For the past eight months I have been in a study with three men whom I have known collectively for about 108 years. One is in Colorado, one in North Carolina, and one in Florida. We have been doing a topical study on the Kingdom of God. After eight months of looking at about every passage we can find or think of on the topic in the Bible we are beginning to summarize our findings. At some level I think we have just scratched the surface.
This morning I got up early to work on the study. I do Bible study on my computer. I rarely shut my computer down. I work off two monitors a large one connected to my laptop as well as the laptop screen. My browser is always open to Pandora, a site that plays music; Fox News; facebook; and Drudge. My email program is always running. I have learned that I have to minimize all of that if I am going to get anything done.
So I sat down at the desk and opened the study. Started working through a passage in Exodus and ran across a topic that I wanted to explore. I use two versions of the same Bible study program, Logos 3 and Logos 4. I did a search in 3 that did not return the answer I wanted, so I repeated the search in 4 and got about 5,000 results, there are a lot more resources in 4. So I spent the next 30 minutes figuring out how to limit the search parameters. Along the way I thought of something else that I was curious about and did a couple of Google searches on that – totally unrelated to my study. When I opened the browser of course there was an article or two that caught my eye that “had” to be read on either Drudge or Fox, they were critical bits of knowledge, really earth shaking, life changing stuff – I can’t remember what they were about. So in the 4 hours I “studied” this morning - those important things plus countless other important thoughts that occupied my otherwise focused synapses, reduced my focus on the Kingdom to some percentage south of 50%.
It is not always like that. But it is always a battle. The enemy knows what will divert my attention from the Word and he is faithful to throw it at me. Sometimes I am better at fighting that battle than others. This morning, not so much. Someone once said that the good is the enemy of the best. This morning the best was bested by stuff that did not rise to that level.
So I sat down at the desk and opened the study. Started working through a passage in Exodus and ran across a topic that I wanted to explore. I use two versions of the same Bible study program, Logos 3 and Logos 4. I did a search in 3 that did not return the answer I wanted, so I repeated the search in 4 and got about 5,000 results, there are a lot more resources in 4. So I spent the next 30 minutes figuring out how to limit the search parameters. Along the way I thought of something else that I was curious about and did a couple of Google searches on that – totally unrelated to my study. When I opened the browser of course there was an article or two that caught my eye that “had” to be read on either Drudge or Fox, they were critical bits of knowledge, really earth shaking, life changing stuff – I can’t remember what they were about. So in the 4 hours I “studied” this morning - those important things plus countless other important thoughts that occupied my otherwise focused synapses, reduced my focus on the Kingdom to some percentage south of 50%.
It is not always like that. But it is always a battle. The enemy knows what will divert my attention from the Word and he is faithful to throw it at me. Sometimes I am better at fighting that battle than others. This morning, not so much. Someone once said that the good is the enemy of the best. This morning the best was bested by stuff that did not rise to that level.
I can be just as(or more) distracted without all those resources. Maybe my problem is inside my eyes...
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