Easily Distracted
Charles Sawyer, a former U.S. Secretary of Commerce, tells about a planeload of people flying across the Atlantic. A voice comes on the intercom, “We are now flying at 35,000 feet. If you will notice out the right window, the two engines on that side are on fire and the engines on the left had to be stopped. If you look directly below, you will see a yellow sea recovery raft with six small dots on it. The dots are the pilot, co-pilot, flight engineer, navigator, and two hostesses. This is a recording.”
While this is a funny story, the truth behind it is real. The people on the plane were so distracted they had no idea what was going on. When it comes to our Christian walk, how distracted are we?
Satan distracts us from the urgency of eternity, he distracts away from the danger of sin, and he distracts us with the allure of leisure.
When it comes to eternity many believers know all-to-well how the devil tried to convince us, before we were saved, that we had plenty of time to make that decision. By the grace of God, we eventually did. The Bible is abundantly clear however, that “now is the time of salvation”. Once we are saved, we often have a tendency to not be as urgent when it comes to sharing our faith with others. We seem to take the attitude that if we don’t get around to sharing today, we can just do it tomorrow, as if eternity is going to wait for us. We must pray that God will give us a sense of urgency when it comes to lost peoples’ salvation and fight the tendency to be distracted by our busy lives and share our faith.
The devil is also very good at distracting us from sin, especially our own personal sins. Isn’t it amazing that we can always see the sin in other peoples’ lives, but seldom in our own. Satan distracts us by getting us many times to focus on others while he slips closer and closer to us. He seems to be able to ease us in to sin and by the time we wake up, he has got us. We need to see Satan as Peter did. As a “roaring lion, who walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.” How do we overcome this distraction of Satan? The same way Peter did, by being sober and vigilant. Always on the lookout for the attacks of Satan.
A third way he distracts us is with the allure of leisure. There is nothing wrong with leisure. Jesus and his disciples often went away from the crowd, but if we are not careful it can become more than it should be. Sports, hobbies, vacations can, if we are not careful, slowly draw us away from our relationship with God and our relationship with our local church. We must ask God to search our hearts and help us keep everything in the right order and in the right perspective.
Remember, Satan gets most Christians to fall over a long, slow period of time and decline, not overnight. Since this is how he works, we must make sure we are not distracted so we can fight the good fight.
