Attention

We were away last week.

I'm thrilled to be back and thrilled to see some of you for the first time in person in

quite some time.

And so it's really a delight to be together.

We've been in a series focusing on themes that connect to the idea of emotionally healthy

spirituality.

And we've been running in this series for quite some time.

We were inspired by a book by the same name.

And so we covered some of the themes in the book.

Here at the end, I felt it necessary to add some additional themes that I feel are every

bit as important when it comes to emotionally healthy spirituality.

This is the last week in the series.

Next week, we're going to start the book of Acts together.

I'm very excited about that.

But I had to get this last theme in, and I thought it was a fitting end to the series.

This week, we're going to try to pull some of these themes together with one final topic

that I think kind of holds it all together.

And that is the topic of attention.

Attention and what we do with this precious, limited resource that we have of our attention.

And Matthew chapter 6 doesn't seem to be about attention, but I think that that's in fact

Matthew 6 · chapter mention

exactly what this passage is all about.

And I want to look at this passage and see a few things about attention.

Four quick points.

The value of our attention, the limits of our attention, the battle for our attention, and

then finally, the reordering of our attention.

That's where we're going this morning.

Let's pray.

Lord, we thank you for your word.

And we just sang this song and prayed this prayer that you would open up our eyes and

open up our ears, that we would pull the blinds and open wide the windows, Lord.

And that song is all about attention.

You removing obstacles so that we might attend to your word.

And that's what we ask this morning.

We ask that you would remove the obstacles, the distractions, the things that threaten

to hijack our attention, that we would fully attend to your word and your spirit.

And we pray that because we need it.

And we pray that it might glorify you as we sit at your feet.

And we pray this in your son's holy name.

Amen.

So first of all, just a word about the value of our attention.

Jesus says in verse 22 and 23, the eye is the lamp of the body.

And I really love that image.

He says, so if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light.

But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness.

And this is a wonderful metaphor.

Imagine that your eye is like a window and it lets light into your inner being.

And so whatever you're looking at, whatever your eyes are focused on, that thing, that

image is then cast, it's projected like a light that illuminates your inner being.

This is kind of an ancient way of thinking about the eye.

And so essentially what Jesus is saying is a very elegant way of talking about attention.

And here's the spiritual principle that he is putting forward, that whatever we pay attention

to shapes our inner life.

Whatever you attend to, that is what illuminates and shapes your inner life.

And this is why in Scripture very often the word eye and the word heart are used interchangeably.

So sometimes Scripture will say that you should set your heart on something, and sometimes

Scripture says that we fix our eye on something.

And those two phrases, set your heart and fix your eye, are actually used interchangeably.

From the Bible's point of view, that's the same thing, right?

That's the relationship between attention and the heart.

Attention is the gateway to the heart, right?

And neuroscience actually backs this up.

There's a powerful connection, neuroscientists tell us, between attention and emotion, right?

So your attention influences your perceptions and your feelings and your behaviors.

And then your perceptions and your feelings and behaviors then influence what you pay attention

to.

It's this feedback loop that works in both directions.

So just to give a hypothetical example, imagine that you're at your job and you get a performance

review.

And you look at your performance review, and it lists 10 things that you're doing extremely

well, 10 affirmations of you in your work.

And then at the bottom, there are two areas of improvement.

Two ways that you need to improve, right?

And imagine, hypothetically, you look at that and just skip past those 10 affirmations, and

you only focus on the two areas where you need to improve.

And you focus in, and that's all you pay attention to.

It's like tunnel vision, right?

And some of us are, that's exactly what we do, right?

You skip, yeah, yeah, blah, blah, blah.

And how do I, oh, okay.

And you see the two areas we need you to grow.

And so you just focus on that.

And then as you read it over and over, you start to feel bad.

You start to feel insecure.

You start to feel frustrated.

You look at that, and you question it in your mind, and you think, well, it starts to become

obvious to you that your boss doesn't notice the hard work that you've put in, that your

boss doesn't take into account all of the stress that you've been under this past year.

The more you look at it, the more you feel unappreciated.

You feel unseen.

You feel not valued by your boss.

And so then maybe a couple of weeks later, you're on your next work Zoom meeting, and

you know, it's hard to kind of get a word in on Zoom for some of us, and you're there,

and you notice that your boss just seems to have this really good connection with one

of the other people on the team.

And so they're talking back and forth, and you think back to that performance review,

and you just stay quiet because you think, she doesn't really care what I have to say,

what I have to contribute.

It's obvious from that performance review.

And then that experience on Zoom is just further confirmation for you that there's no real

connection between you and your boss at all.

And so because you feel like your boss doesn't really value you or appreciate you or see you

or understand the stress that you're under, maybe you start to sort of passive-aggressively

act out of that demotivated state, right?

You start to kind of do subpar work.

You start to be a little later responding to emails.

You start to be a little later on getting things done that need to be done in a timely

fashion.

Maybe you contribute even less in the Zoom meetings that you have, and so then the next performance

review cycle comes around, and there's actually three or four areas that you need to grow

instead of just two.

And they weren't there before.

And that all just further confirms that this is probably not the place that you need to

be.

And so you start looking for other jobs.

So that's scenario one, okay?

Here's scenario two.

Let's go back.

You get that same performance review.

You look at the 10.

You look at the two.

You take the two into account, but then you also spend a lot of time focusing on the 10.

And you think, why would my boss say that I'm doing these things well?

Well, my boss really noticed that I really gunned it over the weekend to get that thing

in on time.

My boss really noticed that I'm really good with people, and I handle this situation really

well.

My boss noticed here that I can handle stress really well, and I'm a clear thinker, and

I'm a decisive decision maker, right?

And you start to feel appreciated because you're paying attention to those things.

And you start to feel like, wow, I really feel valued here.

Next Zoom meeting comes along.

Because of that sense of connection and affirmation, you speak up a little more, right?

Maybe you crack a joke.

Your boss laughs.

You think, oh, we connected, right?

And then a little more, and then a little more, right?

And so then you start to work harder because you feel that sense of connection with your

boss.

And so the next performance review comes around, and your boss says, you know what?

Instead of a performance review, let's talk about you taking on more responsibility.

Right?

Hypothetical example, but I can tell you from personal experience, and lots of people I've talked

to over the years, this is exactly the way it happens.

This is exactly the way it plays out.

Now, you trace that back, what's the origin of the split between those two alternate realities?

What are you paying attention to?

Where is the spotlight of your attention focused?

Have you ever been in a really, really, really dark place?

We were just at the Outer Banks with my family last week, and we love to go crab hunting.

And one of the fun things about the Outer Banks is there's no lights out there.

And so it's pitch black dark, unless there's like a starry night and a bright moon.

It's pitch black dark.

And so when you're out on the beach, really the only thing you can see is wherever you're

aiming your flashlight.

Everything else is pitch black dark.

And that's exactly like attention.

Right?

Attention is like a spotlight.

Whatever it's shining on, you can see everything else you're blind to.

And this is why attention is so valuable.

As Jesus says, the eye is the lamp of the body.

Whatever you pay attention to shapes your inner world.

It determines the course of your life.

That's the value of attention.

We go on to learn a little bit about the limits of our attention.

I just said it's extremely valuable.

Now I'm going to tell you the bad news.

It's extremely limited.

It's extremely limited.

Jesus says in verse 24, no one can serve two masters.

And what he's really saying is no one can give their full attention and devotion to more

than one thing at any given time.

You can't give your full attention and devotion to more than one thing at any given time.

Did you know that your brain receives roughly 11 million pieces of information per second?

11 million pieces of information per second coming into your brain from all of your sensory inputs.

Right?

Now out of that 11 million, how many pieces of information per second are you consciously able to process?

50.

Right?

So 11 million, 50.

Right?

That's how big your spotlight is.

That's how much you can absorb at any given time.

So imagine having a document, somebody hands you a document with 11 million words.

Right?

And they take that document and before they give it to you, they highlight 50 words and then they black out all the rest.

And then they give you the document to read.

And all you can read are those 50 words.

Are you going to have a reliable sense of what that document says based only on those 50 words?

Well, it really depends on which 50 words you're talking about.

Right?

Right?

Whoever chooses the words to highlight is really choosing whether or not you have any idea what that document is about.

And it's the same with our attention.

There's a famous experiment done at Harvard.

I've talked about this before, but I love this study where participants are shown a video.

They're sat down and they watch a video and it's these people and some are wearing white shirts and some are wearing black shirts and they have balls.

And they're passing balls back and forth to one another and the participants are told,

okay, I want you to count how many times the people in the white shirts pass the ball.

Go.

They watch the video.

At the end of the video, the researchers say, okay, how many passes did the people in white shirts make?

And most people get that number right.

And then the researchers ask the real question of the study.

Did you see the gorilla?

Right?

And most people say, what are you talking about?

And you go back and you watch the video again and you realize that right in the middle of the video,

as people are passing basketballs back and forth,

this full-size person in a gorilla suit comes out and just dances around.

Just dances around right in the middle of the screen.

But over half of participants, when they're asked, didn't see the gorilla.

They were completely blind to it.

And the point of the study is this.

Whatever we are not paying attention to, we are blind to, even if it is right in front of our faces.

Right?

Now, that's extraordinarily important.

And here's why this matters for Christians.

Here's why this matters for Christians.

In letters to Malcolm, C.S. Lewis writes this.

He says, the world is crowded with God.

God walks everywhere incognito.

And the incognito is not always hard to penetrate.

The real labor is to remember to attend.

God walks everywhere incognito.

It's not hard to penetrate the incognito, but you have to be paying attention.

Right?

Right?

Most of us in this room, I'm going to assume, would give almost anything to have clear proof and evidence of God's work in our life.

I would love to just be able to know conclusively, that's God.

God is doing that.

That is evidence of God in my life.

That's evidence that he loves me.

It's evidence that he's providing for me.

We would give anything to be able to see conclusively, that is God in my life.

But the real question is, are we paying attention?

Is it possible that our lives are crowded with God?

That our lives are full of God's evidence?

That he's providing us for us?

That he's loving us?

That he's giving to us?

Right?

That he's caring for us?

And that it's all around us, but we are not paying attention.

We're blind to it.

Right?

We don't see the 800-pound gorilla of God's love that's right in front of our face.

Because we're paying attention to exactly the wrong things.

Some of the most profound moments in Jesus' earthly ministry, the first moments of his transfiguration,

the final moments of his prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane before he was arrested,

the disciples missed because they weren't paying attention.

Right?

So here's where we are so far in this progression.

Attention is extremely valuable because it is the gateway to the heart.

The way you feel, the way you behave, the way you perceive yourself and the world around you

is all determined by what you're paying attention to.

That's the first point.

The second point is, it's an extremely limited resource.

You're only able to pay attention to about 50 bits of information out of 11 million in any given second.

And whatever you're not paying attention to, which is the vast majority of things out there,

you are blind to.

Right?

So where are you aiming that spotlight?

It's extremely important.

There's further bad news, and that is that there is an ongoing battle for our attention in our lives,

every day in this society.

In verse 24, when Jesus says,

you cannot serve God and money, the word that we translate often, money, is actually the word mammon.

And it's more than just folding money, cash in your pocket.

Mammon refers to all the stuff of this world.

It's all the stuff that in this context is set at odds with God.

Right?

It's all the material stuff that threatens to hijack our attention, to hijack our hearts.

And so the choice is constantly before us.

Do I give my attention to the stuff, or do I give my attention to the God who made the stuff?

Do I pay attention to the stuff, or do I pay attention to the God who made the stuff?

And this always reminds me of this man named Apollo Robbins.

I don't know if you guys are, if you've been around Advent, you've heard me talk about him,

because I think he's a really fascinating person.

Apollo Robbins is famous because he's a great pickpocket.

And he's so good that he's actually been studied by psychiatrists and neuroscience and even the military.

And I love to imagine soldiers going around pickpocketing people,

but they've studied Apollo Robbins because he's so unbelievably good.

But when you see him in action, it's as though you're seeing real magic happen.

And I don't know if you know Penn Jillette, but Penn Jillette's another magician.

And he sort of loves to sort of debunk other magicians.

So there's this one time when he's standing with a group of magicians,

and he's having people do tricks.

And he says, okay, you're Apollo Robbins, the famous pickpocket.

He said, go ahead, Apollo, steal something from me.

And Apollo says, well, you know, I don't know.

You're only wearing, you know, a shirt and shorts, and there's not much I can steal,

and there's a lot of magicians around.

And Penn's like, come on, Apollo, if you're that good, you should be able to steal something.

Come on, steal something from me.

And Apollo says, yeah, I don't know if I can do that, but I will show you a magic trick.

Penn says, all right.

And Apollo says, I want you to take your ring off your finger.

I want you to put it down on a piece of paper, and I want you to draw a circle around your ring.

Penn Jillette says, okay.

And he takes his ring off, he puts it down on the piece of paper, he gets a pen,

he takes the top off, and he goes to draw a circle, and then he just freezes.

And he slowly holds up the pen, and he realizes that the ink cartridge is no longer in his pen.

And Apollo, standing across the table, holds up his ink cartridge.

And his jaw just goes slack, right.

That's how good Apollo Robbins is.

People study him, right.

And it seems like an impossible view.

How could somebody do that?

Well, here's what he says when he's interviewed.

Pickpocketing is the art of manipulating people's attention.

It's the art of getting people to pay attention to exactly the wrong thing,

so that you can do whatever you want in their blind spot, right.

And the key is, you don't need major distractions.

You simply need to point the spotlight away just long enough to take what is most valuable.

Right.

All you need to do is take your mind off the pen in your pocket for just long enough.

You're taking the ring off your finger.

You're not noticing that the pen is being taken from your pocket.

Right.

That's how you pickpocket.

And here's the way this connects to our sermon this morning.

I think that this is the primary way that spiritual attack happens in our lives.

I think this is what spiritual attack looks like.

I think that one of the best descriptions of Satan is that Satan is a really good pickpocket.

By keeping our attention focused on exactly the wrong things, he's able to steal everything of value without us even knowing it.

You know, in verses 25 to 32, Jesus gives these examples of how this happens.

You know, Jesus says, if you focus on what you lack, if you're focusing on the deficit,

whether it be the food or the clothing or some other form of mammon,

that's going to cause tremendous anxiety in your life.

Now, why is that?

That is how Satan pickpockets, that's how Satan robs you of your peace and your contentment,

which are things that God's people are supposed to have.

Right?

Those are very valuable things.

But you start focusing on the deficit, and those things get taken away from you.

And this is exactly how it works.

We're not aware of Satan pickpocketing our relationship with our kids.

We never feel it happening.

What we actually experience is we just pay attention to other things.

Our attention is devoted to our phones or our job stress or other distractions of daily life,

and there are a million of those.

And we're just sort of distracted by this or this or this,

and then one day we kind of look around and our kids are grown up.

And we say, where'd all the time go?

You know, we're not aware of Satan attacking our faith.

You know, you never feel, I mean, I've never felt in my life the sense that like spiritually,

you know, Satan is sort of like stealing my faith out of my heart.

Yeah, I've never felt that.

What I experience is that I'm just consumed by every daily stress except God, right?

I have all of these other things that I have to worry about and pay attention to.

And just over time, God just becomes more and more and more irrelevant.

And then one day I just kind of look around and say,

you know, my life is just easier without God.

It's a pain to get up in the morning and get my kids ready and go to church and wear a mask.

And, you know, we can't even sing.

And that's just hard.

And it's just easier to not do it.

And it's just over time, you know, year after year, you just, those patterns,

you're just kind of looking around, paying attention.

And all of a sudden you look around and you're like, man, life's easier.

I don't even need God in my life.

That's how he did it.

Right?

The cartridge has been taken out of the pen at that point.

And it feels like magic.

You're like, how did that happen?

God was right here and now I don't even feel him.

That's how it happened.

This is how spiritual attack works.

Now think about life in the modern world.

It's like a playground for spiritual attack, right?

Every day we have to contend with, to use Alan Jacobs' terms,

information overload and social acceleration.

Basically meaning that at any given moment in our society,

more than any previous generation,

we are bombarded with vast amounts of information far beyond anything we can ever process.

A new crisis every day.

A new shooting every day.

A new riot every day.

Right?

A new scandal every day.

Right?

A new source of outrage every day.

Every single day it's like bam, bam, bam, bam, bam on your heart.

And social acceleration.

Things are changing faster and faster and faster and faster.

You have no time to even adjust to the changes in our society before more change comes.

And those two things conspire together to create this environment where we are constantly overwhelmed.

And where we are no longer able to choose what we pay attention to.

It's just being wrenched over here and then wrenched over there and we constantly feel exhausted.

Right?

And now entire industries exist for the sole purpose of hijacking your attention.

There are more and more sophisticated forms of content that are being custom made to target your amygdala.

With the surgical precision of a sniper's rifle.

Content that is custom made by an entire fleet of engineers.

To be aimed like an arrow right at your amygdala.

Bam!

Right?

Outrage.

Lust.

Covetousness.

Jealousy.

Because that gets our attention.

And as I said a few weeks ago, the spirit of your mind, your kind of inner being, is the most valuable real estate in the world.

And as I said a few weeks ago, that's because God is meant to live there.

That's meant to be his zip code.

So everybody else wants it.

The implication of this point is this.

Who's deciding what you pay attention to?

Because if it is not you, it's somebody else.

Right?

There's no neutral ground when it comes to our attention anymore because it's such valuable real estate.

Somebody's deciding what we pay attention to.

If it's not you, it's somebody else.

There are social, technological, political, and spiritual forces vying for that spot.

They want the spotlight on them.

So either you choose or somebody else will choose for you.

So just to summarize before we bring this to a close.

Your attention is extremely valuable because it determines who you are and who you're becoming.

Your attention is extremely limited.

It's a spotlight that can only illuminate a tiny fraction of what's coming in.

The rest you're blind to.

And there's a battle for your attention.

Entire industries, entire fleets of people, algorithms exist simply to hijack your attention

because there's enormous amounts of money to be made if you can do that successfully and reliably.

The only answer is that we as Christians need to recognize the importance of reordering our attention.

And no one else can do it for us.

You know, it's funny.

All these crises happen and, you know, somebody goes in and shoots up, you know, like the guy in Atlanta who shot up the massage parlors.

And all of these articles come out and they say, well, you know, that guy was a Christian.

He was a Southern Baptist.

This is obviously a discipleship issue.

Churches need to do a better job discipling their people not to shoot up, you know, a bunch of massage parlors.

And so people send me these articles, you know, and I read these articles and I think, you know, I think you're right.

I think that this is in many ways, you know, things like this or apart from mental illness, apart from other causes,

I think that, yeah, there's a discipleship issue here.

But I'm not sure it's what the article says it is.

In other words, most of the pastors I know are desperately, they're desperately, desperately trying to get their people to pay attention to the gospel.

But we can't make that happen, right?

Like my sense is that most of, I think our church is probably one of the more dedicated, one of the more faithful, one of the more engaged churches out there.

I think like on the curve, if there's a continuum for that kind of thing, I think we're pretty far over in the engagement.

I mean, our people are extremely engaged.

I mean, you guys are extremely engaged, devoted, most of you.

I mean, you're here, look at you.

You're here wearing masks.

I mean, you're engaged.

But my sense is that there's no competition, that we get maybe two, three good dopamine hits a week.

If I preach a decent sermon, if you have a decent core group experience, right, maybe you read your Bible and have a sense of connection with God,

that's maybe half a dozen good dopamine hits in a given week.

But we are competing with devices and other sources of stimulation that provide hundreds, if not thousands, of dopamine hits per second, per minute, right?

And there's just no competition.

So the question is not like, should discipleship happen this way or that way?

The fact is, discipleship is always happening.

We're always being formed every minute of every day, constant stimulation.

So we're desperate.

We're desperate for ways of encouraging people to turn the spotlight of their attention to the Lord.

But what's very clear is that only a person themselves can choose to do that.

Nobody can do it for you.

If we start trying to hijack your attention, we're just like the social media industry, right?

And that's not what Christianity is about.

The choice has to come from within each individual Christian.

That's the crisis of discipleship.

And that's where change happens.

Jesus says at the climax of this passage, seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.

This is an extremely important principle.

Jesus is saying, when it comes to your attention, if you make God and His kingdom your highest priority,

if you do what you can to keep the spotlight turned in that direction, most of the time,

everything else is going to fall into place as it should.

Everything is going to kind of be ordered and prioritized off of that, right?

But if not, as He said in the preceding verses, your life is going to be turned upside down.

You're going to be filled with anxiety and frustration.

You know, Simone Weil, the philosopher, once said that if we really want to change ourselves, it doesn't happen through the will.

If you want to change yourself, if you want to become a better person, change what you're paying attention to.

That's where it starts.

Willpower is downstream from attention.

So the question is, you know, when you open your eyes in the morning, where does your attention go when your eyes first open?

Does it go to your phone?

Does it go to your notifications?

Does it go to your, you know, email?

Does it go to the news?

Or do you take those first few minutes of consciousness and direct your attention to the Lord?

This has been a really hard battle for me.

The battle for the first few minutes is my consciousness in the morning.

It's been a battleground for me.

I have to keep the phone either across the room or in another room.

Otherwise, I'll give in.

I used to have a prayer app that I had on my phone.

But I realized that the temptation to not go to the prayer app but to go to the news was so strong that I couldn't use the prayer app on my phone anymore.

It just wasn't working.

So when you open your eyes in the morning, where does it go?

As you go through your day, how often are you turning your attention toward God and asking what God might be doing in you or in others around you?

You know, when I learned to do counseling, one of my mentors, one of my supervisors said,

there's three things that you're paying attention to at any given time when you're with another person.

You're paying attention to what they're saying and how they're acting.

You're paying attention to how you're feeling and reacting.

And then you're paying attention to what your sense of the Spirit tells you the Spirit is doing in that moment.

And that's a really good way of thinking about life, right?

I'm paying attention to the other.

I'm paying attention to what's happening in me.

And I'm paying attention to what I feel like God is doing.

And the spotlight is just rotating between those three things.

You know?

So how often are we intentional about that?

Going back to the example of the performance review,

what if instead of only focusing on the negative comments, those two areas of improvement,

what if instead of only focusing on the positive comments and all the ways that you've done a good job,

what if your main focus was to reflect on God's view of you in your work?

Right?

Because you might be doing a great job in your boss's perspective,

but you might not be working with your whole heart.

There might be some resentment or passive aggression there.

But this is what Paul is getting at in Colossians 3,

when he says that we shouldn't work to please others or simply to make our bosses happy by way of eye service.

But instead, he says you should work as though you're working for Jesus Christ Himself,

who delights in you.

What if that was the focus of our attention and our work?

Seek first the kingdom.

Give your attention first and foremost to God.

And I guarantee you everything else will fall into place.

It doesn't mean you ignore everything else.

We're talking about your priorities.

And if this sounds hard, if you're like, oh, I don't know how to do this,

it's because it is.

It's extremely hard.

It's extreme.

You're waiting for me to say, and here's the trick.

There's no trick.

It's extremely hard.

You know, for me, it feels like being asked to go out and run two marathons.

You know, for me, it feels like being asked to lift and bench a thousand pounds, right?

It feels impossible.

But attention is a muscle.

And the more you use it, the more it will be strengthened.

And this is why, friends, Christians have developed all kinds of ways

to reorder and strengthen the muscle of our attention.

And these are the paths of discipleship.

And there's no substitute.

You're either getting stronger with this particular muscle or you're not.

But this is why the rhythm of daily prayer is so important.

This is why the church calendar can be so helpful because it reorders time

so that time itself turns our attention to God in the unfolding story of salvation history.

This is why it's so important to read Scripture regularly.

I can't even tell you how many times my spotlight was over here,

and then I sit down to read Scripture because I'm supposed to

because I've decided that I'm going to do it at this particular time

or I'm in a staff meeting or something like that,

and my attention is just gently brought around to a very different place.

I can't tell you how many times this happened for me.

And the muscle gets stronger.

This is why it's absolutely vital that we are gathering together weekly,

as hard as it may be,

if not more often,

to worship the Lord.

I mean, it's the only way it's going to happen, right?

So if all of this sounds daunting to you,

it is hard,

but it can be done.

Christians have handed us thousands of years' worth of tradition

aimed at doing this thing.

But here's the good news of the Gospel.

Verse 32,

Your heavenly Father knows exactly what you need.

And if all of this hinged only on our ability to pay attention to the right things,

the cross would not be necessary.

Right?

If we could do all this perfectly,

there would be no need for Jesus.

The good news is God is proactively trying to get your attention.

And He's the kind of God who was willing to suffer and to die for us

when the world was not paying attention.

Right?

Your life is filled with evidence of God's presence.

He is pouring grace and love and provision into your life all the time.

And it's not hard to find it.

We just have to be willing to pay attention.

Let's pray.

Lord, we thank You.

We thank You.

And I confess my weakness in this area.

I confess my struggle.

But I have tasted,

I've tasted what life feels like

when the spotlight is focused on You.

I've experienced

the anxiety being lessened,

the fear of being out of control,

being assuaged,

the anger toward my brother being evaporating.

Lord, we've all tasted and seen how our hearts are changed

when they are illuminated by You.

When the lamp of our eyes is turned toward You.

And I just pray that in the power of the Holy Spirit,

that that would be something that You give us more and more and more of,

to encourage us to strengthen the muscle of our attention,

to seek the kingdom of God and Your righteousness above all else.

We pray this for our good and for Your glory.

In Your Son's name, Amen.

For our 90s, O Max falando pubis,

to try and hear it,

to call you need ly say that you have fakult.

Thank you.

By your hands,

you have favored to expression in the spirit of your body and your ER-17.

For our ass,

a collection of full template of your life.

Watch yourself and address it even better the stock of your relationships.

To be alive and….

May out nor have you

be able toкивantly trust me