Distracted 4
Notes
Transcript
Text: Isaiah 40:29-31
According to Michael Easter in his book “the Comfort Crisis”
The average American today spends more than 11 hours engaged with digital media. Boredom is indeed dead. Anytime we feel the discomfort of boredom we reflexively pull out our cell phones, watch TV, listen to a podcast, or surf the net.
Traditionally, when we became bored we would go inward and mind wander. Mind-wandering is a rest state that restores and rebuilds the resources needed to work better and more efficiently any time we’re focused on the outside word (from writing to coding, to having a conversation). It also allows us to introspect and develop creative ideas to improve our lives. Time in unfocused mode — rediscovering boredom — is critical.
The way we dealt with boredom before we began surrounding ourselves in constant comfort delivered benefits that are essential for our brain health, productivity, personal sanity, and sense of meaning. We’d often use it to improve our situations (finding food, building better relationships, think of creative ways to improve our lives). But there’s been a cosmic shift in boredom. The way we now deal with it is “like junk food for your mind,” one neuroscientist told me.
It wasn’t until the 1920s when radio was broadcast to the masses that there was a full-time, easy escape from boredom. Then came Big TV in the 50s. Finally, on June 29, 2007 boredom was pronounced dead, thanks to the iPhone.
Marshaling the facts of His transcendence over nations, graven images, rulers, and gods, the Lord asks one more question of the exiles:
Why sayest thou, O Jacob, and speakest, O Israel,
My way is hid from the Lord,
And my judgment is passed over from my God?
Once again, He asks them to remember what they have heard and what they have known. He, the Lord of Jacob and the Holy One of Israel, is also “the everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of the ends of the earth” (v. 28b).
His power never weakens or grows weary,
His understanding is perfect.
With that declaration of His omnipotence and omniscience, God offers to the exiles the final resolution of their fears about the return to Jerusalem. He will exchange His power for their weakness and His strength for their weariness (v. 29).
When He does, their energy will exceed the vigor of youth. If they are willing to trust God for the timing and the strength to fulfill His promise, “they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint” (v. 31).
By God’s great exchange, their weakness will be renewed by His omnipotent strength and their fears will be relieved by His omniscient understanding. They were now ready for the seven-hundred-mile walk home.
The solution exists for you and I is the same that
Lift up your eyes on high,
And behold who hath created these things,
That bringeth out their host by number:
He calleth them all by names
By the greatness of his might, for that he is strong in power;
Not one faileth.
Consider this reality:
The Exiles are instructIonal for us.
Dearly beloved, I beseech you as strangers and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul;
This work of the spirit in our lives is about the process of incubation. An egg has no ability to make itself produce life. An egg is subject to the conditions being right for life to be produced. Just like a plant a plant cannot produce an inch of growth.
Christ points out as much about us in Mat 6:27
Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature?
The same is true spiritually. The principle of life is that a seed must fall in the ground and die. Yet we have Christians that are attempting to produce their own Christian growth. They think this is something that they can Self Help their way into. I tell you the plant must be in the environment for growth, the egg the incubator, the seed must hit the soil and die. All we can do is expose ourselves to the spiritual conditions. This is what church is about, this is what bible reading and prayer are about. They are not measures of growth they are environments for it.
And hope maketh not ashamed; because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us.
Simple truths that we can know about hope.
Hope is determine by you
Hope demands patience
Hope focuses the mind and heart on that which produces growth
Our theme text I Thessalonians 1:10 gives this working definition of this particular contextual meaning that is “wait for his Son.”
And to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead, even Jesus, which delivered us from the wrath to come.
This means that Paul lays out for us who our hope is.
Jesus Christ, more specifically the return of Jesus Christ.
The Transformational nature of Hope
But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength;
They shall mount up with wings as eagles;
They shall run, and not be weary;
And they shall walk, and not faint.
In the Old Testament the Jews were instructed by God to look forward to the coming messiah.
In the church age our hope is in the second coming of Jesus Christ.
1. Hope frees from lust
And every man that hath this hope in him purifieth himself, even as he is pure.
2. Hope causes the rejection of worldly pleasure
By faith he sojourned in the land of promise, as in a strange country, dwelling in tabernacles with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise: For he looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God.
3. Hope makes a saint bold
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, which according to his abundant mercy hath begotten us again unto a lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead,
4. Hope breeds holy desires
Romans 8:23 (KJV 1900)
And not only they, but ourselves also, which have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body.
For we are saved by hope: but hope that is seen is not hope: for what a man seeth, why doth he yet hope for? But if we hope for that we see not, then do we with patience wait for it.
However the context of this passage is not speaking of saved for eternity but rather saved from the clutches of sinfulness. Romans 6-8 is usually a text that many Christian counselors will prescribe for struggling believers. Even the specifics of this passage are directed completely at the purification of the life of the believer.
STOP DOING START BEING
God has a specific way that Christians are produced. They are produced with the tool of time under the tutalage of the Holy Spirit.
God’s Word
The Gospel
Our Experiences
Our Mentors
Our Tragedies
These are all tools in the hand of the Spirit.
The problem is that we like things now. We like things for a short period of time and we like things convienent. And God’s SPirit will not work like your cell phone. In fact he may not be working in you because of your self hone.
What needs to start happening in most marriages is that we need to get back to hoping for the same things. Instead of shoe horning each other into the image we want we must start working together to change by the power of hope.
God gives us the promises and power to faithfully See his blessing on our way to His return. The problem is that we refuse to give ourselves the time to “wait on the Lord.”
Boredom that once helped us see the vanity of this life and long for a life out there in the heavens. Has tragically dulled our senses to death. We have literally entertained our souls to death.
Notice the order, because it seems strange.
1. We mount up with wings like eagles.
2. We run.
3. We walk.
Does it seem out of order? Not at all.
1. First, we recognize that we soar up into heavenly places in Christ Jesus.
And hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus:
2. Then we set ourselves on the course to run the race
Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us,
3. Then we are in the good place to walk the walk
As ye have therefore received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk ye in him:
We have to get back to learning to rest in the boredom and refuse the inoculation from time with God.
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