Pay Attention

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.  These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts.  Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up.  Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads.  Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.  Deuteronomy 6:5-9 (NIV) 

I’ve been writing words of the day for me to meditate on.  It gives me some clarity and something to focus on.  Some obvious ones are like love, grace, and faith.  Some not so obvious ones center on gratitude, planning, and honor.  Each one has been helpful.  One that caught me the other day was the word ‘Attention.’  It was not referring to people watching something.  Instead, it was on focusing on what matters and not being distracted.  Like a teacher in a classroom, they notice when the class is not listening to a key lesson.  Then they do something to help reign the class back in.  Maybe it’s a subtle pause or tap of a stick against the board.  “Pay attention,” they say.  That reminds the room that something important is about to be shared.  

This was particularly important to my thinking about God.  I began to check in with myself.  Am I praying enough?  Are my prayers one that truly come from my heart or am I ‘mailing it in?’  Am I seeking the word consistently?  Am I doing what I want or what God wants?  These are important aspects of our relationship with God, and whether it be text messages, a TV show, or even the wrong crowd, we could easily lose sight of Him.  

We must always pay attention to how attune we are to God and His will.  I was reading a devotion where I was led to the book of Deuteronomy.  The sixth chapter talked about Israel’s journey into an unholy land where they could easily be led off the righteous path.  God wanted the leaders to be focused on His instruction such that they and others maintained their devotion to Him.  Imagine the challenge of going somewhere where you knew they did not worship God.  You would carry your bible and read it daily to maintain your focus.  Additionally, you would pray a multitude of times.  These would not only keep your focus on God but also ensure you avoid getting off track.  That type of resilience cannot be strictly mental.  That is why God said, “These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts.” It is the heart that drives and motivates us in situations where we may find ourselves lacking mentally.  It is ‘the will’ to power past those things that try to distract and divert us from a righteous path.  

Maintaining attention to God is a process.  There are numerous distractions that take us away from what matters to Him.  It could be a game, a show, a phone, and even a problem beyond your control.  But God did not guarantee we would go through life without troubles.  Even Jesus pointed out as much saying, “Here on earth you will have many trials and sorrows. But take heart, because I have overcome the world.” (John 16:33b) Knowing this, it should be relatively easy to deal with these things, right?  If so, please tell me the secret because I don’t know at times how to deal with it all!  But I do know God can.  So, let us not lose focus on what matters.  Fix your mind and heart on the one true living God, and reap the benefits of His love, mercy, and grace.  Where is your head at this moment?  How can you build a heart driven to follow Christ?  My prayer is that we not lose sight of God’s purpose for our lives, and when distracted, simply pay attention.  Amen. 

3 Is The Magic Number

First, celebrate the Festival of Unleavened Bread. For seven days the bread you eat must be made without yeast, just as I commanded you. Celebrate this festival annually at the appointed time in early spring, in the month of Abib, for that is the anniversary of your departure from Egypt. No one may appear before me without an offering.

“Second, celebrate the Festival of Harvest, when you bring me the first crops of your harvest.

“Finally, celebrate the Festival of the Final Harvest at the end of the harvest season, when you have harvested all the crops from your fields.  At these three times each year, every man in Israel must appear before the Sovereign, the Lord.  Exodus 23:15-17

For those of you who were children of the seventies, I absolutely loved Schoolhouse Rock!  For those of you unfamiliar with this, it was basically a three to five-minute infomercial about … get this … stuff you learned in school as a kid!  I know it sounds boring but there were really cool jingles that you could recite over and over again.  For example, one was about using conjunctions called, “Conjunction Junction.  What’s your function?”  As you might have figured, it was a train conductor trying to teach you how to use conjunctions in a sentence.  There was another one that talked about the process of making a bill into a law and the difference between the two.  “Oh how I hope and I pray that I will, but today, I am still just a bill.”  There are some of you thinking has Kent lost it, but give me some credit.  I did get ‘hope’ and ‘pray’ in there!  😊  So, there is one of my favorites if not my favorite.  The jingle goes, “A man and a woman had a little baby.  Yes, they did.  There were three in the family.  That’s the magic number!” 

Now I can speak of many things in my life that always had something to do with threes.  A saying like ‘the third time’s the charm’ or ‘once an issue, twice a trend, third time’s a problem.’  However, it has had a significant impact in my walk of faith.  Anytime God has wanted me to pay attention to something, it crosses my path three times.  One could say it is coincidence, but it has never failed to have a significant impact when I listened to that third time.  Most of our greatest significance to the number 3 would be the Holy Trinity of The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  However, is there more to it than that?

God is always giving clear signals as to things we should pay attention to.  Today’s verses focus on the three festivals the Israelites were to have in honor of God according to His law.  It made me ponder beyond my own circumstances and life lessons to the things pointing toward that number 3 biblically.  For instance, Peter denies Jesus three times after Jesus prophesied such.  The significance is not the denial.  The focus should rightfully be on Jesus’s ability to predict, which further underlined His divinity as The Son of God.   Jesus rebuking Satan in the Wilderness three times was not just about Jesus denying him.  It was also to show the tenacity of the devil coming at our weakest moments to tempt us.  Furthermore, it underlined Jesus’s perfection staying to true to His Heavenly Father.  What I’m getting at here is that we should always pay attention to signs of what God is saying.  Ideally, we should answer God whenever He calls, but are we wise to not jump the first time if we are unsure?  If we are hearing His call twice and certainly a third time, we must act and ideally with a high sense of urgency.

God always looks to connect with us.  When we look at the story of Samuel, we noted He answered God the fourth time and not the third.  However, if you read the story it was not that Samuel did not answer God that third time:

 A third time the Lord called, “Samuel!” And Samuel got up and went to Eli and said, “Here I am; you called me.”

Then Eli realized that the Lord was calling the boy.  1 Samuel 3:8

The calling was not just for Samuel.  It was for his father to tell him for the first time who God was.  Rev, Penny Ellwood, a UMC pastor, wrote, “In our church, we believe (the mystery of the Trinity) happens in another threefold – the use of our head, heart and hands.”   Isn’t that the beauty of how God works in us?  Will you be keen to God’s calling the first, second, or third time?  How can you be comforted by the knowledge of and faith in the Holy Trinity?  My prayer is we pay attention to God’s prompting for I truly believe ‘3 is the magic number.’  Amen.