Fervent Awareness
There has been a near limitless value placed on your attention. Look no further than your phone with its push notifications – doing everything it can to get you to spend another minute of your time. So much of our experience is determined by that which we choose to be attentive to. So, what’s it for you?
I’ll be the first to admit I spend an unreasonable amount of time on the ESPN app. The PGA Tour has me. I will scroll through the list of 125 Thursday tee times on Tuesday. There’s absolutely nothing I can do with this information for the following 48 hours, yet there I am scrolling through.
We’ve been reading through the Gospel of Matthew in Bible Study the last few months. In chapter 13 Jesus is explaining to His disciples the reason that He speaks in parables. He tells His disciples, “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given” (Matthew 13:11).
A bit of an interesting remark. Do we not have agency when it comes to understanding the Words of Jesus? Well, a few verses later Jesus quotes a prophecy from the Prophet Isaiah. “‘You will indeed hear but never understand, and you will indeed see but never perceive.’ For this people’s heart has grown dull, and with their ears they can barely hear. And their eyes they have closed, lest they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears and understand with their heart and turn, and I would heal them” (Matthew 13:14-15).
There are a few things I want to hone in on here. First, Jesus says the people’s heart has “grown dull.” Dullness is not given, it’s chosen. When we allow ourselves to live out of a state of distraction, it makes focus all the more difficult.
Secondly, Jesus graciously says that He would heal those who turned. It’s the fact they haven’t turned to Him that has kept them from experiencing His healing and has disabled them from understanding.
God gives understanding to those who seek Him. Friend, I want to ask you a self-reflecting question. Thinking over the last week, month, season, are you living with an increasing or decreasing awareness of God’s presence in your daily life?
This question stumped me. I realized I could tell you more about the top-ten rated golfers in the world than I could about what God’s been teaching me recently. That’s not to say watching golf is bad, but it caused me to pray fervently against any and all dullness that may have fallen over my heart regarding how I see and understand the Lord.
To land the plane, what are some practices we can employ to help reorient us to the presence of God in our daily lives? We have to be in His Word. Take a minute or two this evening and watch the sunset. See if that doesn’t move your heart to praise. Try slowing down. The hard one for me, choose against the distracting thing. Netflix, sports, music, these things aren’t bad, but I tend to use them to turn my brain off and that is part of the enemy’s strategy to dull my heart.
I want to challenge you today, choose after the awareness of God in your life. Practice looking for Him – daily. I pray that our eyes would see, our ears would hear, and our hearts would understand. Let’s get together a month from now and declare that we’re beginning to see Him in our lives more frequently because we’ve been looking for Him more fervently.
