We keep comparing David to Joel Osteen. I contend he has neither the hair nor the smile for it, so I think we just need to... When I was a high school senior, I went off to a new school. And I walked into that school very, very introverted, very, very shy, not at all happy about going into a new school. And I walked into the first class of the day, which was a history class. And there was this girl in that class who looked at me with a look of recognition and marched right up to me and said, is your name Tim? I said, yes. She said, if you ever tell anyone, I will kill you. I will absolutely kill you." Well, that was Aileen. I married her a few years later. Those were the first words that ever passed between us, and I'm sworn to secrecy what it is that I had previously seen that she was so offended by. But I thought, well, there's my introduction to the school. And that is Aileen. We got married in 1998, 15 years ago. At the time when I met her, she wasn't a believer. I shared the gospel with her, and really my mom shared the gospel with her, and she became a believer, and we've been married very happily for 15 years. We have a 13-year-old son whose name is Nick. We have an 11-year-old daughter whose name is Abigail, and a 7-year-old daughter whose name is Michaela. and they are true joy to me. I'm an associate pastor at Grace Fellowship Church. That means I do not a lot of preaching. I mostly clean up the messes the senior pastor makes, try to do the things better that he does poorly, and just do a lot of administrative type stuff. One of the joys of ministry is our church has seen this big sustained growth in the young adult ministry. I've taken that on. I spend most of my Sunday afternoons now with the crowd of young adults, just teaching them. Many of them are relatively new believers, and so teaching them Christian doctrine and Christian living. That's really the favorite part of my ministry in the local church right now. One of the greatest memories from my youth happened just shortly after that little episode in high school. The 1996 Olympics stand out in my mind. You might remember they were the Olympics that were held in Atlanta. I was still living in my parents' home at the time. Now, my parents, we never owned a TV, but somehow we had TVs at special moments. I don't know where they got these from, but during the Olympics, they somehow got a hold of a TV, and I remember spending a lot of my summer watching the Olympics unfold. And you know the great event of the Summer Olympics, it always comes down to the men's 100-meter race. In 1996, Canada had a man named Donovan Bailey, who was running for us, who had been this rising star in the athletic world. We're Canadian. We're pessimistic. But we had dared to hope that maybe this man might win a medal for our country. I don't know if you remember the race, but it got off to a rough start. There were three false starts. There was a disqualification. Finally, it got underway. And Donovan Bailey not only broke the world record, but he won the gold medal. And as the announcer said afterwards, it was, you can go on YouTube and watch the race. And the funny thing is, the announcer right away goes to this. He did this all on enemy ground. This was a Canadian dominating on American soil. That was the big event, of course. Canada doesn't win a lot of medals at the Summer Olympics, so this was pretty exciting north of the border. When I watched that race today, again you can pull it up on YouTube, what stands out to me is this man's concentration. He got down into the starting blocks and he was looking straight ahead to the finish line and he took off and he never took his eyes off that finish line until he had passed through until he had won his race. And really part of what made him the dominant athlete he was, was this intense focus, this intense concentration on this goal that he had given his whole life to achieving. And I get the sense that the Apostle Paul was a man who must have liked athletics because he often returned to these athletic metaphors in the Bible, in the letters he wrote. He uses this picture of a race many times in the scripture, though I think he was thinking more marathon than sprint. But still you find it in the book of Acts and 1 Corinthians and Philippians and 1 Timothy. All throughout his writings you have this metaphor of the race. 1 Corinthians he says, Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one receives the prize? So run that you may obtain it. Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable. In that day, like in our day, the athletes of course would spend months, they'd spend years training so that they could compete against one another. They would have to exercise great self-control, they'd have to deny themselves all kinds of pleasures, all kinds of desires, all in anticipation of the great race to come and really in anticipation of the reward that would come when they ran their race and finished their race. these athletes, they'd be totally dedicated to that race, so that at the end of it, hopefully, they could claim the prize. So Paul used that kind of athletic dedication, that kind of faithfulness to their task, he used that as a picture of the way that we as Christians are meant to live. So Philippians 3, one thing I do, forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal, for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. Let those of us who are mature think this way, and if anything you think otherwise, God will reveal that also to you." So he tells them that mature Christian living involves keeping an eye on that prize. Not only that, but living in such a way that you're striving, you're straining to gain that prize. You know, an athlete doesn't get to the finish line by sitting in a Lazy Boy and munching on pork rinds, right? He gets there through effort, through self-denial, through self-control. So the writer of Hebrews says, Lay aside every weight and the sin which so easily ensnares us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith. This Christian life, it's a long, a long and a difficult race. Now, it's not a race where we're competing against one another, right? We're not battling one another. It's a race in which we're competing against the world, against the flesh, against the devil. We're competing against any kind of hindrance that might slow us down, that might stop us, that might cause us to veer off the track. And what are we doing in this race? Well, we're learning to think like Christians, and then we're learning to live like Christians. We're renewing our minds day by day so we can renew our actions, so we can renew our lives. We're getting rid of those sinful, those immature patterns of thinking, and we're then replacing them with godly, with mature patterns of thinking. And once we do that, then we're getting rid of the sinful and selfish deeds that we like to do, and we're replacing them with godly deeds, with loving deeds. Now, how are we doing this? What are the means we have in which to grow in this way? Well, primarily, we're dedicating ourselves to God's word. We're also doing it through Christian fellowship, through participating in the sacraments or the ordinances. In very ordinary ways, through very ordinary means of grace, God shapes and changes our minds, and then He shapes and He changes our actions. Someone's rightly said the Christian life is a long obedience in the same direction. As we near the end of our time together today, I think what we need to do is concentrate on some of the hindrances to holiness. Some of those hindrances to sanctification that may pose a special challenge today. What are some of the things in our time, some of the things in our culture, our situation that threaten to prevent us from growing in mature thinking and mature living? What are some of those things that weigh us down and slow us and maybe lead us to veer away? This is 2,000 years, just about 2,000 years after Paul wrote his letters. What are some of the challenges we face today? They might be different challenges than the ones he faced, the people he wrote to, different challenges than they faced as well. I want us to consider just two of them today. And a lot of this comes out of my thinking about living as Christians in a world full of new technologies. We're living at the beginning of something new. We're transitioning from a print culture to a digital culture. And there's all these new challenges that are facing us in this kind of 21st century, always on, digital, Facebook, email, Twitter, cell phone kind of a world. I think two of the big challenges that are facing us is the challenge of distraction and the challenge of busyness. Distraction and busyness. Each of these is a growing concern today and each of them is a concern we need to deal with. We need to learn how to overcome. We said in this Christian life we're battling to renew our minds so that we can renew our lives. These are the things we need. We need to think as Christians so that we can live as Christians. So I want to look at the issue of distraction. Distraction as a real challenge to our thinking like a Christian. I think this culture of distraction around us, it promotes shallow thinking. It promotes shallow thinking and then prevents us from having a Christian mind. Then I want to look at the issue of busyness as a challenge to living like a Christian. Busyness promotes shallow living and prevents us from having a Christian life. In each case, I'm going to sum up the concern in just one little facet of the digital world we live in today. So I want to begin with distraction. I want us to see that where the world today causes us to have a distracted mind, the Bible commands a directed mind. I want us to see distraction as a challenge to thinking like a Christian, a challenge to having a distinctly Christian mind. I want to do it by talking about one of those things we all take for granted today. I want to talk about the beep. Yeah, the beep. You know the sound. I know you know the sound of the beep. You hear it every day. Have you ever thought about the fact that beep, that sound, is an entirely modern sound? Until just a few decades ago, no one in all of human history had ever heard a beep. There's nothing in nature that makes a beep. There's no plant, there's no animal that makes that sound. We don't think a lot about beeps today, but maybe we should. How many things in your life and in your world beep at you today? Your microwave beeps every time you press a button, right? Your oven beeps when it's preheated to tell you now it's time to put the food in the oven. Your phone beeps at you to say you've got a message that you haven't heard yet. Trucks beep as they back up. And what if we expand from beeps into bings or pings or ringtones or any of those other noises that all our devices are making now? We've got our cell phones ringing. We've got your iPod or your iPad doing something to tell you that it's time to check in with Farmville or Candy Crush or whatever you're playing. Your computer is making a noise to say you've got an email. Facebook is making a noise to tell you someone's trying to chat with you. And it goes on and on and on. Our lives are full of beeps today. What's the purpose of a beep? What's the purpose of that tone, of that noise that keeps coming out of our devices, out of our appliances? Well, they exist to tell us, you need to pay attention to me. That's why your device beeps. It says, pay attention to me. So the truck is beeping when it backs up to say, you need to pay attention if you don't want to be having a really bad day really soon. Your microwave is beeping to tell you that your food is finished defrosting. Your phone is beeping to tell you you're getting a call. It's beeping to say you've got a text message. The beeps just never end in our lives today. Beeps are thoughtless. They're completely thoughtless. Your phone doesn't care who you are, where you are, what you're doing. It's not like you're in your kitchen and your microwave is finished defrosting the food and it looks at you and says, he's having a nice conversation. I'll just hold off the beep until he's gotten through that thought. It just barges into your life and it beeps at you. It's why our phones ring during conferences, during church services. It's why we get woken up at night if we forget to mute our phones. The text messages start coming in at three in the morning and they wake us up. This is life in this world. Beeps are really one of the defining sounds of this modern digital world. And I see them as just nicely representing this whole culture of distraction. A million devices, a million softwares always competing for our time and our attention. We're surrounded at all times by these devices that are beeping and buzzing and vibrating and flashing and they're always pulling us away from what we're doing and trying to draw us to something else. That's just life today. A few years ago, I decided on behalf of my family that we'd take a digital vacation. So we would go off somewhere for a week and just turn all that stuff off. So my family lives down in Chattanooga, Tennessee. We live up in Toronto. And we said, if we both drive halfway, we'll end up around Virginia. So we found a state park in Virginia that's way outside of cell phone range. There's no Wi-Fi. There's nothing there. It's just like this digital black hole. And we all drove eight hours, ended up there, and for a week we were unplugged. There was nothing beeping at us. There was nothing buzzing. There were no calls coming in. There were no emails, no Facebook, no games. And you know what? The pace of life just slowed right down. Nothing distracted us. Nothing barged into our time as a family. Nothing interfered with our family worship. Life just got slow. Life just got quiet. And my brothers and sisters and their families were there as well. And we just realized this is the cost of life in this world. We realize so much of what we've lost and so much of what we've gained in this digital world. All these things we've allowed and invited into our lives. All of that beeping, all of that distraction, it has to come at a cost. We're training ourselves to become, really, to become people of the beep, people who respond to whatever it is that barges into our lives, whatever it is that buzzes and flash and beeps and vibrates, rather than being people of single-minded devotion, people who are focusing on the most important task before us and just carrying it on to completion, carrying it on to excellence. I'm sure you've seen that. You're having a conversation with someone, right? And suddenly you see their demeanor change and you know that their phone is just beeped or it's just vibrated. You see their constant, and for a minute they try and hold their conversation with you, but then their hand drops to their pocket. And a minute later their eyes drop down and you've lost them, right? You've lost them from the conversation. And you see it when you're speaking in front of a room. You see it as well where the eyes go down and you know that people are now doing something else. They're involved in an entirely different world. You're no longer present here. You're now present out there somewhere in the digital world. where one of the great challenges of life in this world is a distracted life. The Bible commends a directed life, a life brought into captivity. And my concern is that all of this distraction in our world is preventing us from people who are able to think deeply. And the fact is, if we're not people who can think deeply, we're not people who can live deeply. Distraction leads to shallow thinking. Shallow thinking necessarily leads to shallow living. And what will we be if we're people, Christians, who are living shallow lives? What will be the cost to our families? What will be the cost to our marriages? What will be the cost to our witness in the world? What will be our cost to the church? In contrast to this life of distraction, the Bible commands a life of direction, a life of wisdom, a life of thoughtfulness, a life that depends on the use of the mind, a life of careful, directed, critical thinking. Again, a life of taking every thought into captivity. Listen to the way Paul prays for the church, the Colossian church, at the beginning of his letter to them. And so from the day we heard, we have not ceased to pray for you. And here's what he's praying, asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God. Do you see what he's asking for this church? He's praying to the Lord that these people would have this deep, deep understanding of God's will. that they will be full of wisdom, that they'll have a deep, a profound understanding of the person and the work of God. And if they have these things, there's a condition in there, if they have these things, then they will be able to walk in a manner that is worthy of the Lord. Really only if they have these things will they then have lives that are worthy of the Lord. Their obedience to God depends on their knowledge of God. Their ability to bear fruit in every good work depends upon having minds that understand who He is, what He has done, what it is that He's calling them to. The Christian faith is more than intellectual, right? But it's more than facts, it's more than knowledge, it's more than wisdom, but it's certainly, certainly not less than those things. The Bible's constantly calling us to use our minds, calling us to engage our minds, to be thoughtful. A few years ago, Mark Knoll wrote a book called The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. And it was one of those books that just got out of the gate with a great line. He said, the scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind. Kind of a zinger to start the book, but that might have been true in his day. I'm concerned it's more true than ever in our day, and it will continue to be true in days to come. If we don't learn to manage corral all of that distraction in our lives. If we don't manage to keep that distraction out so that we can simply think, so that we have times of unbroken concentration to really ponder the Lord. I've often thought about Romans 10 verse 2 where Paul's writing to that church and he's warning about zeal divorced from knowledge. Being excited to do things for the Lord without basing those things on a right knowledge of the Lord. So he speaks about the Jewish people of his day and he says, I bear them witness that they have zeal for God but not according to knowledge. Zeal, but not according to knowledge. These people were being zealous for God. They were excited to do things for God. They wanted to defend God, all of those things. But they simply didn't have right knowledge of God. They didn't understand who God was, and therefore their zeal was misplaced. They were pursuing all the wrong things. They had somewhere there they had the right desire, but they didn't have knowledge to put that desire to the best use. Could that be us? Could that be us today? If not, could it be us tomorrow? If you and I, if we're going to walk in a manner that is worthy of God, we have to, have to know Him as He is. And to know Him as He is, we have to seek Him and find Him in His word. We need to seek and find Him in the word, in our personal devotions. in our times of family worship, through the public reading and the public preaching of God's Word. And one of the great enemies of that kind of knowledge is distraction. It's simply the beep. It's all those things we allow into our lives that interrupt our learning, that interrupt those times of engagement with the Lord so that He can speak to us, so that He can reveal Himself to us. We need a quiet, a quiet sanctification. Our holiness, our holiness as individuals, as a church, it depends upon increasing our knowledge of God. It depends upon spending time with God without being constantly pulled away, constantly distracted from Him, from worshiping Him, from spending time with Him. Whatever happened to meditation? meditation, just spending quiet, serious time focused on God, focused on the Word of God. I'm not talking about that Eastern style stuff, you know, emptying your mind so the universe can, I don't even know, but I'm talking about filling your mind with God, filling your mind with the Word of God. We fill our minds with what we know to be true of God and trust that as we do that, He'll now illumine Himself to us. He'll take our knowledge of Scripture and He'll reveal Himself to us. That kind of meditation, it is so easily interrupted by all those beeps and all those buzzes and all of that distraction around us. There's no shortcut to that. It depends upon time, focused time. Here's the thing about distraction in a world like this, is it's looking for us. It's out to get us. It's seeking us out. It's looking for us. Our technology is constantly evolving toward distraction. And so we need to work very hard to be undistracted. to carve those times and those places and those situations in which we will just be with the Lord. We are now going to reduce the things that distract us so our minds can be filled with Him, so our minds can be renewed by the Lord through His Word. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind. Think of David who could say, I rise before dawn and cry for help. I hope in your words, my eyes are awake before the watches of the night. What's he doing? That I may meditate on your promise. Today, as soon as our eyes are open, we're heading right for Facebook, right? Recent statistics say that young women between late teens, early 20s, more than 30%, the first thing they do in the morning, before they even go off to the bathroom, the first thing they're doing in the morning is checking in with Facebook. That's how they begin their day. David's saying, I'm up, what am I doing? I'm meditating on God, meditating on His promises. So we need to learn to turn things off. We need to learn to leave things behind. We need to learn what it is that's distracting us. Then we need to put those things aside so we can be with the Lord. Your ability to live well depends on your ability to think well. And that depends on times where your mind is filled with the Lord and with His word. Distraction leads to shallow thinking, which leads to shallow living. But direction, direction, directed minds, that leads to deep thinking, which has to then lead to distinctly Christian living. And that, of course, brings great glory to God. So distraction, I think, is one of the great challenges to sanctification today. It's one of those things that's just keeping us from growing in knowledge so we can grow in our ability to honor and serve the Lord in all things. The second challenge I want to speak about is busyness. Busyness. Now, we can say the beep is sort of representative of this culture of distraction. Then maybe the smartphone can stand as our picture of busyness. So I recently bought myself a new phone, the iPhone 5S. I was overdue for an upgrade, so I went and bought the new one when it came out. Now, what is it that sets that phone apart from the previous one? What is it that sets that apart from the one before? There's a few minor features, but more than anything else, it's speed. Right? Every time you buy a new device, every time you buy a new phone, new computer, what are you buying? You're buying one that's faster than the one before. You know what it's like when you're using a device over time and it gets slower and slower and it just gets maddening. You want to go and buy a new one so everything will speed up again. We all know it from life in this digital world, faster is better than slower. It's true of our devices and I think it's true of our lives as well. We believe faster is better than slower. More is better than less. So we've got this culture of speed, this culture of busyness in our lives. We're all busy, right? We're all busy all of the time. When I ask how you are, it's very possible you'll say, oh, good, but busy, so busy, crazy busy, can't stop, can't breathe, that kind of busy. We almost compete about how busy we are, right? Oh, you're this busy? Let me tell you how busy I am, as if it's a badge of honor that The busier you are, well, the more important you are, right? All these people vying for your time and attention. Look how busy I am. We feel good about it. What is busyness? Have you ever stopped to think about what busyness actually is? Is it just inevitable in a life like this, in a world like this? Do we have to be busy? A columnist, Tim Kreider, offers some good insights. He says this. Notice it isn't generally people pulling back-to-back shifts in the ICU or commuting by bus to three minimum-wage jobs to tell you how busy they are. What those people are is not busy, but tired, exhausted, dead on their feet. It's almost always people whose lamented busyness is purely self-imposed, work and obligations they've taken on voluntarily, classes and activities they've encouraged their kids to participate in. They're busy because of their own ambition or drive or anxiety because they're addicted to busyness and dread what they might have to face in its absence. I think if he was writing as a Christian, he's writing as an unbeliever. I think if he was writing as a Christian, he'd say, we're busy because of our idolatries. We're busy because we are valuing something so highly, we will do anything it takes in order to get it. There are things we're holding up as so important, we will just wreck our lives in order to get that thing or to get those things. It might be money. It might be success. It might be your children's success. It might be just about anything. Busyness is a choice. Busyness is a result of decisions we've made. It's a result of certain desires that we have elevated. We choose to cram so much into our lives. We choose to do many things instead of giving dedicated focus to just a few things, to just the most important things. When we're busy, we're always on the go. We've got minds that never rest. We neglect those commands to rest. We don't even want to think about the fact that the perfect, omnipotent God who needed no rest, even He chose to rest. He was never busy. He was never tired. Even He took one day to rest. This doesn't mean that we can't accomplish a lot in life. It doesn't mean that we can't do a lot with our time and have many different areas of responsibility. Far more important to do a few things well than to do all sorts of things with mediocrity. Whatever happened to excellence? I've seen book after book come out about all these Christian character traits. What about excellence, just doing things well, doing things all the way to completion? Whatever happened to that? We can work hard, we can accomplish a lot, but still not be busy because busyness is a decision. It's a choice. I said earlier we love speed. Why do we need speed? What's the promise that comes with speed? Well, the promise is that we'll be able to do more things better, more things faster than we did before, which is interesting. You think back to, I think you're You should get this. You remember Pentium computers? Remember that, when there were Pentiums? That was an amazing computer back then, right? And then the Pentium 2 came out. Let's just say it's twice as fast as the Pentium, right? So you upgrade from the Pentium to the Pentium 2, you now have twice as much speed. Did you find you could get things done twice as fast now? Did you find you're now getting twice as much stuff done? That's the big joke with all this speed, right? The speed keeps going up, but it's not doing anything for us. We're not getting things done better or faster than before. Today's computers are ten times faster than the Pentium. Maybe they're a hundred times faster. Do you find you're getting your work done better? If you find you're getting your work done faster, I don't think we're even supposed to ask questions like that, right? Somehow along the way, we've accepted this idea that fast is good, that doing more is better than doing less. I really think what's happened is this always happens in technology. We create things in our own image. We create something to serve us, and over time, it sort of returns the favor. Those things start recreating us in their image. And I think that's exactly what's happened. We value speed. We value efficiency because we keep building those into our devices. We want to work quickly so we can move on to even more things and do them quickly too. You go to the bestseller list and there's always books on efficiency, books on getting things done, books on getting more things done even faster, getting maximum value at every moment. We've got this culture of speed all around us, this culture of busyness. How do we see that manifested? Well, how about through multitasking? There's a big joke, multitasking. I was looking through the newest statistics. These came out a few weeks ago on how much time you and I are spending in front of screens. One of the amazing things is that our screen time is now outweighing our awake time. How does that happen? Because we're often using two or three screens at a time. So I'm watching TV while playing a game on my iPad while sending text messages. So I've got three screens on the go all at once. That's multitasking. And we really think that works. The funny thing is, there's really no such thing as multitasking, right? All we do is just carve our time into tiny little pieces of time, and we just keep flipping back from one thing to the next. We're giving what they call continuous partial attention to a bunch of things instead of just focusing in on one thing and doing it well. If it's not multitasking, maybe it's skimming. We're becoming a people who just skim. We even need to read efficiently now. When I was a kid I was taught to skim a book. Maybe you were too. That was part of a reading technique. First you skim and then you go back and now you read it thoroughly. The skimming helps you understand the lay of the land so that you can do a better job when you read the book thoroughly. But today people are being taught to skim books and nothing more. There's a book that was actually very popular, sold very well, called How to Talk About a Book You Haven't Read. And it was a serious book. Maybe a little bit tongue-in-cheek, but that's what we do. We skim a book and then want to talk about it. We need to be efficient in our reading. We skim to get the sound bites, to get the tweetable lines, but we never return and read in depth. If it's not multitasking, if it's not skimming, maybe it's just this demand for efficiency. To be efficient in all of life. I think we take productivity, we take efficiency for granted. But even these are relative newcomers to the human experience. It wasn't really until industrialization that we even began to think about these things. Factory owners, they started to understand, I can make a lot more money if I control every aspect of production. So they hired experts. They would just stand and watch people do their job, and they would find any area of waste. And they would try to control that. So soon every part of a worker's day became regulated. Every second was accounted for. Every person needed to be productive in every moment because every wasted moment was wasted money. Wasted opportunity for profit. So efficiency, productivity, they just became the order of the day. We bought into that in our lives as well. I recently watched a documentary on the quest for the perpetual motion machine. You know that? The machine that would create motion, create energy without any external energy being applied to it. It's a machine that will start but then never stop again unless outside forces apply to it. Scientists are pretty convinced this could never happen, right? It completely It just goes against the laws of thermodynamics. I think it just goes against the Bible, right? Every mom knows this. You can't just put something in motion and leave it, and it's going to stay that way, right? You tidy the house, you walk away, you come back, and it's utter chaos again, as David explained to us. That's exactly the way the world goes. So far, no one's been able to create this machine, but people keep trying. That perpetual motion machine is fantasy, but I wonder if we're kind of trying to become perpetual motion people. Just feel like we have to be constantly moving, constantly productive. We're measuring our lives through just the sheer quantity of things we accomplish. So we've got, in this world, things like multitasking, which people are teaching now, how to multitask. We've got skimming. People are teaching you how to skim instead of how to read. We've got this demand for productivity and efficiency, which, again, we're being taught like this is necessarily good. I think in the face of forces like this, in the face of this busyness, we need, again, a quiet sanctification, a sanctification that comes from and moves toward just quiet. where we're always pushing ourselves today to lives of busyness. The Bible commands a life of blessedness, of being blessed by God, receiving God's blessings, so that we in turn can be a blessing to others. God brings us together into local church communities so we can care for one another, so we can take responsibility for one another. The local church really is God's plan, right? He doesn't have a plan B beyond the local church. It's not conferences. Those are helpful. It's not anything else. It's local church. It's his plan for the world. That's the hope for the world is the local church. Think about all those one another commands that are so prevalent in the New Testament. You think about those descriptions of the early church from the book of Acts. It's so clear when Luke was writing the book of Acts, he wanted for people to see the unity of one believer for another. And that unity was based on their sharing lives together. The Christian life is a life of living with and living for other people. If you're going to grow in holiness, you need the other people in your church. If they're going to grow in holiness, they need you with them. You've got to share lives. And that's where we get to all those one another commands. Be devoted to one another. Bear one another's burdens. Live in harmony with one another. Encourage one another. Build up one another. That's Christian living. That's deep Christian living. Mature Christian living. The kind of lives God expects from Christians who have grown mature in the faith. You cannot do those things efficiently. You cannot do those things while multitasking. You cannot do those things if you're just skimming along the surface. You can't do those things if your only knowledge of the Bible comes from skimming the Bible instead of spending time with the Lord in his word. These are not things we can do if we're busy. We simply cannot carry out God's commands of how we're to live with one another if we're busy people, if we're driven by busyness. Busyness will prevent us from doing the very things that God has called us to do. Busyness will destroy our relationships. It's going to undermine our ability to love one another. It's going to undermine our witness in this world. Busyness will keep us from living the mature, Christian, self-denying, other-serving kind of lives that God calls on us to live. Think about Jesus. The more I grow in the Christian life, the more I just spend time with the Lord, the more I just find myself looking to Him, looking to the Bible to see the kind of life He lived, and to let Him model what it means to live in a mature and godly way. He maintained a ministry in which he was always, always in demand. People always wanted and needed his time and attention. He went from one town to the next, to the next, and people were always pressing against him, always asking him for his help, always asking him for his favor. Yet so often we read about him retreating. He would leave people with genuine, true, real needs. and He would go alone. He would go off by Himself to spend time in a quiet place with His Father. He would walk away from very important responsibilities, or what seemed like very important responsibilities, just to spend time with His disciples. He would enjoy a quiet dinner. He would enjoy extended conversation. He had endless responsibilities. But do you read about Jesus hurrying? Does it seem like He lived a busy, hurried life? Even when Lazarus fell gravely ill, did Jesus go rushing off to his side? No. He went at his own pace. He wasn't productive, right? He wasn't counting healings. He wasn't counting how many demons he had driven out and saying, this is the measure of what I'm accomplishing in this world. He had total self-control when it came to the use of his time. Always prioritizing the most important thing. And he never looked productive. He never looked efficient. Kevin DeYoung says this well in that book that James mentioned, Crazy Busy. He says, don't think Jesus can't sympathize with your busyness. You have bills that need to be paid? Jesus had lepers who wanted to be healed. You have kids screaming for you? Jesus had demons calling him by name. You have stress in your life? Jesus taught large crowds all over Judea and Galilee with people constantly trying to touch him, trick him, and kill him. He had every reason to be run over by a hundred expectations and a thousand great opportunities, and yet he stayed on mission. Jesus knew his priorities and stuck with them. We just can't escape the fact that quality time is really quantity time, right? There's just no replacement for focused, deliberate, slow time with people if we're going to be true brothers and true sisters to them. We can't be fast and efficient in our worship, right? We can't be fast and efficient in our fellowship. These aren't things you can just put on your to-do list. Worship, fellowship, good, I accomplished that, right? These aren't things we can streamline. These are things that have to take precedent over getting things done. I think life would be a lot easier if people didn't keep getting in the way, right? Ministry. Think how easy ministry would be if people weren't involved in ministry. Think how easy marriage would be if there was just one of you, or parenting, if there weren't people who are constantly taking your time and attention. But how much of life and how much of ministry comes in the interruptions? How much of life and ministry comes in those inefficient moments when somebody barges in to all your busyness? Some of that, the best, most important of that one another ministry comes when you least expect it, when you can least afford the time. Are you willing to do that? Or are you just so busy you just don't even have time for the people the Lord is bringing to you? We are busy people, but we're called to be a blessing to others, and that just takes time. It takes slow, quiet time. We're not the only generation that has struggled with sanctification far from it. That's why I appreciate a conference like this that lets us just think about some of the specific challenges in our day. So David got to look at one of the theological challenges, and now we're looking at just some of those more cultural challenges. pursuing God so that he can transform our minds, so he can transform our lives. Of course, that's always been a battle. Every generation brings new challenges. These are just two. There's so many we could talk about, but these are just two of ours. We're distracted. That distraction leads to shallow minds. We're busy. That busyness leads to shallow lives. One part of the Bible I return to again and again. I love the book of Proverbs. I just love to spend time there. There's always something good to chew on. And pretty much every time you read it, you find a proverb you've never even thought about before. It's like the first time you've read it. But I return to Proverbs 24. I need to read this one again and again where Solomon is going out for a walk one day. Solomon was king, right? I'm sure he had a lot of things to do. He had a lot of responsibilities. One day he's out for a walk and he passes by a vineyard and he sees that the walls are crumbling. He sees that the vines are overgrown. They haven't been kept for, there's no fruit growing anymore. So what does he do? He thinks. He looks at it. He meditates. He ponders. And it's through this slow meditation that the Lord then brings a lesson home to him. A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest, and poverty will come upon you like a robber and want like an armed man. What might have happened today? Solomon's out walking. He walks past that vineyard. What does he do? Maybe he pulls out his phone and he snaps a little Instagram of it and he puts it out there for us to see, but he hurries on his way. He never receives that lesson because he never put in the time to think about it, to meditate on it. Maybe he doesn't even see the vineyard, right? Because he's got his head down and he's walking along tapping out a text message to someone, right? He never receives the lesson because he was just going too fast to even slow down. He was just too busy to receive the lesson the Lord had for him right there at that time, that day. I don't want you to hear that I'm anti-technology. I think technology is a good gift of God. He's given us these things. We can use them for His glory, or we can use them to serve ourselves. We can use them for all sorts of poor purposes. None of these technological marvels is wrong in and of itself. What happens, though, is we just allow these things to be used for bad purposes rather than good ones. We allow them to distract us instead of help us. We allow them to speed up our lives instead of just using them to maintain a manageable pace in life. We allow our technologies to help us pursue our idols, to pursue our idolatries instead of using them to serve the Lord. It should not be. It must not be. In the face of all of this distraction, we still need those times of quiet. Those times free from all the beeps and the buzzes so we can just fill our minds with the things of the Lord. If you're sitting in church on Sunday and you're being distracted by something in your purse or in your pocket or in front of you, Learn to turn it off. It's so much more important that you disconnect for a little while and you let the Lord speak to you. If in your family devotions you're finding that you, your kids, your family is being distracted by those things, learn to put them away. If your family nights are being, there's all these devices getting in the way, get a basket, have everyone put their favorite thing in there, walk it away, spend time together. In a world that keeps moving faster, a world of perpetual motion, we need to create times where the pace slows down so we can live as mature Christians. So let's have minds directed to the Lord so that we may have lives that are directed to the Lord, so we may bring glory to the Lord. May he make it so, and let's pray. Father, you have given us so many gifts in a world like this one, and things like technology, we know that so often we use them poorly when we could use them so well. So it's our prayer that we would learn to use these things well, that in a world like this we would lead the way in using these things in a way that honor and glorify You. Let us have minds that are undistracted from You. Let us have minds that are full of You, full of Your Word, so we can think deeply, so we can understand You as You are. And let us avoid busyness. Let us flee busyness. Let us stay on mission just like Jesus stayed on mission. and let us live lives that are deep, lives that matter, lives that are directed to You. We pray that You would be honored and glorified in every thought we think, in every action we take, and in the lives we live. It's in Christ's name that we pray. Amen.