Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] You're listening to a live recording from Westside Church in Bend, Oregon. Thanks for joining us. We hear this a lot, that in the Internet age, attention spans have gotten so short that you have to really make a point quick, otherwise you lose people's attention. And yet there is this other thing that's happening. And I don't know if you've read about this or seen this, but some of the longest form conversations, as far as podcasts go, are all of a sudden gaining huge traction among Gen Z and now Gen Alpha. So you have a generation that's raised on TikTok videos, right?
[00:00:39] Very short few seconds kind of entertainment. And then also there are this undercurrent of demand and desire for something that is slower and more longer form. And so we have young people and kids even listening to two and three and four hour episodes of these conversations. And so at both points, we have shortening attention spans and yet a hunger, and I think a desire to sit and go with full attention and a fixed focus deep into things that matter to us. And I think what this does is it speaks to the attention economy that everybody is after. Our attention, right? Attention equals dollars. If I can grab your attention with an advertisement or as an influencer, I can get money. That's basically what it boils down to. In fact, $90 billion will go towards advertising this year alone. And I was reading about this, and the author, Tim Wu, said, the attention merchants, by design, have the ability to craft and control the experience of millions of people at once shaping culture and influencing behavior. And in the modern economy, attention has become the most valuable commodity.
[00:01:56] And so we live in a time where, by nature, of the value of your attention, our attention and our focus and our presence has become fragmented and scattered and disconnected from the present moment. And this has incredible effect not only on our relationships and our mental health, but also on our spirituality and our ability to stay present in the space where God is. And what I love about this gathering is that this, for many of us, is one of the few times during our week where we come into a space and we allow ourselves and our attention to be focused on the presence of God in community.
[00:02:39] And maybe that is one of the great drivers of a desire for us to gather, because we all know there's plenty of good content out there. You can consume good content. You can find better preachers than me. Lord knows.
[00:02:53] Don't laugh.
[00:02:57] And yet there's a desire to come into a space where our attention is fixed. And if right now you're also scrolling on something it's okay. There's mercy in the room, right? But this is, by design, a place where we come and we gather together and we focus our attention.
[00:03:16] And I think attention as a thing that is so fragmented, it becomes that thing that we can offer as our sacrifice in worship, that God, you can have my attention.
[00:03:29] One other quote, and this is more to the point, Reed Hastings, the co founder and CEO of Netflix, said, our biggest competitor for people's attention is sleep.
[00:03:40] They've gotten everything else. They've won every other competitor for attention, but sleep is still. People are still sleeping. If we could just solve that, we get people to bend. A whole nother season of love is blind, you know, but we'll get there.
[00:03:57] I think in our moment, our current moment, when our screens and our obligations and our rabid pursuit of productivity is clamoring and screaming for our attention. We need an attention reset so that our spiritual lives don't get discarded along the wayside.
[00:04:19] I think we know this. I think we know that the fragmenting of our attention is actually costing our souls something.
[00:04:26] And so today, we're going to talk about this. What does it look like to focus and fix our attention on Jesus? Would you pray with me? Lord, we thank you today for these moments together. Those in the room, those watching online. We just pray for the ability today not to just perform a religious ritual well, but that, Lord, we would come into your presence and that you would have our full attention.
[00:04:53] We love you. We thank you for this community. In Jesus name, amen. Romans twelve one. Paul is writing to the church in Rome, and he says this. He says, so, dear brothers and sisters, I plead with you to give your bodies to God because of all that he has done for you. Let them be a living and a holy sacrifice, the kind he will find acceptable. This is truly the way to worship him. How do we worship? How do we worship Paul? He says, don't copy the behavior and customs of this world. I think it's really interesting, probably the way that we are dressed right now, the way we think about so many things in the world around us, the way that we engage in relationships.
[00:05:38] All of it has to do with what we have seen and experienced from the world around us, right? And so Paul says, actually, don't copy that influencer. Don't take on the customs that you've read on your feed. Come on, now.
[00:05:54] But instead, let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Or if I could put it this way, by changing what you fix your attention on, and then you will learn to know God's will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect.
[00:06:12] Whatever has our attention will shape who we are becoming.
[00:06:17] And so when Paul encourages us to allow our minds to be transformed, what he is saying, he's saying, fix your minds on something else.
[00:06:26] Then what will become for you a spiral into unhealth.
[00:06:33] Instead, fix your eyes on that thing, the presence of Jesus, and be transformed.
[00:06:40] John Ortberg once wrote, for many of us, the great danger is not that we will renounce our faith.
[00:06:47] It is that we will become so distracted and rushed and preoccupied that we will settle for a mediocre version of it.
[00:06:54] And today, our invitation is, let's leave the mediocre faith behind.
[00:06:58] I think this is really true. If it's mediocre faith or no faith at all, choose no faith at all, because mediocre faith is a corruption of what is the most life giving thing. I think this is why in the book of Revelation, John writes down the words of Jesus to a church, and he says, listen, I would rather you be hot or cold, but you're kind of in the middle of lukewarm. You're kind of mediocre, and that's something I'm gonna spit out of my mouth. He says, that's something that really has no place. Either be in or be out.
[00:07:30] I think it's common for Catholics to define themselves either as Catholic or as practicing Catholic. Right. Have you heard this? Because there's a certain cultural Catholicism, and I think the same is true for us Protestants, that there's a cultural Christianity, that. What religion are you? Well, I'm a Christian. The next question is, are you a practicing Christian?
[00:07:50] Are you putting into practice the way of the one we worship, the way of Jesus?
[00:07:59] And so the question for us today is, will we follow in this way or not?
[00:08:04] So you might be asking, like, okay, so what behaviors do I need to modify to do this? Evan? What behaviors do I need to switch in my life so that God will be okay with me, so that God will love me? And here's the good news.
[00:08:22] You don't have to do anything, because right now, where you are sitting, you are completely loved by God. That's it? That's it.
[00:08:34] I actually. I didn't do anything to deserve God's love. He initiated his love. When the Bible says, I was far away from him, I was the enemy of Goddesse.
[00:08:45] And so we understand that to follow after Jesus is not to do enough things to where God will love us. To follow after Jesus is to wake up and realize that our starting point is the place where we, undeserving of it all, have become completely loved and known by God.
[00:09:05] And it's from that starting point that is not the finish line. You are not earning the love of God at the end of your life. You're not hoping that you've done enough to where God said, now I love you. No. You woke up and on the first day, God said, I love you desperately before you knew to even call out to me. God has had his eyes and his attention and his affection on you.
[00:09:29] And I think this is what John was writing about in one, John three, one. When he said, see what great love the father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God. And that is what we are.
[00:09:42] He's lavished his love on us.
[00:09:45] I've never heard anyone get a new job and come home or get their first paycheck and say, what money my boss has lavished on me. No, you earned that. You put the work in and they fulfilled their side of that transaction. That is not a lavishing kind of experience with the love of God. It is lavished on you. You didn't earn it. It was a gift.
[00:10:11] I remember the first job I ever had.
[00:10:15] It was the late nineties. I was 1314 years old. And I had this idea, I want to start a t shirt printing company, you know, because that's where the big money's at.
[00:10:29] And so I had a friend, and he was several years older, and his parents had worked in the early days for Microsoft. And so he had some Microsoft stock that I went and I said, listen, I got this idea. Microsoft is probably plateaued on its value.
[00:10:45] Once you sell that stock and buy a t shirt printing press with me, that's what's going to get you to the top, baby. So he did.
[00:10:53] He cashed out the stock.
[00:10:57] And so we went into business and we borrowed some space from my dad. He had a warehouse here. And so we borrowed some space. We built this t shirt printing shop, and I think we had, like four clients before the whole thing shut down. But in those early days, so much hope.
[00:11:13] And I remember the first client we got, we printed their t shirts, and we gave them the box of t shirts, and they paid us in cash. And so we took off that stack of cash, a ten dollar bill, and I put it in a frame and hung it on the wall because that was our first of many, many, many payouts that we'd have. And so we sat there and I looked at that $10 bill framed and I wish I could say I have it today and I'm going to show it to you. But the truth is, it lasted about three weeks. And then I was like, I could really use that $10.
[00:11:45] I think I bought a frozen pizza or something. But.
[00:11:49] But this is how, at least in our modern world, we understand how the world works.
[00:11:57] You work for something, you earn it, and then you get the payout from it.
[00:12:02] And this is why I think it is so hard for us to truly accept that the grace and the mercy and the love of God is actually a gift, that it was the act of pure grace that God loved you in the first place. It is not something that you have earned. And we can say intellectually, yeah, we understand that it's a gift of God, but in how we respond, oftentimes we act as though we still have to earn it.
[00:12:29] And this is a problem, because if you have the truth in your mind that I have to earn God's love or anything good that will come to me is something that I have to earn, you'll actually never enter into true rest because that's something you have to earn, and your to do list will never be done.
[00:12:47] You'll never be able to walk in grace because you'll understand, like, I've still got a lot of stuff wrong in me, and I've got to fix that before I can actually truly accept the gift of God's grace. And so we live in these kind of shadow lives where we intellectually believe in the grace of God. But the way that we walk actually looks like we're still earning it. And so we never fully embrace the life that God has for us.
[00:13:14] And so we look back at how Jesus interacted with his very imperfect, very ragamuffin disciples to see what is it for us to enter into a relationship where we understand the love of God is for us? And as a starting point, everything that we will do in pursuit of Jesus, everything we will do in the building of our life of faith, comes as a response to that love of God that is already for us.
[00:13:46] Let's look at this in the gospels.
[00:13:48] Matthew, chapter four, verse 18. One day, as Jesus was walking along the shore of the sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon, also called Peter and Andrew, throwing a net into the water, for they fished for a living. Jesus called out to them, come, follow me, and I will show you how to fish for people.
[00:14:05] And they left their nets at once and followed him. A little further up the shore, he saw two older brothers, James and John, sitting in a boat with their father Zebedee, repairing their nets, and he called them to come, too. And they immediately followed him, leaving the boat and their father behind.
[00:14:22] So interesting that they would leave immediately.
[00:14:25] It also makes me wonder, how many other young fishermen did Jesus call out to that said, give me a second.
[00:14:33] Let me wrap this up, or maybe next year, Rabbi.
[00:14:38] And yet it's these young men who respond immediately. They drop their nets. They leave their father behind to follow him. What is the motivation for these young guys to fall after Jesus? Surely not to impress their families. I'm sure dad Zebedee was upset that these guys are leaving him not only to do the work that they should be doing, but also abandoning the family business.
[00:15:06] It's not because they are worried about the anger of God or that they might go to hell if they don't respond to Jesus. That's really not in their theology.
[00:15:15] So what is it about this call that Jesus gives that causes these young men to respond so immediately? I think this.
[00:15:23] That one, somehow the voice of Jesus got their attention, got their full attention.
[00:15:30] And there was something so compelling about the way that Jesus called out to them that it would motivate them to leave everything behind to follow him. In the first century, rabbis would do this. Itinerant rabbis would wander around the countryside with bands of disciples behind them. This was the normal custom.
[00:15:50] And so it was not outside the norms for Jesus, as this young rabbi, to call out to disciples. And what disciples would want to do is that they would want to become like their teacher, like their rabbi, who would be several years older, and they would follow after him, and they would learn from him, and they would be with him until they themselves would be able to become teachers.
[00:16:17] And so it's this desire to be like him that motivates these young disciples to follow after Jesus. And there's this old saying, this first century jewish saying, that would be given to young disciples as they would set out to become part of the crew of a rabbi. And the phrase was, may you be covered in the dust of your rabbi's feet.
[00:16:44] And the idea was that they would follow so closely in the steps of the rabbi that the dust coming off the sandals of the rabbi would cover them.
[00:16:53] This past year, I went to Wichita, Kansas. Any Wichita fans out there?
[00:16:59] Really? Okay.
[00:17:02] My wife, Alyssa, who's here this morning, graduated from Friends University, got her master's in spiritual direction and christian leadership. It was very cool, really. She spent two years getting her master's degree in learning what it is to put into practice the way of Jesus, and in doing so, also leading others in it. And at the graduation that I joined her for, there was a banquet the night before, and their professor, who is the cohort leader, called them up one by one, the students that were graduating. And he quoted this phrase from the first century. We said, may you be covered in the dust of your rabbi's feet. And he gave each of them a little glass vial filled with dirt. And if you want to really make the TSA concerned, just carry a little vial of dirt in your carry on.
[00:17:54] It took a long time to get home, but there was something in those days, in the earliest days of this following after a rabbi, that it wasn't just like, intellectually agree with whatever your rabbi says or believe in the same things that your rabbi believes in. No, there was something very physical in the following, that you would walk in the footsteps of the one that you were following so closely that that dust would cover you. And so these disciples, they began to follow after Jesus, leaving everything behind.
[00:18:30] And this is something that probably would have made them feel kind of elite, you know, here's Jesus. He's this up and coming rabbi, word spreading about him. He teaches with authority, and he's even starting to heal. And I think this is pretty cool. We're the entourage of Jesus.
[00:18:50] And as they walk along, and Jesus is calling more and more of these disciples to himself.
[00:18:57] These early disciples, Peter and Andrew and James and John, are, by thinking we are the first.
[00:19:04] We are elite.
[00:19:06] I think we're the best of Jesus disciples because he called to us first. Did you hear the tone of voice he used when he called out to me? Peter says, and they think that they're going to live a good life at the top rung.
[00:19:21] And then Jesus walks with them, and he knocks on a door, and they're like, isn't this a tax collector? Doesn't a tax collector live here? Like that sleazy guy that steals all our money for Rome?
[00:19:33] And Jesus walks into the house and there's a table set, and already there's guests at the table. And James and John and Peter and Eddie are like, I thought we were going to go to the temple and show off how smart Jesus is about all the scripture and stuff. But we're here, and there's some really, really low life kind of people around this table.
[00:19:54] There's cheats and frauds and sex workers and the lowest of the low of the whole city. They've all come out to sit around this table. What is going on, Jesus? We thought we were the elite, and then Jesus starts talking, and the tone of voice he uses with the least of these around the table is the same tone of voice, voice he called out to Peter with.
[00:20:16] And Peter's like, uh oh, we're following a rabbi who hasn't created this special club just for us, but he uses that same tone for everybody.
[00:20:29] And very quickly, these disciples of Jesus would have realized that not only did they belong to Jesus, but everybody could belong to Jesus.
[00:20:40] And why do I talk about this kind of experience the disciples had is because this was not Jesus teaching specifically, yet he would get to that. This was not Jesus speaking directly to Peter. Hey, you need to learn this. Listen up. This is how things go. No, this was Peter and James and John and Andrew simply being close enough to Jesus to see how he acts.
[00:21:04] And that was seeping into their souls.
[00:21:07] So much so that years later, after Jesus crucifixion and death and resurrection in acts chapter four, the leaders in the city in Jerusalem would say this. It says, when they saw the courage of Peter and John and realized that they were unschooled, ordinary men, they were astonished, and they took note that these men had been with Jesus.
[00:21:31] The mark of discipleship, the mark of those who follow after Jesus, is that people think, I recognize in them what I know about Jesus.
[00:21:42] And this, my friends, is what it is like when we step out of, yeah, I'm part of the christian faith into, I'm a disciple in the way of Jesus. I'm a practicing Christian. Don't probably say it that way because that makes you sound weird, but I am someone who is absolutely, passionately focused.
[00:22:06] My tension is fixed on following after the way of Jesus.
[00:22:11] Being with Jesus really is the first step of discipleship. I think oftentimes we think of someday, if we grow our faith in the right ways and we become so mature in our faith, then we will arrive in a place where we can just spend time in God's presence and be okay with that. But what if that was the first point?
[00:22:28] What if that is the starting point of our journey of faith, that we spend time and we are at rest in the presence of Jesus?
[00:22:38] In the end, being with him, I think, is really the most important part of our faith. This is what Jesus talked about in John 15. When he said, abide in me and I in you, he was saying, be okay sitting with me.
[00:22:54] Paul would have a word for this being with this focusing on this facing towards God's presence. And we find it in two corinthians 318, when Paul writes, and we all who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord's glory. We're being transformed into his image with ever increasing glory, which comes from the Lord who is the spirit. Here's the thing. When we get close to the presence of God and we begin to gaze upon him, we then reflect, what is the stuff of him.
[00:23:27] I've heard that eventually, if you're married long enough, you start looking like your spouse.
[00:23:33] Apologies to my wife, who's here. As I said, I don't know if that's true. But I do know this, that what we spend time immersing ourselves in will affect and shape who we become.
[00:23:46] And if we are constantly inundated and taking in and consuming, whether it be fear filled news, we're going to become fear based people, right? If we take in things that make us covetous and want what we don't have and are always trying to achieve, something that's just beyond our reach will become covetous people.
[00:24:12] But if you fix your eyes on Jesus, I know this, and I believe this, you will become a person of compassion and mercy, someone who speaks with authority and who has a peace that passes understanding, a person of non anxious presence in a world filled with anxiety. Why do I know this? Because that's how Jesus was.
[00:24:33] And wouldn't it be wonderful if at some point in our lives, people would look at our lives and they'd be astonished, and they would take note that we had been with Jesus?
[00:24:44] We spent enough time face to face in his presence, to where we began to reflect what he's like.
[00:24:52] This idea of contemplation can sound kind of woo woo. That's the theological term for it, woo woo.
[00:25:00] But this idea that, oh, we just, you know, we sit alone and we turn inward and we just focus on, you know, our own souls and. But can I tell you this, that the contemplation, this act of contemplating God's glory is very much allowing his presence to transform us in moments of stillness and silence.
[00:25:22] And a neuroscientist, Andrew Newberg, was doing a study on the effect of faith in the neurological processes in our brains.
[00:25:31] And this is what he wrote after studying everybody from franciscan monks to charismatics and Pentecostals in the american church. He said, intense, long term contemplation of goddess and other spiritual values appears to permanently change the structure of those parts of the brain that control our moods, give rise to conscious notions of self, and shape our sensory perceptions of the world. Contemplative practices strengthen a specific neurological circuit that generates peacefulness, social awareness, and compassion for others to contemplate the glory of God in his presence. Sounds very much like a religious, spiritual thing that maybe didn't have any other effect, but yet we. It has the power to change our minds and change the very stuff that's happening even at the neurological level. This is the effect when we allow ourselves to fix our eyes, to fix our attention, to fix our gaze on the presence of Jesus.
[00:26:36] For this week and the next couple weeks, we want to give you a very simple practice each week. You're welcome to do this with us. You're welcome to not do this with us, which you're aware of. You don't have to do any of this.
[00:26:51] But we thought it was important, as we've been discussing how we want to end this summer and heading into a new fall school year, all that, that we give some very practical ways to engage in the way of Jesus.
[00:27:05] And as we're talking this week about fixing our attention and our focus, we talked about all sorts of things, of ways that we could set aside times and find silence and carve out moments to really focus on Jesus, to set the rhythm of our days. And we wanted to make it really simple. And so here's one thing that I want to invite you to do this week. Give it a shot. Give it seven days. And if you don't like it, you can move on.
[00:27:32] But for seven, the next seven days, find two minutes. Do you have two minutes?
[00:27:36] But that you would take two minutes. Open your bible to one John three one. Or maybe even better yet, write it down by hand on a piece of paper. In the first person, set your phone down away from you, and for two minutes, just read that verse. And then sit in God's presence and experience God's great love that's lavished on you. And here's the thing. I've heard it said that if in prayer, we find that our mind is wandering 100 times a minute, that's a hundred opportunities for us to turn our focus back to the loving presence of God. And so for two minutes, that's 200 times that your mind might wander. That we continually bring it back to this center. That I'm loved by God. And that is the starting point for all my pursuit of my faith and my life.
