[Joshua Creech] A couple of weeks back, we were taking a drive as a family. I can't remember where we were heading. And all three of our boys sit in the very back of the van. So they're always lined up back there. And a surreal reality sank in. Something struck real close to home. And I'm not sure what brought it on, but as we were driving, I looked over at Lizzie and I said, "You know, they're never going to understand what it means to be disconnected. They aren't ever going to climb into a vehicle and start driving and be disconnected." We are always connected through our cell phones now through GPS. Many of the vehicles we have now have Wi-Fi in them. Something they're not going to know. I remember I used to get in a car and we'd drive and you're cut off from the world until you got to where you were going. There was nothing else there. And as we talked about this a little bit more, I started to feel really old because it sank in that, you know, it's not just my children. We have young adults who now don't have that experience. Young adults didn't have the experience of getting into a vehicle and driving and not having some type of cell phone or something where they could get connected to somebody. We feel lost without our phones now. I know a lot of people say they turn around and go back home and get them. They feel that lost without the phone in their pocket. It's just something that they won't experience. They're never going to have that disconnect with the world.

This is going to make me sound and feel even older, but I remember the first cell phone I had. It wasn't mine. The first one I had, it wasn't mine. It was my parents' cell phone, but anytime I went to school or anytime I went out with friends, if we had sports activities afterward, I was expected to take it with me. So they gave us the house… it was the family cell phone. We had one for the entire family. So they would give it to me so I could take it with me and that way, if it was a sporting event, I could call them when we were leaving whatever school we were at and they knew what time to get back to our school to pick us up. So it made things a lot more convenient. It helped out with timing, but we were always connected. We had a way.

So it's not the small cell phones that you guys know today. This thing was a brick. It seemed huge to me. I couldn't carry it in my pocket. So as soon as I got in my car, I threw it in my glove box because the thing was a couple of inches thick, about 4 inches long. So probably about the same screen size that we have now, but just add two inches of depth to that thing. And then in order to talk into it, you had to flip down the mouthpiece, which was another two inches. It had the little antenna that you pull up. That was the first cell phone that our family had. And it'd been pretty popular for a while. So it wasn't the newest one at that time, but that's what we had. So I remember a time when I didn't have that. It was so big that if I did need to keep it on me, it looked like a little camera case, a small camera case to carry this thing around because you couldn't get it into your pocket. So that's what I had. That was my first cell phone. That's what started connecting me to the world. They didn't have all the capabilities they do today, but technology at that time was advancing quickly. Not quite as quick as it is today. We've seen a drastic increase over the past 10 years of how sophisticated technology is becoming. With all of these connections, with this technology comes distractions. Comes distractions.

So before we get fully submerged in this main idea that I want to talk about today of distractions and what we can do to try to avoid them, I want to touch base on a little bit of a bigger picture. Try to get an idea of where we're at in time and a little bit of the prophecy because I fully believe that we are either at the cusp of reaching some prophecy and getting into a new age or that we will soon be there. One of the two. We could see more prophetic events at any point in time. So if you would, if you look over in Daniel 12 with me, Daniel 12, it talks about the prophecy of the end time. Daniel 12:4.

It reads, "But you, Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book until the time of the end; many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall increase… Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall increase.” This is a wide range of things, spiritually speaking. We understand what's going to come and that there's a lack of God's knowledge right now and understanding of what His words are and how people apply them to their lives. But I think this also has a physical aspect to it. This has to have a physical aspect of how we're capable of doing such things. So with these technological advances, the knowledge is increasing, we constantly have access to answers to any number of questions that we have. And it just seems logical to me that these two are running hand in hand right now, that our physical technology and the knowledge that we have and what humankind has been capable of doing is playing a part in the spiritual aspect of fulfilling this idea of God's truth will be spread. It will be known. So if you just think about this from the Church's standpoint, we have many possibilities. Our articles and our magazines, we can send them all over the world. We're able to send it all the way to the opposite side of the earth. A couple of days, maybe weeks, depending on how we expedite it, but it can get there at a pretty timely manner. Not too much trouble.

Logistically, there have been advancements where they can move stuff at a fast rate, but then we take a step back and we see there's been even more advancements. We have even more opportunities. They're more economical and they're more timely. We have the capability of sending sermons, Bible studies, BT Dailies instantaneously. Our media department is working tirelessly to produce new material because that's going across the world in the blink of an eye. That's all it takes anymore. We put it on our website, every inch of the earth is covered. There's no question about it. So that increase in knowledge, we have technology that helps that knowledge increase. And then he also wrote about running to and fro. Many shall run to and fro. So if we put these hand in hand, what do we see? Yeah. We see we are able logistically to ship things. We can personally fly to the other side of the world in a couple of days. We can move. We have ships, we have cars. We have any means of transportation, but spiritually, we see people running to and fro as well. We see this on a deeper level.

People are starving. They're thriving for some sort of truth, some sort of knowledge of God's word and understanding. And they have trouble. They have trouble comprehending the actual truth, so then they start bouncing. They find tidbits here and there. They bounce from religion to religion, different theories, different ideas that pop up because they're starving for it. They're trying to figure out what the truth is, so they just continuously bounce. They're searching all over. They're running to and fro, looking for it anywhere they can find it. They're not going to find it until God decides it's time to open their eyes. That's what's tough for us to understand, but we have to be in a position that we're prepared for. We're prepared to inform people all over the world when that time comes.

We have a scripture over in Amos. If you flip over to Amos with me, that hits this right on the head, we see that God's word said this is the way it's going to be. Amos 8:11. Verse 11 reads, “'Behold, the days are coming,’ says the Lord God, ‘That I will send a famine on the land, not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord.’" Hearing the words of the Lord. Do we see people, the people we work with, some friends, maybe their neighbors, do we see them thriving, starving? Starving for those words, starving for some sort of understanding. The rapid growth of technology over the past couple decades has allowed us to reach the ends of the world. There's no point where we're cut off from.

Many of you have probably seen different news things going on this week. Oh, yeah. We had the meeting between President Trump and President Putin and then shortly after that, the Russians released they have five new plans for advanced weapons. They released some of the details of that, showing their weapons systems that they have. Or maybe you heard about the cyberattack on Singapore. Singapore's government health system database had a cyberattack where 1.5 million people had some personal information stolen.

These are things going on the opposite side of the world, but we know instantly what's going on and what's happening. So there's huge benefits. There are huge benefits and assets to being able to use this technology, the doors it has opened for us. But if we're not careful, these connections, this technology, it can also become a distraction. It can become a distraction. So as vague as some of these prophecies are at giving us the full details of how God is planning to fulfill each prophecy, He doesn't give us exact timeframes, He doesn't give us specifics now. He gives us a broad picture of what we can look for and what we can turn to. He doesn't tell us the specifics on how He's going to unfold His plan during the end times. But there are a few things in the Bible that we are 100% clear on and He gives us a few things that we need to work on, change in our personal lives. And one of those is being distracted. If you flip with me over to 1 Corinthians, 1 Corinthians 7, we find it clear as can be about distractions. 1 Corinthians 7:35. Verse 35 reads, "And this I say for your own profit, not that I may put a leash on you, but for what is proper, that you may serve the Lord without distraction." We may serve the Lord without distraction. He's not trying to hinder us. He's just trying to help us refocus. He's trying to help us to understand what's important. What is the most valuable thing in our lives?

And there's another section I'd like to flip over to in Mark. In Mark, we find the "Parable of the Four Soils," and one of these four soils is exactly this, this being distracted and getting sidetracked. Mark 4. So this is broken up into two sections. The first section of Mark, he actually gives the parable. And what happens is there's a group of people who don't understand what he says. They don't understand the parable or the correlation that he's trying to make. So, after he gives the parable when they're a little more secluded and it's a smaller group, they ended up asking him like, "What did you mean by this? What did this parable mean?" And that's where we get into verses 18 and 19, Mark 4:18-19. It gives us explanation. He explains exactly what He was meaning by it. So verse 18 says, "Now these are the ones sown among the thorns; they are the ones who hear the word, and the cares of this world, the deceitfulness of riches, and the desires for other things entering in choke the word, and it becomes unfruitful." These are those distractions. These are those distractions that slip in, they try to detract us from paying attention to God's Word, being able to focus, focus our time, and dedicating it to what we need to, what's for the greater good.

And you don't have to turn there. But in Luke's account, it actually adds an extra piece that I really like. I'll read it for you. If you want the reference, it's Luke 8:14. It's the same example of this parable from Luke's account. It reads, "Now the ones that fell among the thorns are those who, when they hear, go out and are choked with cares, riches, and pleasures of life, and bring no fruit to maturity." That section of, "and pleasures of life," pleasures of life, those are the fun things in our lives. Those are the things that we want to make sure we do. The exciting things, the things we enjoy. We can't let them overtake what's most important, the Kingdom of God. We have to be fully dedicated, fully dedicated to making sure that that's priority number one. We have to make that a priority. We have to make that the priority because we're destined to be part of God's family. We are destined to be sons and daughters of God. That's what His plan is for us, and we have to make that the priority. If we don't, we've lost track. We've become distracted, distracted from our purpose here, our purpose of being created. Distractions come in all shapes, all sizes, all forms. There's no limit to them. Some of them are good, some of them just take up time. Anything that diverts our attention away, anything, from the main goal that we have, is a distraction. We can't forget that that Kingdom of God is where that priority has to be, priority number one.

So if we think about the story I opened with, never being disconnected, I don't ever see anything changing in technology to where we're going to lose that ability unless major disasters occur. But as far as our economy, and sustaining it, and advancing, it's going to keep advancing. It's hard to picture it accelerating at the rate it has been because we've moved along so quickly in the past few years, but that's the way it's leading. It has put us in a completely different category from 20, 30, 40 years ago. We have so many different distractions trying to take up our time. If you think about just going to stores, places we visit, normal activities. You can't go into McDonald's or you can't go into Starbucks anymore without them having TVs running different news channels, sometimes they run sitcoms. We're always connected. There's always something going on.

And if we're sitting there and they don't have something on that we're wanting to watch, what do we do? We either flip out our phone or we pull out our laptop because they have free Wi-Fi. They've given us the ability to be able to connect to whatever we want for free. Just hop onto their Wi-Fi. So those times, what do we do? We try to eat our meal or drink our coffee and maybe you scroll through, find a TED Talk, find a YouTube video of something that you wanted to learn about. So you start watching through it. Before that TED Talk is done, you end up finishing your meal. Then we're stuck. We're not sure what to do. We don't want to waste our time. Our time's valuable, right? We have lots of things to get done, so we don't want to sit there and watch the rest of it because we're done eating. We could be doing something else. Technology has given us an avenue out of that. You hit that little data button, instantly connected again. We walk down the street, we walk down the street, connected on our cell phone. Keep watching our YouTube video, keep watching the TED Talk as we're traveling to wherever we need to get to.

We are always connected. We have the capability. I looked up a Time... Time did a study on this. This was from a couple years back. Back in 2012, they found the following results from a study that they did talking about cell phones. So 84% of people surveyed said they couldn't go one single day without their mobile device in their hand, 84%. And that was six years ago, in 2012. I would imagine that's only gone up. They feel that they can't go one day without it, that lost sensation I said that when we get in our car and get just a block down, we realize, "Oh, man, my phone." That's that feeling. That's that anxiety that they get because they don't have it in their pocket because they're used to being distracted. Twenty years ago, I didn't have it, but it seems like I can't live without it now. And we're in a completely different era when it comes to technology.

Sounds like I'm bashing cell phones. I'm really not. I love cell phones. There's tons of benefits that come with it, but we have to be careful. We have to use it wisely. We have to be cautious when we think about how often we're using it because it is the easiest accessible piece to distract us, at least for me. I would imagine that most of you are the same way. It is the easiest thing to use as a distraction. It can suck us in real quick. And what does it distract us from? Distracts us from being focused on what truly matters. On doing God's work, focusing on His word, preparing ourselves for the Kingdom of God, preparing for the Kingdom of God. That's what we're doing. Does it ever distract you from your Bible study? If it does, we have a scripture, a scripture that will help with that, Psalm 119.

Flip back to the Old Testament. Psalm 119. If we read verses 15 and 16, this is why it's so important not to get distracted. The importance of what we're doing. Psalm 119, starting in verse 15 says, "I will meditate on Your precepts and contemplate Your ways. I will delight myself in Your statutes; I will not forget Your word." How do we not forget? How are we to not forget? It's by studying. It's by getting into it. We are closest to God when we're in His Word. When we buckle down and dig into the words that He's written for us, that's when we're closest to Him. That's how we don't forget His words, by going over them over and over again. This is how He's communicating with us. This is what He wants us to learn. This is what He wants us to know. It's not just on the surface. It's not just… yeah, you may know some here and there. This is at our very core. It's what makes us who we are. These are the actions that we live every day and that's what He's wanting. That's why it's so important that we not forget His Word.

I'm not the greatest reader out there. That's my wife. She'll read 10 books before I can get through one. And I end up reading the same page over and over again. I sit there and look at it, I get to the bottom, I realize, "I didn't get anything out of that." Read it again. Still, nothing. My mind's off somewhere else, distracted. So I read it again. If it takes three times, read it three times, but we have to know His Word. And it's not failure. It's not a failure that we've read it 3 times, or 5, or 10. That's not failure. That's focus. That's staying dedicated to God and doing what He's expecting of us, what He's asking us. That's focus. That's drive. That drive that puts His words in our heart. That's what it is. We want to know it, front to back.

Turn with me over to Hebrews. Hebrews 4. This section is focusing on the Sabbath, but it gives us, in a bigger sense, the power and significance behind His words. Hebrews 4, I'm going to read verse 12. Says, "For the word of God is living and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of the soul, and spirit, and of joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and the intents of the heart." That's cutting deep. That's cutting all the way down to our actions, our intents. Our heart, that makes us who we are, pumps the blood through us. God's Word, they're not merely words written on a piece of paper. They're not written down into books. They're not just letters and phrases. They're life-changers. They are life-changers. They have the ability to change our thoughts, change our actions. They can refocus us onto the Kingdom of God when we get distracted. They are truly relevant for our future. Impactful. That's what His words are. They're impactful.

If, if we dig deep enough, His words will change us. His words will make us a different person, but we have to allow it. We have to get into it. It's Him. It's through the closeness that we have with God that will change us. That will alter our thinking, alter our actions, to who we actually want to be, for our future. That's a big part of our daily Bible study. It's a big part of our prayer, whether it's sending cards to those who are on tough times, those who are sick, they're struggling with decisions they have in their life. Whether it's getting out and visiting. That's the changes that makes in us. It's the person we become. It's the person we're going to become. With all the distractions, that becomes really, really difficult. They get thrown in from every direction now. We are constantly trying to be blindsided by distractions. So, that focus, that focus is key.

Have you ever been engulfed with curiosity? Have you ever found a section of the Bible that you quite didn't understand, an aspect of our teaching that you didn't quite… you know what the teaching is, you know what our stance is, but you never really dug into it and actually researched it to understand the ins and outs and the scriptures that we use to understand and comprehend what God has. What do we do with that? When we have those questions, what do we do? Do we just let them linger? Say, "Somebody's done research before. We're just going to go based on what they say. That's it." No. That's not what we do. That's not what we do. We decide to research it, right? What do we do? We pull out our Bible, we grab a concordance. Maybe we grab our laptop, grab some documents from UCG. Maybe it's a booklet or some articles that have been written and soon you're sitting there and you realize you've completely barricaded yourself in. You're not getting out. You're ready to go. You have all your materials. You're going to figure it out. You're going to figure it out. You want to know, you want to know what God says. You want to understand why. We want to have that base. So we're there, ready to go.

So we get researching. We're looking it up, whether it has to… maybe it's word by word. You're going through every Greek or Hebrew word and understanding exactly what it is and where it came from, what multiple meanings it has, but you're starting to get it. You're starting to get with the studying. You're figuring it out. You're working on the next pieces that you need to work through and it's coming. You've got multiple tabs up on your laptop flipping through different translations. Maybe it's multiple commentaries trying to give you background on different scenarios and the society at the time, but you're getting it. You're pulling it out and you get tired of flipping through. You get tired of flipping back and forth between tabs. So what's our other option? What do we reach for? Reach for that cell phone, right? Either a cell phone or a tablet, something, because we don't want to flip it back and forth. So we pull the cell phone out and we sit it there and we pull the commentary or whatever we're using for our research and we set it there, so now we've got a laptop, we've got our books, we have our cell phone, and it's all working out.

We're accelerating the rate we're getting information. It's timely. It's intensifying. We're figuring it out piece by piece. We start circling, highlighting, write notes in the margins. We all have different methods, but we all have some method that we use to try to put it in our Bibles or in our notes so that we know for next time that we've researched this and it'll trigger something, telling us, "Hey, we know what this piece means." Just as you're getting to the end of it, you think you're just about there, you hear, "Ring, ring," so you ignore the first one. You're like, "All right. I'm busy doing this." You ignore that your cell phone just went off and you keep going, and then a second one comes through, "Ring, ring." So you're like, "All right. Well, let me see what it is. Let me check it real quick."

So you flip it up and it was something important. There was a prayer request that just went out. Somebody in our congregation has an urgent need, an urgent need for prayers. And that's what came through, whether it's through email or just an actual text message from a group of people, but it was important. So what do we do? We take a minute, we stop what we're doing, we pray about it. We pray about it and then we're ready. We're ready to get right back into that studying, get ready to figure out what's left. Before we can sit that cell phone down, "Ring," "Buzz," whatever it is. We've got hundreds of defaults on these phones now. That or you hear somebody's favorite song go off. They can make notifications, whatever they want, but in the phones themselves, they have hundreds built. Those aren't enough, though. We have to put our own songs in there.

But it goes off before you can even put it down and then we're sucked in because it's still in our hand. We get sucked in, whether it's the piano song, whether it sounds like a nuke going off. It distracts us. It distracts us. What is it? Facebook pops up. We've got a couple people who put little heart emojis. They love some pictures we had posted. My wife puts lots of pictures of our kids. A couple people liked it, who knows what's going on? Candy Crush. You got some new lives. They're ready for you. Come play. Come play Candy Crush. Amazon Prime, it'll notify you. “Hey, items in your cart, they've decreased in price.” So then you're thinking, "What did I put in my cart?"

So you pull it up. You're like, "Oh, okay. I got to see. I got to see if this is something I really needed. I've been waiting on a couple of these items." And then you start searching for other things. Get distracted. Or it's Facebook again. You got a friend request. Somebody wants to be friends. Expanding that network, our community. "Yeah, I'll accept you. I know who you are." Right after camp was bad for that one. I kept getting, like, 20 a day. Redbox, Redbox movies. They release new movies every Tuesday. Rent one, get one free. Do they even tell you what movies are out? Runkeeper, I have a bunch of friends on Runkeeper. They let you know when your friends ran. Lets you know how far they went, where they went. Domino's Pizza, two medium, two-topping pizza, $5.99 each. Dinner time, right? Yeah. Even my alarm clock. My alarm clock has a notification. It pops up and lets me know that I haven't set the alarm for tomorrow. It wants to make sure I get up for work in time. It's helpful. It's helpful when I actually forget, but it can be a distraction at the wrong time. It can be a distraction.

We are bombarded. We are constantly bombarded. Every app that has ever been created, I think has some type of notification. And if you're not diligent about going through your settings and turning every single one of those off, it's going to notify you. And very quickly, we get sucked down that pit and we get sucked into whatever that notification is and we're completely distracted, what we meant to do. Every time we reset, every time one of those distractions comes through, those are temptations. Those are temptations to quit. We were on Bible study. We were working hard. We were figuring it out. Those notifications, those are a chance to quit, a chance to keep us from what our true future is. Our true goal of becoming part of the family of God.

Proverbs 4, Proverbs 4 tells us how to battle this. What we need to do. Proverbs 4:25. It's a real short, quick one. Verse 25 says, "Let your eyes look straight ahead, and your eyelids look right before you." Look straight ahead. The Message Bible actually phrased this slightly differently. It says, "Keep your eyes straight ahead. Ignore all sideshow distractions." Ignore all sideshow distractions. Is that what we find? Do we find some of these distractions the sideshow, right? Something that's not primary in our lives that just kind of pops up, especially when we're trying to accomplish something and we have no intentions of doing anything else but we end up having to refocus over and over again because of these distractions. They're all over the place. And I don't think they're backing off anytime soon. I don't think society is going to make it any easier. If we look at social media, we look at video games, we have books, TV, movies. We have playing sports. Maybe it's crocheting, knitting blankets for friends. Maybe they're having a baby. All of these things can become a distraction. We make an endless list of things that we want to do that could become a distraction from what our focus is at the time. Because we sit there, work on something and we think, "Oh, I meant to do this." And we're sidetracked.

Most of those things are fun. They're the things we enjoy, but we also have necessary distractions. On top of all these fun distractions, we do have necessary ones and we have to be careful with those also. God has requirements. He has expectations. And if we're not careful, they become distractions instead of being part of what make us who we are in our lives. God expects us to teach our children, to teach our families to grow, to care for our families. That's His expectation. That's His expectation. We have to develop our families. 1 Timothy 5 goes over this. If you turn over to 1 Timothy 5, this section here is talking about caring for the widows, But verse 8 touches on a broader note. 1 Timothy 5:8.

It reads, "But if anyone does not provide for his own, and especially for those of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever." We have to take care of our households. We have to care for our families. Not only spiritually, that's not the only focus. We have to feed them. We have to buy clothes for them. If you have little kids, it's usually buying clothes twice a year for them because they grow so quickly, but they have needs. We have to bond. We have to play with them. We have to grow spiritually and physically. So we have needs. We have expectations to care for our families, provide for them because if not, it says we've denied the faith and we're worse than an unbeliever if we're not caring for ours.

We have other expectations, too. How many of you have neighbors? Nobody has neighbors. Wow. I want to live where you guys live. I have one neighbor on one side. He's the guy that mows his yard twice a week. Makes me look bad all the time. But luckily, on the other side, they let it go till it's like five, six inches, like every other week. So I try and do it at least once a week, try to do a good blend between the yards. I don't want to disgruntle the one. You know, they always give you dirty looks if your grass is a whole lot higher than theirs. Those are things. Those are expectations we have. Those are the necessary expectations that we have of upkeep on our homes. If it's not a leaky toilet, or a running faucet, or a broken pipe, something that needs fixed, a light bulb, there's always something in the house. There's always something that needs done. After 10 years of owning a home, I've learned some valuable lessons. One of those is if there's nothing wrong with the house, watch out. It is guaranteed something will break. I've never lived in my house and had everything completely done. It's never been perfect. These are part of the necessities of life. This is caring for our families, taking care of the responsibilities that we have, the expectation God does have of us. The key is making sure that they don't become the distractions in our lives. If we don't let them get to that point of becoming distractions, then we're able to maintain it. We're able to focus and actually give it the time that it needs.

So if you flip over a couple pages with me to Titus, Titus 3:14, it says, "And let our people also learn to maintain good works, to meet urgent needs, that they may not be unfruitful." That they may not be unfruitful. The urgent needs. These are those things in our lives that pop up. These are the things that we're not expecting or anticipating, but they do need done. They can become a distraction. But what's a bigger distraction is if we're not taking care of the other things that we should have already maintained and we've already taken care of because the urgent ones wouldn't be that urgent because we have the time to do it. So what is this all boiling down to? Where do we get to that we can make a concerted effort to make sure we're doing this in a proper manner? It all boils down to time management. Time management will help us avoid many of these distractions, many of these scenarios that become urgent instead of just taking care of them when they should be. We have to be deliberate with our time. That'll help us down the road in every aspect, spiritually and physically, because we'll have the time to apply it to what we need.

I found a quote, Rick Warren, he's a pastor and he was the founder of the Saddleback Church. He says, "Time is your most precious gift because you only have a set amount of it." We only have a set amount of it. It's tough to think about. None of us want to think about not existing. We don't want to think about when we're not here anymore. But the truth of it is that's the way it is. We don't know what's coming. Proverbs 27:1 reads, "Do not boast about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day may bring forth." That's Proverbs 27:1. We just don't know. We just don't know what it holds. So if we're planning accordingly, we'll have a much better approach to being able to fully anticipate changes or urgent needs that come up if we equip ourselves, if we manage our time better. Even though we don't know what it truly holds, we can plan wisely. We can organize what we need to accomplish to help us battle these distractions, to help us stay focused.

If you flip over to the book of Ephesians, flip to Ephesians. Paul writes about the need of taking advantage of the time we have. Ephesians 5:15-16 says, "See then that you walk circumspectly, not as fools but as wise, redeeming the time, because the days are evil." It's wise to redeem the time, to use the time is wise. And if you flip over a couple more pages to Colossians 4, we see this again. Colossians 4:5. It says, "Walk in wisdom towards those who are outside, redeeming the time." Redeeming that time. So what methods can we use? What methods can we use to manage our time more efficiently, more effectively? What can we do? Hopefully, by thinking about this, it'll help us be able to apply the right amount of time to each activity. We'll have it narrowed down so that we can do that.

So one of these methods is actually to sit down and plan. So to actually take the time to sit down and plan. If we sit down to try and do a daily planner, we'll figure out what we need to accomplish. Those must-have dones. And while we're in that process, it usually ends up extending out a week or two because we all have requirements, whether it's through our job, where we have deadlines or other things with the house. Who knows what it is? But we all have commitments. We all have something that, generally not do specifically today. So it helps to sit down and do that plan. Figure out exactly what it is and how we need to allocate each day so that we can fulfill all the requirements, how we can get to that end goal and be done without cramming it all in on that last day because oftentimes, that's not okay. That's not going to work. Just crammed it in at the last time. It's not beneficial to do it that way either, but sometimes it just won't work.

So plan, take some time to figure out what you need to do, how it's going to work out. Identify those urgent tasks, the ones that need done now. That'll help us. That'll help us with this time management. Another method is staying focused, stay focused on the specific items we're dealing with at the time. Sometimes that means dump everything else. That means get rid of all the extra items that we think we need to do and stay dedicated to that one. Dump all the distractions along with all the other items that may interrupt us. We don't want anything. We want to stay focused on the exact thing that we want to get done as much as possible. That means putting the cell phone in the other room or the tablet. Maybe it means locking yourself in the basement where there's no windows. I find myself just looking out the window at times, the kids playing. Whatever it takes, whatever it takes. That's what we have to do. We have to make a concerted effort not to stretch out tasks because that's what it does. That's what these distractions do. It's what they do. Something that should take us two hours ends up taking us four or six, or that's the only thing we did that day when it should have just been two hours and we could have accomplished other activities as well.

Don't let the phones become distractions any more than they have to be. Don't let them sidetrack us from the intended jobs. If we know something has the potential to distract us, time and time again, we've personally seen it with ourselves. We've seen it happen and we know, "All right, this is probably going to throw me off." Remove it, remove it before it gets a hold on us. Remove it before it becomes that distraction. Don't even take the chance. Don't take the chance of letting it mess with our focus and throw us off because we've planned. We've planned it out. That's what we need to get done.

We can make a big list. If you research ways to help time management, there's tons and tons of lists. There's one last one that I'd like to touch on to help avoid these distractions. And the final one that I'm going to mention is procrastination. Procrastination, this kind of goes back and forth between the distractions and procrastination because they bounce off of each other. We do not, for one, want to procrastinate when it comes to our spiritual growth. Absolutely not. We want to study today and we want to study now at the time that we've allotted for it, which hopefully is daily. It should be daily. We don't want to put it off. We don't want to put off the time that we have set aside because then it gets put off again and again. Distractions lead straight into procrastination. They cause procrastination because it pushes things out. It pushes those priorities away. Every minute that we allow distractions in our lives, it eats up more time. It eats up more of our valuable time and something has to get pushed back. And it's usually the things that we wanted to get done, that we needed to get done.

A lot of times it's actually more damaging because, at that point, it's already been procrastinated to some point. We got distracted earlier and it got pushed back and now we're pushing it back again. So we just see this cycle, the cycle of going forward if we're not careful. And we don't want to get distracted. Procrastination leads to big adjustments in our schedule. So all that time, all that dedication that we sat down and planned and got down into the specifics, the nitty-gritty of how we needed to do our day, how we need to go out just got thrown out the window because we spent a whole bunch more time on distractions. So then we procrastinate. So it changes that schedule. Don't allow the distractions. Don't allow the distractions to cause us to procrastinate and push back our plans and responsibilities. We'll find that as we go out through our time, our attention is completely fragmented. I find mine more and more increasingly fragmented day to day if we're not careful. Little bits of job and work, social life, everything takes up some of our time. That's our life. It is fragmented out into sections and it just keeps becoming more and more fragmented. We have to be careful that we don't let distractions come in and embed themselves and pull us away.

Never forget Satan. Satan is the cause of this. Satan is the cause of these distractions. He is the number one distraction. We read over and over again in the Bible, he is the tempter. He's called "the tempter" over and over again in the Bible. That's what distractions are. It's a temptation to pull us away from what we're trying to accomplish. And if that's our Bible study and our prayer, that's a big problem. And that's his goal. That's his job. He hates the family of God. He hates the thought of the kingdom of God. He wants to destroy every single one of our lives. He wants to distract us to the point that we aren't connected to God, that we aren't doing those things that keep us close. Reading His word to where it's embedded in us. That's his goal. He doesn't care how it gets done. He doesn't care how we're distracted. He'll use everything the world can throw at us and then he'll multiply it because every time one of us falls away, he has a little bit of success. That's his only goal. That's all he has left. He knows he's lost because God's plan is going to happen. And we are all supposed to be part of it. We are all supposed to be there. That's what He has in mind for us. That's what God's plan is for us. Don't let Satan's plan distract us from that. He wants to rip us out of the Kingdom of God, out of the family of God. Don't allow the distractions today to destroy our lives tomorrow. Take time to plan, focus on the plan, and take time to study.