richest place on earth, because it is here that you will find all the hopes and dreams that were never fulfilled, the books that were never written, the songs that were never sung, the inventions that were never shared, the cures that were never discovered, all because someone was too afraid to take that first step, keep with the problem, or determined to carry out their dream.” Or, maybe they were just too distracted by other things to accomplish their dreams?
Let’s not make the same mistakes. Let’s live more intentionally. Let’s put down our phones, get off our computers, get off the couch, turn off the TV, put the book down and spend some time with the Lord. Listen to what the Lord wants you to do and then do it. Not after you finish wasting all your time, do it now, before another day goes by. We don’t know how many days we are going to get. Each one is a gift. What are we doing with that gift? How are we spending the days of our life? How much of this precious time God has given us are we going to allow the enemy to steal from us? How much time are we going to surrender to mindless distractions just because the enemy has convinced us we want to. When you stop yourself from engaging in your usual distractions it will be hard at first. Your mind will try to talk you into it and tell you it is not a big deal. Fight the urge to listen. Remember what it says in the letter. I will leave you with the last few lines of the letter because they are the ones I can’t seem to shake this week. “But do remember, the only thing that matters is the extent to which you separate the man from the Enemy. It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts,” Don’t go down that gentle slope. Pay attention to what you are doing and live more intentionally. Don’t let the enemy trick you anymore. Fight back! Distractions are from the enemy.
Dear Heavenly Father, I ask you to bless all those listening to this episode today. Lord, help us to fight the distractions. Help us to know, even though we feel powerless against the pull of the distraction, we aren’t. You are right there giving us all the power we need. All we need to do is acknowledge you are filling us with the power and then use that power to walk away from the distraction. Lord, this is so hard, please continue to strengthen our resolve each and every day. Help us to fight these temptations, help us to recognize they are straight from the devil and to reject them. Lord you are amazing. You are the Light of the world and the our Savior. You are the Lord God Almighty. We love you Lord and we ask all of this in accordance with your will and in Jesus’ holy name, Amen.
Thank you for joining me on this journey to walk boldly with Jesus. I look forward to spending time with you on Monday. Have a blessed weekend!