The Cost of Constant Distraction

In this episode of The Morning Charge, Joshua talks about distraction, stillness, and the importance of making room for God’s presence in everyday life.

This message focuses on how constant noise, overstimulation, and nonstop activity can weaken spiritual focus and make it harder to hear God clearly. It also highlights the difference between being busy and being fruitful, and why believers need to slow down enough to sit with Jesus and let Him bring clarity, peace, and direction.

This episode is a reminder that distraction has a cost. If believers want depth, discernment, and a stronger walk with God, they have to make room to be still and choose the better part. 

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Transcript

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Welcome to the Morning Charge. This is your moment to slow down, breathe, and get your spirit aligned before stepping into the day ahead. Life moves fast, responsibilities pile up, voices compete for your attention. But before the noise of the world takes over, this is where we come back to what actually matters. This is a place for honest conversations about faith, life, purpose, and everyday battles we all face. No pretending, no religious performance, just the truth. Because following Jesus was never meant to be complicated. It was meant to be real. So whether you're driving to work, you're getting the kids ready, or simply taking a quiet moment for yourself, you're in the right place. This is real talk, real Jesus, real life. This is the morning charge. And that's our problem. A lot of us do not slow down. Amen. A lot of us don't slow down. Woo! A lot of us don't. Patty, we lift up Jerry this morning. We pray over those headaches have got to go in the mighty name of Jesus. And we stand in faith right now and we say, Lord, will you come and bring healing to his body right now? Father, will you come and show them, Lord, what is causing these headaches and what these things are? But we pray off every attack of the enemy right now, every bit of darkness trying to come against him. And I say all pain has got to go right now. In the mighty name of Jesus, amen and amen. Melissa, you have triplets and you cannot slow down. Oh my goodness, my friend. Well, uh, we have eight children in all six that still live at home. And we decided to uh to full-time uh start full-time RVing last October. So we but you know what? Our family has never been closer. Yes, it gets a little tight sometimes, and yes, you know, and yes, it gets loud, but I'm here to tell you that we have never been closer as a family, and I'm seeing the Lord begin to really move in our children's lives by the things they write down, by the things that they are drawing, by the things that they are doing and the things that they're saying. And it's amazing to see the fruit of what God is doing with my family during this time. If we're just obedient and step out and do what God asks us to do, no, it didn't make any sense. We had a 2,300 square foot house. Why do I want to live in 300 square feet? That is not my idea. But the but Brandy and I didn't question the Lord. We pressed into it. He spoke to us at different times about it, and now here we are along the journey. We're going and doing what God just says go and do. When he says go, we go. When he says stay, we stay. We're trying to be very faithful with what God has placed into our hands in this point, in this moment, in this time. We've got to be faithful with the assignments that he has given each one of us because you weren't simply just put here on the earth to just merely exist and get saved at the altar and then just, well, we might, you know, might do something, might not. I'm just going to try to get by until I go home in the sky one day. That's that's not that's not the whole point. He's given you a purpose, he's given you a plan. He knows what he placed on the inside of you to do even before you were in your mother's womb, before you were even formed, he knew what was placed on the inside of you. The thing is, we are confused about what was placed on the inside of us. Once again, instruction manual. Get quiet. Find yourself in the secret place with the Lord and see what he has for you. And we've been on this journey the past little bit about starting things and having goals and stepping out into what God is calling you to do one step at a time. Yesterday we talked about what it was like to be somewhere caught in the middle between stepping into the new thing and then getting to where God said that you were going and not giving up. Today I want to talk about the cost of constant distractions. The cost of constant distractions. Because guess what? There's a world that is tugging on us all day, every day. And that's what I want to jump into. Oh, Kendra said, amen and woo. There we go. Yes, the cost of constant distractions. We're going there this morning. But before I do, I want to remind everybody to go to the link in my BIO, okay? There's a way for you to find out more about Brandy and myself and what we have going on all over the place. All right. There is email there. There's all kinds of things there. All right. If you want to find out more about Fire and Water Ministries, you can go to Fire and Water Ministries.org. Okay. And also if you want to become one of our monthly partners with Fire and Water, we're 501c3, nonprofit organization. So it is a tax-deductible donation if you do decide to do that. And we're so very thankful for our monthly partners. You new people, we have monthly partners. Why? Because we do not ask or charge for going and ministering. I'm not doing that. If there's a church that's just like, well, we can't really no, those are the ones I want to get there because you're hungry for the Lord, and you guys are the ones that help the mission carry forth in what God is calling Brandy and me to do. And we're very, so, very thankful for those that are able to do that. Amen. Prayer is also another big one. So be lifting up me and my family. Some of you guys ask, how can we pray for you guys? Just pray that God continues to move how he wants to move, and that we continue to hear his voice clearly. I want to, I, if you want to know how to pray for the Hamas family, it is that we would continue to hear God's voice clearly and that we would be intentional to do all that he has called us to do. That's the biggest thing. And pray for safety and protection over everything we do and everywhere we go in the name of Jesus. Amen. In the name of Jesus. But go to the link in the BIO and check out. There's lots of information there for you. I got some other things there for you as well. All right, let's jump into this. There's no other way to do it, but just jump into it. We got to talk about distractions. Distraction, distraction is something that easily creeps into our lives because it's there. If you were to sit down and really assess things, you would see distraction all around you. All right. You're always doing this thing. You're always scrolling and looking, finding information. All right. You're always checking something. You're getting buried in your emails. You're checking on this, you're checking on that, I'm checking on this. I'm texting. I'm doing this, I'm doing that. Okay. You're always consuming yourself. I mean, we have information overload now because you have the whole world in your hands. Like literally, you have the whole world in your finger at your fingertips. You're looking at news before you even get up in the morning. When the alarm goes off, if you look, you can find out what the weather is like right now, what it's going to be like later. You can find all the top stories you missed overnight. They may have happened in your local neighborhood, your state, uh, the nation, around the world, whatever. Before you even get up every day, what in the world is that? Amanda, style me up. All right. Well, there you go. Style me up. Toilet paper and plungering. Good morning, friend. Thanks. But we have information overload. We're always looking screens and we're always moving. We're always going. We're always doing. All right. We're always looking for another opinion, another video that's going to solve all my problems, another update for an app that's supposed to be working the way it's supposed to be doing, another notification. Okay. We're always we always got bad news and good news and this news and that news and all these controversies and all these conspiracies and all these distra all these distractions and these things that are buzzing our minds. And we wonder why we can't sit down for two seconds. Anybody else have that problem? You sit down, and it's almost like something on the inside of you triggers you that you should be up and moving. Well, I just sat down. Oh, well, no, you need to be up and you need to be going. You need to be doing something because if you're not being productive, you're not living life. You're not doing anything. And it's almost like the enemy tries to make you feel guilty for sitting down for a minute. Yeah, Tim. For sitting down for a minute. And yes, we have a lot of, we have things to do and we have priorities and we have goals and we have things that we're pressing into. But if you do not prioritize your time, then you, I mean, your time is just a mess all day long. It's the same thing with the budget and your money. If you do not prioritize your funds, it's like it's like the old saying, you know, you you you tell it where to go instead of it telling you where it went. The same thing is with your time. You have to you have to tell it where to go. Or at the end of the day, you go, where did the time, where did the day go? My gosh, is it already seven o'clock? Like I was going to do this and this, and I didn't even get to do this. Well, what are you doing? What are you doing? You're you're staying you're staying busy doing a lot of stuff, but what are you doing? All right, you're you're you're always informed and you're taking on all this information, but are you discerning the information you're getting, or you just taking everything you get as gold and allowing it just to infiltrate your body and infiltrate your mind? You know, now we talk about people being overstimulated. I'm overstimulated. And when people are getting overstimulated because there's just so much that is coming at us. A distracted life is going to keep you spiritually weak. A distracted life will keep you spiritually weak, even though you're you're staying mentally busy, it is weakening something on the inside of you. If you have a distracted life or you live a distracted life, you will you you have a lot of a lot of noise around you, but but things are not real clear, things are real foggy, thing you can't see things, you know, right, because you've had so much information coming at you. A distracted life is going to keep you always reacting instead of responding. And you'll begin to react to everything that's around you, and you're losing touch with what God is trying to tell you. See, the voice of the Lord, He wants to speak to you, but we have all these distractions and we have all of these things, and all of this stuff is going on around us. So we haven't sat for a moment and just been in his presence. We've always got to we've always got to be on the phone call, or we've always got to be texting back and forth, or we've got to be looking up the information. You know, there's lots, yeah, we need discipline. Yeah, Brandy. She's getting ahead of me. We have to unalive to the flesh. Yes. We have to unalive to the flesh. We have to deny ourselves, take up our cross, and follow him daily. Sometimes that means leave the phone on the charger, okay? Leave the phone on the charger, and then go. Go do something that doesn't require you to. I mean, I work with technology all day long. So I have to work in structured work blocks, is what I try to do. Now, sometimes it's, you know, you got to have a little, I'm not saying that your schedule's gonna be perfect and that you're not gonna have to kind of bend. What I'm saying is you have to be more intentional about what you're doing in the moment. Okay. I posted something yesterday somewhere in social media out there, and it was how I was sitting, I was sitting in bed, and my one of my daughters was sitting next to me, and she says, Look what I've done. And I was working on something, and I and I looked up, and in that moment, I heard the Lord say, Be intentional. And so I put the phone down for a minute and I said, Well, what do you got there? And so we had a brief conversation, and she was showing me this little rubber band bracelets that she had. Now, if we're not careful, you can be sitting and doing this, and you go, Oh, wow, that's great. And later you're not even going to know. You're not even going to know what it was that she was trying to show you. You're not going to have a clue. Hey, do you remember when I I don't I don't know if I remember that or not. I don't know. But so many times we're so caught in the the twelve things that I've seen and I'm going through here, we're not even present in what's going on around us anymore. That's a great way to put it, Sean. We're disengaged. We're dis we're disengaged from the the the local world is what I want to call it. Because we're so interested in the out there world. Even the things that I put on social media and the things that I do. It takes time to shoot things and edit things and put things out and put things up and do this. I have to make sure that I have concentrated work blocks because I know this is a part of what God has called me to do. So I have to be a good steward over that. But I can't let it consume all of my time. See, that's what's happened. That's what's happened through the decades and through the years. We have taken our careers and things and we've let it consume all of our time, but it's just a it's a small part of our lives. It's a small assignment of our lives. But so many people have put their identity in what they do. Now they're being extremely distracted by something that was just meant to be a piece of your life, a part of your life, a part of what God is calling you to do. A lot of people think that their biggest problem is warfare, warfare, warfare, warfare. And yes, warfare is real, and we go through different storms, we go through different battles, and we have to discern what it is that we are up against, all right, when we're coming up against the enemy. But a lot of people think that's their biggest problem. A lot of people think another big problem is just the devil is always attacking me. He's always coming against my mind. Another big problem is that, you know, I don't have, I haven't heard from the Lord. I need to hear from the Lord, and now they're getting on every prophetic page they can find and reading every prophetic word that some of it and trying to find the commonalities between all the words and then all of this and that. The Lord got a hold of me a long time ago and said, Hey, be careful who you're listening to. All right, not every voice is speaking what I am speaking. There's a lot of things out there that sound good and it looks good and it feels good, but it's not the real voice of the Lord. So you got to be very discerning. It looks like God, it sounds like God, but it's not what God is actually saying. And there's a lot of people that are being pulled off. I mean, the Bible warns us against false prophets. We have to be very careful on who we're listening to. There's a lot of feel-good messages that make your flesh feel just great, and they're leading people this way. And there's also the doomsday stuff that's going this way, that on, you know, June the 12th at 11 15 a.m. If you guys see anybody who's posting a day or a date, and I have this was it September of last year, October, September. There was these people, these doomsday prophets on TT and everywhere else. And they were like, on September, there's this, and this is gonna happen. And I told everybody, I said, Jesus doesn't even know. He sits at the right hand of the Father, and we too, hello. We were co-resurrected with Christ, so we also sit in heavenly places. Ah, he's not, he's not, he's not speaking that to Jesus. He's not speaking any of that to us. No one knows the hour, no one knows the day. All that we know based upon the word of God is that he is coming soon. You should be prepared, you should be ready, you should be a bride that is awaiting his return, yes, but we don't know the day and the time. So stop doing that. There's a lot of people who didn't, my wife did not grow up in church. Brandy did not. She is going to be one that you're going to want to hang out, hang out on TikTok. All right, say hello, dear. You see Brandi Hamas in here. She did not, she didn't grow up in church, you know, and her testimony is very powerful. The Lord, she went through all different types of things, drug addiction and things like that. Of course, you can find her testimony in places, but but you're in a good place, Melissa. All right, because Jesus loves you and Jesus wants to have a personal relationship with you. All right. This is not about religion. I'll go ahead and tell you. Yes, a lot of people look at it as the Christian religion, but what you have jumped into this morning is a bunch of followers of Jesus, which goes beyond religion. Religion is just a bunch of head knowledge, okay, and then and then we think that we we know a whole lot and that's it. But Jesus wants a relationship with you. All right, and Brandy's put a lot of stuff here for you. If you're looking for a Bible to get, Amplified is good. New King James is uh I have the New King James, all right. The passion, NASB are all good. The passion is what I read from. The passion's kind of like it's like plain English, like we're sitting here talking, all right. But I I got them, I I got a bunch. But you want to definitely get something that you understand. NASB is good, amplified would be good to start with. I would that's just my own personal take, okay? The NKJV is good, but definitely get something that you can understand, okay? That's what I like. What uh what what I'm reading now, okay. Well, good. I I read a lot from the passion, okay, on here because it is it's English and it puts it down, and I'll break it down. We'll talk about the Greek meanings of things, the Hebraic meanings of things, the Aramaic meaning on things, all right. But I will bring other translations in to make sure we all get the whole picture of what is being said here. I try not to leave anything out according to the word of God, amen. But yeah, jump in with us and hang on because we hopefully we're all going some places with Jesus, of course. So thanks for being here. Oh, yeah, absolutely. No problem. We appreciate you being here with us this morning, amen. But we see Martha here, who is doing a lot of good things. But see, the all the good things began to pull her away from the one thing that mattered most in that moment. Jesus is sitting in your house. And while it was important to do all the things and the good things and this and that, the more important thing would have been to sit at his feet. And she gets really hot at Mary. Well, look at Mary just sitting there, just I mean, having a good time. We got all this stuff we got to do. There's Mary. And Jesus points it out and says, Well, she chose the better part. Martha, you need to be like you need to be like Mary in this moment. She's choosing the good part to sit at my feet, and we have lost that. We are so distracted with all these things. And there's a lot of good things we get distracted with. I mention that all the time. But you gotta be very, very cautious and careful what you're doing in that moment. Is it what God wanted you to do? Rob, thanks, man. I appreciate the swan, buddy. Thank you. We gotta be so very careful what we're doing. If Jesus entered the room right now, would you stop what you were doing and sit at his feet? Or would you be so distracted he could come in and go out and you never even knew he was there? Amen. Amanda said, I'm glad God brought me out of works and religion and brought me into relationship. See, that's that's where we're going. He won't he wants us to walk with him in the cool of the day again, like Adam. When I say that we are working our way back to the to the garden, what I'm saying is we're working a way back to our original design that he had for us, where we're taking time. They weren't doing a whole lot in the garden. Yes, they were tending the garden, I'm sure. But they spent time with the Lord. They walked with the Lord, they talked with the Lord. They felt when the breeze blew, oh, thank you, Lord. Thank you, Lord, for this moment with you. We gotta be, we gotta get undistracted again. We gotta get undistracted again. There's a lot of people that are busy doing a whole lot of good things. You're handling a lot of responsibilities. You're you're running your household, you're running your businesses, you're stewarding your ministries. All right. Maybe you're taking care of kids and you're you're responding to the messages that you need to respond to. And you're watching these videos and you're doing these things and you're you're following the news and you're you're trying to stay caught up. See, that's our problem. We're always in a state of, I gotta get caught up. Oh, I meant to check on that. Ah, I meant to do that, and ooh, I gotta get over here and do this. Ah, I gotta see. Do you anybody else? Hello? Hello? Anyone else out there feeling like that? Well, we're doing all these things. But yet still we're missing the better portion. We're missing the better portion. Jesus said Mary had chosen the good part. She chose the good thing here. Because Mary slowed down long enough to sit at his feet and hear what he had to say. There's a lot of people who are missing. You're missing the important things right now. And you wonder why life, you wonder why mentally you feel like you're spiraling, and and why why life is not going so well, and and you're not feeling fulfilled, and you feel like you've missed something. Well, the the answer actually is you have missed something. That's the truth. The truth of the matter is you have missed something. You're missing sitting at Jesus' feet. Because you have yet to choose the good part of life. Responsibilities, we have them. Goals, we have them. But if you're not sitting at his feet, what are you doing? What are you doing? Yeah, there's 24 hours in a day. We have to tithe our time. Very good, Amanda. We have to tithe our time as well. That's giving of our time. A lot of us will just, you know, we'll throw some, you know, we just throw money out there and off we go. I did my part. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Let's choose the better part. And let's take some time and intentionally sit at his feet and say, here I am. This morning before I did anything else, I sat outside for a little while with my cup of coffee and I just man, look at the sunrise. Lord, I just, I just thank you for life. And I sat there. And I still struggle with this if I'm just sitting there and I don't have my Bible open. I don't have my notepad open, and I don't, I'm not, I'm not doing this, and I'm not, if I'm not, if I'm if sitting there and not doing something, the enemy tries to come at me, and he's always like, all right, well, you got all these things to do, so chop chop. See, the enemy doesn't want you in his presence. All right, hopefully we have figured that out by now. The enemy does not want you sitting in the presence of Jesus because guess what? Some things may be said and some things may start taking place, and he don't want that. I say it many times. I know it's a lot of things I say, right? The enemy, if he cannot get you to just stumble headfirst into the sin that used to ensnare you so easily, now he's over here keeping you distracted all day long because he does not want you in his presence. Sin keeps you away from his presence. Distractions keep you away from his presence. Whatever the enemy has to do, he's going to try to do his best to keep you away from his presence. It's all about presence. Thank you, Lord. Psalms 46 and 10 says, Be still and know that I'm God. Be still and know that I am God. We all know that. We've said it. A lot of us probably quoted it at VBS and who and all the other places that we've ever been our whole lives from childhood until now. Be still and know that I'm God. Be still and know that I'm God. But yet we don't we have a hard time being still. We know that he's God. We got the half, we got the latter half part of that, right? But the be still part, the be still part. We're working on that. Such a simple scripture. Be still and know that I'm God. But there's a lot of people that say, well, I haven't quite got that yet. He didn't say, Well, you you need to fill every quiet moment with something because you always need noise in your life. You gotta be doing something. If you're not doing anything, then you're you're lazy. See, that can go back to hurts and wounds of your past as well. Maybe how you grew up. Get up and do something. What are you sitting down for? See, if we're not careful, we do that to our kids too, because of the hurts and the wounds and the pains of our past. Now, I'm not just gonna let the kids just lay around all day, okay? But if we're not careful, if we have that thing on the inside of us where we feel like we need to be up and we need to be doing, we need to be going, we need to be this, this, this, this, this. If not, we're gonna be we're gonna be passing that on to them. We haven't even been able to steward it well with the kids. They see us up and going and moving and doing and don't sit down, and why are you sitting down? We need to be out, you need to be going, you need to be this, you need to be that, you need to be still and know that I'm God. Why do we need to be still and know that he's God? Because there is something there's something that happens in the stillness when you're in his presence and the chaos begins to melt away. There's something that happens in the stillness of his presence when when when when this peace begins to settle upon you, there's something that happens in the stillness in his presence when when when when when he begins to speak to you and you take a few moments and just soak in what he's doing in that moment. Stillness slows you down. Stillness slows your thinking down. And on and honestly, being still, it it begins to reset your body in a way that nothing else will. You know, the world calls it meditation. I'm gonna go meditate or whatever they call it. And they say they or whatever, you know. So even the world gets the fact that being still does something to your body. But we have something much greater than that, is that when we are being still and we are being quiet, we understand that we are in his presence. And he comes and begins to reset everything. Could it be the very thing that you need is to just go be still for a little while and put all the distractions away? And it might be painful at first, but you fight that flesh and you say, No, I'm gonna sit here for a while with the king because I need this. I need this today, and you need it every day. Stillness begins to expose things that are going on and just how scattered you have become in this old chaotic and noisy world. Stillness will force you to confront what is really going on in the inside of you. And see, that's another big point we don't we don't usually throw out there. We talk about you need to allow the Lord to do open heart surgery on you, you need to allow him to come in and and and shine his light on things and and come and because what happens is conviction begins to come to your heart when you become still, and we don't want that because it's painful, and we just want to suppress it all and just keep it down there, and I'll just keep myself busy because that's what keeps it away. I don't think about it when I'm busy. Well, God wants it to bubble up so he can take it so you can live in freedom. But you're just thinking about the pain that's going to come along with that when he begins to talk to you. Stillness, though, it gives you room to hear his voice. Stillness will give room and give way to the word of God, and it allows it to sink deep on the inside of you. Stillness gives the Holy Spirit some time and some room to come in and correct and redirect you in certain areas of your life. It's a very vital part of life to be still. You want clarity to come, you need to go be still in his presence. You want you want you want peace to come upon you and your household, then you need to go and you need to get in his presence. You need to be still. Amen. Thank you, Jesus. And thanks for your heart meeting. Welcome in this morning. Colossians 3, 1 and 2. If then you were raised with Christ, seek those things which are above. Set your mind on things above, not on things on the earth. Oh well, that's real clear direction. If you were truly raised with Christ, seek things which are above. His kingdom come, his will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Set your mind on things above, not on things of the earth. Stop concerning yourself with all the things you have no control over. Stop concerning yourself with things you do not have control over. Amen. Christy said it right there. You love your mornings with the Lord, and it makes your day go smoother. I can tell the days when I have got up late and I have rushed and I've thrown and I've done and I've gone and I've ah You gotta have those moments of quiet to reset yourself. So the biggest issues of our time that people can't sit in silence for five minutes. Go try it today. If it's been a while since you've done that. See, I was gonna say, see how long you can sit with the Lord, but like at least try five minutes, ten minutes with the Lord. People are waking up and doing what I said earlier, grabbing your phones and you're looking at things, and now you're getting buried, now you're in reels, and now you're watching cat videos and you didn't even mean to get there and you're laughing and you're wondering what's going on. My alarm went off, and now I've been here for an hour doing what? What did I just what did I just get myself into? And then there's people that are going from one distraction to another distraction all day long. All right, if you own a business and you don't have the right business systems in place, hello, I found those out the hard way, then you're always putting out this fire and you're putting out that fire and this fire, and now this fire's arisen, and oh my gosh, I just put fires out all day and I have no idea what happened. Once again, you got to put safety measures in all areas and aspects of your life to make sure things run smooth enough to where you're not always being distracted all day long. Put safety measures in place in your life. There's people that have trained their minds to always need that constant stimulation. You know, if you do a little bit of a scientific study, a little bit of a health study, if you will, it's the frontal lobe of your brain right here, the frontal cortex, whatever they call that. This thing right here is where dopamine and things are created. Okay, I don't mean to go too deep on the health thing here, but but what happens is you pick up your phone and it gives you an instant boost of something. You see something that you like or you watch a video that you thought was great. And now what happens is the, you know, the algorithm behind everything is beginning to throw you all the things that you stay on the longest and you watch. So now it's throwing you all these things. And that's when you just get lost for an hour, you get lost for two hours, you get lost for however long. You got to be so very careful. And then it's training your mind that uh you just had a bad situation. Well, you get you're gonna you're gonna pick up a distraction and you're gonna get distracted because you want to get your mind off of that. Well, it doesn't make that thing go away, but you bury yourself for a while. And then the next thing comes along. So you bury yourself for a while, and then you go over here and you bury yourself for a while, whatever that is, whatever it looks like. I mean, and I know I I pick on the phone a lot, but it could be sports, it could be the news, it could be, it could be anything else. There's a lot of people that form addictions and things out of that because you're running to some distraction because you don't want to handle what needs to be handled. But God wants you to slow down so he can help you take care of business to bring freedom to your life, so then you can begin living the way that you were designed to live, which is us working our way back to the garden so we can walk with him in the cool of the day. We can talk with him. We understand who we are, we know our place here on the earth, we know the things that he has called us to. There's no more questions when it comes to those things. And then when we have done everything, we stand and say, Oh, I'm just thankful for your goodness. Oh, I'm just thankful, oh, for your presence in my life. And when you get to a point where you're just thankful for his presence, that it doesn't take all these other things to make you happy or make you feel fulfilled. I'm telling you, you will never truly be fulfilled until you understand who he is and who you are in him. You'll never understand. We've got to go back to this and understand why we were created in the first place and what it is we're supposed to be doing. The enemy wants to keep you distracted with all the things going on. The this and the that. We've got to be up to the minute with everything. Quick, quick, quick. And it's been a slow fade through the generations. It's been a slow fade. And things intensified and things picked up and things got way out of hand like they are now. Things that were meant to be tools, we're considering them to be life. It's not life. It's just tools. If I look at the news, I look long enough and I go, okay, well, I see what's going on around the world. I'm not saying be a hermit and hide in the hole, okay? I'm saying, I'm saying stop consuming your time with one thing so much. If you want to consume your time with anything, then get in his presence. Get in his presence again. It's time to seek things that are above, setting our minds on things that are above and not of this world. Because distraction's expensive, y'all. Distraction's expensive. It costs you your focus, it costs you your depth with the Lord, it costs you your peace, your discernment, your prayer life, your time, your family. Could cost you your career. And busy hours turn into busy years, by the way. We think a few minutes here and a few minutes there. If you have screen time on your phones, go look and see the average. Go back. I don't know how it is across devices, but go back and see how much you spent on there yesterday and how much you spent on there the day before and see what it was that you were doing. That really gives you a kind of a clear picture. I'm telling you, that gives you a clear picture. Because when we're distracted, we become shallow. And what happens to shallow people? Shallow people have shallow roots, which means that a wind goes and you just you just fall apart. And then you bury yourself in your distractions again. That is not a good place to be. Not a good place to be. Amen. If we have shallow roots, then we're easily offended. If we have shallow roots, we're easily deceived. If we have shallow roots, we're easily manipulated and controlled. See, there's a lot of places out there that'll just keep you so busy till you don't know the the up from the down and the end from the beginning. And they can be easily controlled and manipulated. Because you're busy. Busy, busy, busy. You wore out, you don't sleep very much, because you're busy, you're doing and you're going. Shallow roots on people causes you to be thrown by every wave of emotion and every trend that comes along and every crisis that arises and everyone's opinions and every hard season you go through, you're getting thrown here and you're thrown there, and you're taking everything as gold and you don't know what the truth is anymore. You know, I mean, psychologically speaking, when you go to make a big purchase in your life, a home, a car, or anything with a large price tag attached to it, at least have a 24-hour, if not a 48-hour rule on it. And what does that mean? That means you go and you sleep on it because you're so excited for this new thing. You're so excited for the new adventure. You need to spend a couple of days to go through the thought processing, to pray about it, to ask the Lord to have his discernment in it because your your emotions are so high in the moment. Sometimes it's hard to hear the Lord. But you want to make sure that you've heard him. You want to make sure he has confirmed it. And that goes, means that you need to go be still for a couple of days before you make that big purchase. All right. Get your emotions out of the way before you step into something. All right. Now we should take that on everything that we do. Get your emotions out of the way, step back and ask the Lord for guidance, and then step in. There's been a lot of things that I have stepped in. I wish I hadn't stepped in. Y'all can take that where you want to take it. Amen. I've stepped in a lot of things and went, well, I shouldn't have stepped there. So you have to be careful and you've got to make sure that he is helping you with your decisions. You want to bring depth back to your life, you've got to get in his presence. You're not going to hear him clearly if you're not in his presence and you're not being still. So, so what do we do with all of this? All right, we we've talked about the things that come against us and the time that is stolen from us. So, what do we do with it? The first thing you have to do with all of this is you have to get honest with yourself. Or you got to get completely honest with yourself. You need to say, Am I constantly distracted? That's a good place to start. Ask yourself that. Am I constantly distracted, Lord? You need to ask yourself, have I have I even lost the ability to just slow down? Have you lost the ability to slow down? Ask yourself this. Do I reach for my phone faster than I do for the Word of God? Do you? Am I always consuming things? But I'm not reflecting. I'm not reflecting things. You're always consuming, but you're not walking things out. Or maybe you're walking out a whole lot of different things. You're confused about who you are. Are you hearing God clearly? Or are you mostly just living in, you know, reaction mode? I'm always in reaction mode. I'm reacting to everything. You gotta ask yourself those questions. You gotta get honest with yourself. But then once you get honest with yourself and you begin to write those things down, you need to start making room to be still. You need to make room to be still. You don't have to disappear in the woods for two weeks. Okay. But you need to slow down a little bit every day to meet with God. Slow down a little bit every day to meet with God. That means you got to put the phone down first thing in the morning. All right. It needs to, when my alarm goes off, I intentionally set it back to sleep mode. So I don't, I don't want to see what I've missed overnight. I don't want to see all the things that are coming in right now because what's going to happen? The alarm goes off and you hit done. Everything just all the notifications just flood in. Here's all the things you've missed. Go check it all out. I don't want to do that. So don't pick up the phone first thing in the morning. If you need to go back, I did this for a small season of my life. I actually went and bought me a $5 cheapo old school alarm clock that would go beep, beep, beep in the morning. So I could charge my phone in my office. And I would just hit when I hit off on the alarm, I would just get out of bed. I didn't have anything to pick up, didn't have anything to look at. I had to really train myself because I'm only speaking to you from personal experience. Hello? I was getting consumed every morning in everything. This was even before I started doing TikTok and all that. I had to get an old school alarm clock to help train my brain how to just get up in the morning. You need to take 10 to 15 minutes to be in silence before the Lord. Don't set a huge goal for yourself. I'm going to spend two hours tomorrow. I'm doing this tomorrow morning. We're going to spend two hours with God. No, no, no. I want you to get up and start with 10 or 15 minutes. If it winds up being an hour, fantastic. But intentionally say, I am going to set this time aside and I'm going to spend time with you, Lord. Here I am. You can pray and you can listen. Make sure you're listening, though. You need to start reading scriptures without multitasking. Have you ever started opening up the Word of God? And I've done this before, and I'm like, oh man, the Lord was talking about, oh man, I meant to. Did I pay that bill yesterday? Ooh, I don't, ooh, I don't think I did. I better run do that real quick. And now I've run to do that real quick. And then, ooh, well, there goes that. Oh, there's an email that came through while I was paying bills. Well, I'll go ahead and handle that real quick. And then one of the kids come in. Hey, can you help me with? Okay, well, then I'm going to do that. And then me and Brandy start working on something. And then before I know it, we've we've got in bed the rest of the night. And I was like, oh man, what was that scripture God gave me earlier today? I didn't even write that down. Where was I? Man, what was that about? And that moment passed and it slipped, and I don't know if he ever brought it back again. Be intentional with the important things. When the Lord is speaking, you begin to read and you begin to write down and you begin to do what he's asking you to do. He is going to give you little things in your life to see if you'll do those little things. If you're not willing to do those little things, how in the world do you think you're ever going to accomplish and do all these other things? Be careful. That's today's morning charge. Before you move on with your day, take a moment and let what you've heard settle into your heart. Faith isn't just something we talk about, it's something we live out in the ordinary moments of everyday life. Wherever today takes you, remember this. You don't walk into it alone. God is already ahead of you, working in ways you may not even see yet. Stand firm, walk in wisdom, lead with love, and don't forget who you belong to. Until next time, keep your heart anchored, keep your faith strong, and keep living out real talk, real Jesus, real life. We'll see you on the next morning charge.