The Elimination of Hurry (Part 2): the Great Enemy of the Spiritual Life - Something is Wrong

Welcome to Heaven Earth Church.

My name is Ross Stackhouse.

I'm the founding pastor of Heaven Earth Church.

From the beginning, our heart was to be a church for people who

don't fit neatly into church.

Our heart is to meet people where they are, to learn their stories,

to honor their stories.

Because in every human story is God's story.

In this podcast, you'll hear more about the people who now call

Heaven Earth Church home.

Their stories, in many cases of misfits who are discovering or

rediscovering faith.

If you want to know more about us, you can go to heavenorthchurch.org

Otherwise, we invite you now into the story.

Hello, good people.

Brad Miller here, the producer of the Heaven Earth Church podcast.

One of the main benefits of being a part of the Heaven Earth

Church community is our Sunday morning conversations taught by founding

pastor Ross Stackhound.

You can watch and participate in the Sunday morning conversation

this Sunday morning, 9:30am Eastern time at YouTube.com heavenerthchurch.

The audio version of the Sunday morning conversation is available

here on the podcast, which you can find at Apple Podcasts, Spotify

and on the website, which is heavenearthchurch.org here.

Now with part two of the message series, Eliminating Hurry.

The great enemy of the spiritual life is Heaven Earth Church

Pastor Ross Stackhouse.

Lord, help us to be aware of you.

Help us to be aware of your grace, your presence with us in Jesus.

Amen.

Okay, I want to know what app you're addicted to right now.

So if you went to your screen time, your weekly screen time, what's

the app that's really just chewing into that screen time?

And some of you might be like, I'm not.

I don't use my cell phone that much.

What about a TV show?

What TV show or app are you giving minutes and hours of your

day to?

Let's hear it.

Your diabetic sensor.

You got to do better than that TV show.

Patty.

I know you got a TV show.

I said, but TV show.

Price is Right.

Do you like Bob Barker or Drew Carey better?

He's all, you know.

Oh, my.

Oh, okay.

What else?

TV show or app?

Paul Dexter.

Okay, I've never watched it.

Paramount Plus.

Okay.

Gotta watch it.

Okay.

Facebook.

How many hours you spend in a day on that, Dina?

Okay, so there's a specific channel you're watching on Facebook.

Yeah, you need to get off of that.

What else?

What apps?

What?

What's chewing up your screen time?

Jamin.

I couldn't hear him.

Cookie run Kingdom.

Okay, I'm guessing it's a really good game on the.

Okay, dad.

YouTube.

YouTube.

Chewing up your screen time, dad.

Okay, all right.

What else?

What you got?

Online people?

Wake up.

Online people.

What you got?

What are you using for your screen time?

TV time.

Valerie Benjamin app.

Okay.

Oh, good thing I don't know about that because I'm such a penny

pincher, I'd find any way to save a buck.

Yeah, no, no, no.

Don't share it, Valerie.

Don't.

Don't.

Survey junkie.

Huh?

Wow.

What else?

Come on, Natalie.

Yeah.

How many.

How many of you would say you watch more than an hour a day of

Netflix on average?

I think I probably do.

Oh, man.

Thou shalt not.

Hey, listen.

Thou shalt not lie is one of the Ten Commandments.

Okay?

What'd you say?

Oh, you're too busy on Facebook and Instagram to be able

to do that.

Yeah, yeah.

Jamin Facebook and work emails.

Okay.

Jay.

Tick tock.

Yeah.

Pokemon Hallmark.

I don't get it.

Every Hallmark movie is the same.

But, but, but, but maybe that's the comfort in it.

It's that it's the same kind of plot trajectory every time.

Joey the Ch.

Watermelon Game.

Is it not?

Fruit Ninja.

Is that.

Is that a thing anymore?

Okay, it was so.

My.

The addiction of these apps is so.

I don't have Facebook on my phone.

I don't.

The only social media app I have is Instagram, and I have something

called the Be Present app that limits how much you spend on it a

day.

But don't worry, I'm about to tell you how bad I am.

Still.

I got into chess a lot recently and downloaded the Chess

app.

And even that stupid app is built to make you addictive.

You win so many games and you get trophies, and then it's like,

hey, here's the next level that you can get.

I love trophies.

You know this.

And so here I was, starting to play chess.

Like an addiction.

It's serious.

So on Friday, I deleted the app because I asked myself, ross,

what do you want to be?

Do you want to be good at chess or do you want to be present?

Because I wasn't achieving both.

And you're like, gosh, this guy's a.

He's an addict.

He's in trouble.

Yeah.

Yep, you got it.

So here's.

Yeah.

So here's this number right here.

That struck me.

I did some research.

You know what that is?

What is it?

Duncan's Theorem.

It may be that that's not what I was looking for here.

PT I'm looking at, on average, cell phone Users look at their phones

that many times a day.

Oh, yeah, I've heard of this.

Yeah.

Way to make that tie.

P.T.

that sounds good.

Yeah, it's true, though, actually.

You've already beat me to the punch today.

Pretty much.

I know.

Yeah.

We can.

We can make quick work of this.

Guess what that is.

Average time spent back in 2718.

It was in the twos.

It's going up really quickly, that number.

And some of you are like, I don't spend.

What's that?

PT could be.

I didn't see that part of the research.

I think I did see this part of the research.

Part of it is.

Is that one.

Apps are being designed to be more addictive.

So the drug is getting better.

The quality of the drug is better, More addictive.

But also younger generations are driving up the average of that

number.

Millennials.

Z.

Driving it up.

What's that?

Melissa Gin.

What?

Alpha.

What's that?

It's my son.

Oh, my.

Okay.

All right.

This number, it is not the number of Greek soldiers who fought

bravely at Thermopylae.

Gerard Butler.

This is Sparta.

Not that.

It is not.

You're actually.

It's correct.

True.

This is the.

According to Nielsen National TV Panel data, US adults spent roughly

300 minutes a day watching TV, according to quarter four of 22.

So whether you're a phone person or a TV person or both, a

lot of our time has been lost to the digital invasion to the screen.

And so what is the result of that?

According to a 2015 Time article.

So it's worse now.

Goldfish have an attention span of nine seconds.

We have an attention span of eight.

And it's worse now.

It's worse.

So have I lost your attention so far?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Everything is competing for your attention.

Everything.

Go ahead, PT and it's going faster.

PT Says I can't go see an action movie anymore because the

speed of the action's too fast.

It's like.

It's overwhelming.

There's so much that's going on.

One researcher said that we.

Now everybody is in this boat.

We suffer from this phenomenon, continuous partial attention.

I feel that every day.

You guys, if Angela are here right now, if you asked her, what's

one thing that Ross does that makes you want to kill him in his

sleep?

And you think that's extreme, but you should see her face when

I do it.

She will talk to me while I'm in the room.

She'll ask me a question, and I won't even respond because I legitimately

have not heard a Word that just came out of her mouth, Continuous

partial attention.

Any spouses got that going on in your house?

Any.

Come on, help me out.

Don't leave me alone.

And here's what is.

This is worrisome for many reasons, right?

Many reasons.

But here's the one that I'm going to point to that's going to.

It's going to.

We're going to pick this back up at the end.

Mary Oliver, have you ever heard of her?

She's a poet.

She says that attention is the beginning of devotion.

Attention is the beginning of devotion.

And as John Mark Comer says in this book toward the end of the chapters

on the problem, he says, attention is so important because

it leads to awareness.

And awareness is everything.

All of spiritual maturity, emotional maturity comes from an

awareness.

Awareness of God's presence, awareness of ourselves, awareness

of others.

We are losing attention at a sickening rate.

And so we are losing awareness at an exponential rate.

Attention is the beginning of devotion.

Awareness is at the root of all forms of spiritual and emotional

maturity.

Aren't you excited you came to church today?

How's your attention span right now, Ross?

You need more pictures, we need videos.

You need to go, this is too many words.

So Joanna beat me to the punch.

So we've already.

This is all the quantitative effect of attention, but what we

need to talk about is more the qualitative effect.

John Mark Comer says this in this book.

The ruthless elimination of Hurry.

What you give your attention to is the person you become.

You agree with that or disagree with that.

Think it's true, not true.

We got to vote for true.

If you don't think it's true, I'll make a case real quick.

Real quick.

If you were to watch Fox News for, say, an hour and a half a day,

how would that affect your mindset?

What you care about, who you become?

If you were to watch MSNBC for an hour and a half, two hours a day,

how would that shape.

If you watch YouTube clips of a certain personality and you trusted

everything that came out of their mouth or podcast, how would

that affect what you become?

I think to all this, there's a moment when I got to show you this.

We.

We neglect these moments where Jesus, we're so fixated on what he

says and what he does.

But sometimes I think there.

There are moments when he doesn't say anything and he really

doesn't do much that say a lot about where God's heart is.

Watch this.

This is in Mark, chapter 8.

Mark 8 · chapter mention

The Pharisees came and began to Question Jesus to test him.

They asked him for a sign from heaven.

He can you read the next two words?

Can you practice that real quick?

Give me a deep sigh.

Have you done any deep sighing this week?

That right there says a lot about where Jesus is with his peers.

You know what he did right before this?

The story says that he fed a crowd of about 4,000 people.

And then these powerful folks said, hey, we need a sign from you.

He sighs and moves on.

I think when I'm going to go back to this in a minute.

I think when Jesus looks at what's happening to our attention

and our awareness, which I said last week, we're coming by honestly.

We're not trying to be hurry sick people.

One, the technology that we're leaning on so much is designed to

make us hurry sick, to make us be hurry distracted, busy and sick.

We know that because people who worked in Silicon Valley, they

left the industry and said, let me tell you what's really happening

there.

The drug is getting better and they're working on making it better.

That's one reason we're coming by.

This hurry sickness, this attention erosive existence.

But the second thing is as human beings, we tend to run from

sickness to sickness.

We talk about this in the rooms in the recovery rooms.

A lot of people who are in addiction were running from one misery

to another misery.

Why do we do this?

Why are we signing up for a more distracted life?

Because to not be distracted would be to be attentive to our own

lives and to be aware of our misery and pain and trauma.

Who wants to face that distraction is hurry.

We're hurrying away from our pain.

We're hurrying away.

And so Jesus looks at this, I think, and will you do it?

Go ahead and sigh deeply again.

I think that's what he does.

I think he's sad.

I think he's heartsick.

Like a friend who keeps knocking on your door.

I think of my daughter going to our neighbor's house and knocking

on the door and asking if she wants to come out and play.

And it's like that person never opens the door.

Jesus is knocking.

Nobody's home.

They're there, but they're not there.

They're suffering from continuous partial attention lost

in a TV or a screen, running from pain.

When Jesus says, he says this right here.

Oh, man.

Actually, let me go to the scripture itself if I can find it.

That isn't it, is it?

I've got it on here somewhere.

Maybe I don't.

He says In John chapter 10, he's talking about being the good

John 10 · chapter mention

shepherd.

He says, I came that they may have life.

Oh, I do have it.

Where did that come from?

Thank you, Jamin, for the win.

God bless you, man.

He says this in John 10.

I am the gate for the sheep.

All who have come before me are thieves and robbers.

Jesus is grieved that people are.

Their lives are getting stolen away.

He's like, I've come to rescue my sheep.

That last part.

I have come that they may have life and have it to the full.

That's the one thing I have for you today.

The Son of God has drawn near to us so that we may have life and

have it to the full.

But what's that last word that I have with a period there?

Can you read that?

Any grammar nerds?

Want to tell me what that tenses there with that?

Sorry.

It's like the subjunctive.

People are like, oh, God, this guy's getting too nerdy.

Now I'm loose.

My attention's gone.

This is really too nerdy.

It's something that might happen.

Could happen.

It may happen.

I have drawn near to you so that you may have life and you may

not.

I'm knocking on the door.

Will you answer?

I'm sitting in the room.

Do you know it?

I've come.

What we give our attention to is the people that we become.

So Jesus, he says to his disciples, this thing right here,

he's telling them something they didn't.

I don't know if you know this, but Apple phones weren't a thing

in the year 34, 33.

I know that's shocking news to you.

So they didn't really struggle as much with hurry sickness.

People have always been in a hurry, always.

But now it's just worse.

The intensity is harder.

But he is telling them his disciples later in that same chapter,

watch out and be on your guard for the yeast of the Pharisees as

well as the yeast of Herod and right on Brand.

The disciples are like, I don't even have any bread with me

right now.

So take heart.

When you feel like you have no idea what Jesus is saying, they never

did.

He comes back like, that's not what I'm talking about, you idiots.

No, he doesn't say that.

He's nicer.

No, he's more patient.

We talked about last week how Jesus is slow and steady.

He's intentional.

He's saying, guys, do not give your attention to these two powerful

groups of people.

Everybody has their eyes on them and wants to be like them.

And so they're becoming like them.

They're giving their attention to these people who exploit religion

for power.

Don't pay attention to them.

Don't give your precious attention to them.

Because he says later to them in that chapter, they're gaining

the world.

They are the Pharisees and Herod.

They're.

They're amassing more power, more stuff for themselves, and they're

losing their lives along the way.

That's it.

This is at the end of the chapter.

Another translation says, what does it profit a man to gain the

whole world but lose his soul?

The word in the Greek is pasuke.

We get the Greek prefix psyche from it.

Like psychology, it's your essence.

It's the.

It's the essential you.

What if you gain all the things you're running after?

You gain it all.

What if you want to be like that Instagram influencer?

You're like, ross, that's not true.

But somewhere deep down, is it.

What if you gain all that influence?

What does it cost you if you gain all the things you're running

after?

What is it costing you for all the things you're giving your attention

to?

Guys, what's it costing you?

Ross, your wife is asking you a question in the kitchen, and you

don't even hear it.

Jesus, Are the things that you're giving your attention to worth

it?

If Jesus knocks, do you hear it?

Listen, some of you are rightly saying, like, you have good

reason to feel this way.

You have good reason to feel like God is.

God is absent.

I'm sick of it.

God show up in my life.

Where are you?

The psalms sound like that a lot.

And some of you have, like, that's.

That's real.

Full stop.

Okay?

Did you hear that?

And I do wonder if God is showing up and we have no attention,

and we.

And so we have no awareness.

All right, last question, then I'm going to finish for the day.

Okay.

I asked you to pay attention to your hurry sickness this week.

Now maybe you don't remember it.

What did you notice?

What did you notice about.

Notice about your tendencies of being hurried, distracted, and

busy.

Did you notice, Nick, by Monday, I forgot.

I'm with you, brother Jay.

It brought more awareness into my life.

Heather.

Heather just admitted.

Brought to the table.

Like, I'm very uncomfortable just sitting still.

Sitting by myself and being still.

Me too.

God has called me to a season of extended periods of stillness

and silence.

The last, like, 30, 40 days.

I'm noticing.

It takes me 10 to 15 minutes to even be able to hear what's underneath

but it keeps happening.

I keep getting there.

And I've told you guys, I'm seeing how much scarcity drives my

life.

This belief that there is not enough.

Even my prayers.

I need to pray in a certain way to motivate God to act.

Scarcity.

I'm hearing that humming in my life more.

But it's taking me 10 to 15 minutes to sit still because I'm

sitting there going, I'll sit outside of my porch like, oh, gosh,

I should go pull those weeds real quick.

My yard looks like a disaster.

You know what?

Really quick.

I need to text that person back.

I forgot to text back.

How many of you have been on the end of a forgotten.

No reply from me.

Don't show your hands right now.

Don't do it.

Listen, can I tell you something?

I'm being straight up with you.

It's going to happen more.

I'm not going to text back as quickly, okay?

But I'm getting to the solution.

I'm jumping ahead.

What'd you notice about your week, Kaylee?

Yep.

Have a hard time?

Yes.

Yeah, thanks for sharing that, Kaylee.

Kaylee was talking about how she started her junior year in day

one, homework in every class.

There's.

There literally is not margin to do it.

So what Kaylee's talking about is there's a.

It's kind of like PT said about action movies, the speed of

our world anymore.

It's like you can't, you can't even be present in it because the

speed is just so fast.

The go ahead.

Yeah, yeah.

Thank you for sharing that, Melissa.

Yeah, yeah.

Melissa said it her.

Melissa works in a school and she's like, I have to carry on a

notebook to take note of things or I won't remember what happened

in the last five minutes.

Because you're just bombarded.

Yeah.

Did I say the speed of the world is intensifying, Adam, Go ahead.

You would have been able to do, you know, even 20 years ago.

But the dark side of that is, you know, for me, focusing in on

a task in one project can feel virtually impossible because I'm

always accessible.

There's things simultaneously happening with a handful of projects

all the time.

And so I'm just.

It's like whack.

A full.

Yeah.

Yes.

It's a game, folks.

Like where there'd be these holes, like nine of them, and then

this mole would pop up and you got to take the thing and hit it

on the head.

Go ahead.

It's just non stop back and forth.

And I did a few days, I Don't even know.

Like, what did I work on?

Yeah, y.

Just really focus so I can do my job.

But it seems like that pursuit and that Chase is also my job.

Yeah.

Part of what I'm hearing from you is that the world is not going

to slow down for us.

It's actually going to get faster.

It's going to.

This is going to get harder, and I think the technology is only

going to.

The drug is going to keep getting better.

Dina.

Yeah, sure.

Yeah.

Even your bosses are explaining the new policy that you

need to adhere to with a speed at which you can't comprehend it.

So you're doomed from the start.

All right, I'm ending here.

Do you know what that is?

This is what you and me want to be like.

Yeah, yeah.

Sheep.

I've heard people give sheep a bad rap because they're stupid, silly,

or, you know, they're stupid, smelly, can't see.

Great.

Well, because I like to do such things, I wanted to research.

Is that actually true?

Interesting.

So it turns out they can hear better than humans can.

Anatomically, they're very similar to us from a hearing standpoint,

but they can hear better than we can hear frequencies that we can't

hear.

Have you all seen the video of these sheep who are all scattered

and such?

And people are hollering at them, but then their shepherd comes

along and hollers out to them, and they're like, yes, go look it

up.

I think what we're trying to recover is our ability to hear, our

ability to just have an ear for the shepherd who says to us,

life to the full.

Life like you can't imagine it.

Life like you're currently not experiencing it.

Look, the bad news here.

Oh, my God.

I just about did it.

I didn't mean to.

Bad.

I wasn't even going for that.

I swear.

And it just, like, came out.

This is the bad news.

Is that May?

Because the bad news is May not.

But the good news is May he will show up every day and knock

on your door every single day.

And what I'm learning in this extended time of stillness and silence

I've been called to recently.

I keep having this realization that keeps bringing me to tears.

It's like, oh, yes, a Hook reference.

Yeah, it's coming.

I didn't even plan for this.

There's this part where Peter Banning comes to Neverland.

How many people have never seen Hook?

You gotta go see it now.

Amanda Daggonet, Peter Banning, who's a lawyer, he is the

most hurry.

Sick person.

You've ever seen.

He was once one of the lost boys, once Peter Pan.

He comes back to Neverland and they're trying to find out who he

is.

And then this kid gets up on his face and starts spreading his

face around and he goes, oh, there.

Anyone?

Oh, there you are.

In my time of stillness and silence, it takes me a while, but

I keep going, oh, there you are.

He was there all the while.

It wasn't about his presence.

It was about my awareness of his presence.

So my prayer for us in the coming days that we would be like

sheep whose hearing gets restored to the shepherd.

I haven't even spoken about the solution yet.

There's a whole section in this book about the solution.

These first two weeks have been about the problem.

Ross, can you get to the solution already?

Do you feel it?

We want, even in our lives, the way that we try to get out of

our sickness is we try to hurry and make a leap toward the

solution.

And so we never get to it.

So I just wanted us to sit with our problem for a minute and

ask you, like, do you accept that it is a problem?

Furthermore, do you accept that your willpower ain't gonna be

enough?

Do you accept that your willpower is not enough?

By the way, that's the first step, first couple steps of Alcoholics

Anonymous, if you didn't know.

Do you accept that this thing has become unmanageable and your

willpower is not enough if you do?

If we do, we got a shot.

The next step coming next week, surrender.

So next week we're going to start talking about the solution,

but we're going to do it slowly.

We're going to do it for four weeks.

Four weeks.

We're going to talk about the solution to hurry sickness to this

hurried, busy life.

But I just pray for us spiritually that we would become

like sheep who start to have like.

By some act of God, our attention and our awareness are restored.

A minute of stillness and silence, and then I'll pray.

We are sick, Lord, and in need of healing.

And so we ask, Lord, that you would come to us and heal us and

help us.

Give us strength with our attention.

Restore our attention and awareness.

In Jesus name, amen.

Thank you for participating in the conversation happening at Heaven

Earth Church.

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Eastern Time, either at the main campus at 309 East Main in Whiteland,

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we.

Want to thank you for spending time with us today.

My name is Ross Stackhouse, the pastor to Heaven Earth Church

and and you may think out there that your story is over, but

in fact your faith story may just be beginning.

If you want more information about our church or you're interested

in the next step, you can go to heavenorthchurch.org Otherwise,

we look forward to being with you next time at the Heaven Earth

Church podcast.

SA.