Focus and Prayer - Pt 2

Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. (Deuteronomy 6:4-9 ESV).

Gospel faithfulness is about paying attention. In eighty places in the Bible, God’s people are called to take heed, which is the urgent language of attention. Our reading today urges us to keep God’s word on the forefront of our minds at all times, and in all situations. This means we ought to prioritize our days for the purpose of living without distraction. We must not allow the business of life to consume us. We cannot let the trivialities of this world cause us to neglect the riches of the gospel. We should be watchful and ever alert. In all these areas, and others, God calls us to guard our attention. We must pay attention to details. Unfortunately our culture simply doesn’t pay attention to God. It is interesting that the Church was always intended to be the one institution whose mission depended on galvanizing attention; and through its daily and weekly work, as well as its sometimes central role in education, that is exactly what it managed to do. At the dawn of the attention industries, then, religion was still, in a very real sense, the incumbent operation, the only large-scale human endeavor designed to capture attention and use it. But over the last fifty years, organized religion, which had weathered the doubts raised by the Enlightenment, became vulnerable to other claims on and uses for attention. Despite the promise of eternal life, faith in the West declined and has continued to do so, never faster than in the twenty-first century. Offering new consolations and strange gods of their own, the commercial rivals for human attention must surely figure into this decline. Attention, after all, is ultimately a zero-sum game. Grabbing attention is where corporate profits are made, which is why advertising is so potent. Products need time to flicker in pixels before our eyes. This monetizing of the gaze has given rise to what is now called the “attention economy,” run by “attention merchants.” The end-game is profit by grabbing our attention. Thus, the competition for our gaze, and the competition for our minds is very keen. For the person who wants to really know God, they must become intentional about their attention to the details of that relationship through prayer and Scripture. Where is your focus? Put the puzzle together today!