Latest / Wesley at FSU & TSC / "Distracted" | Sunday Service | February 2, 2025

Transcript

"Distracted" | Sunday Service | February 2, 2025 · Wesley at FSU & TSC

• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: I want to give a message this morning titled Distracted.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: Look to your neighbor, say, I'm not distracted.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: Look at your other neighbor, say, Yes, I am.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, the truth is we are very distracted as people.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: I read an article not long ago saying that Gen Z, which is you guys minus me, uh, and a few others in the room, uh, Gen Z is like the most distracted uh I don't know, group in the history of the world.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: I I think probably because you have everybody's waiting for this moment in my message, these devices.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: How many times do I do this in the sermon where I'll pick up uh the staff are laughing at me to like you always pull that out of your pocket and say these devices?
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: And the truth is, yes, uh, because these are both the most awesome and dangerous devices in the history of the world.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: I like believe that in my soul.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: It has power over you, you don't even know.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: Okay?
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: So I want to talk about being distracted this morning, but I don't necessarily want to talk about it in the phone sense, although I'm gonna give you that example for a second.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: I want to uh show you, I wanna show you, this is hard for me.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: My home screen.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: Can I show you my home screen?
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: All right, this is my home screen.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and a few groans in that moment.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: This was Friday night when I definitely needed to plug it in.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: And um I had a lot of things going on.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: But what's the one thing you notice?
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, the the thousand things up there, the 115 emails, the 49 texts.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: If that was yours, I'm sorry.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: Uh yeah, I've what I've learned is that there's two different types of people in the world.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: There's people like me who this doesn't bother, and then there's people like many of you whose home screen looks a little more like this.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: Which is nice.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: I I put it on sleep mode.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: You can see that in the top.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: This is like a new feature.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: I put it on sleep mode so that all the things just disappear, and then my my life just, you know, everything just goes into the ether, right?
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: Until I turn it back on.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but I think a lot of us deal with that uh being distracted.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna go to the Luke text in just a second.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but the other thing I wanted to show you is what caused all this in our lives, which is notifications.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: Did you know that on your iPhone and I'm sure on your other phones, uh you can see your notifications?
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: Put that up there, Hannah, uh, real quick.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: This is my daily average of notifications.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: It is a lot, yeah.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: This is a thousand over five days or so.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: I average between two to three hundred texts a day.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: And so if I don't respond to you, just know that my heart is in the right place.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: It's just that my fingers and my brain can't keep up with it, okay?
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um you can look at this into your own thing as well if you want.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I have some funny apps on there because I like to keep track of the world, like X, true special.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and uh I just those are mostly muted, but they still come through as notifications.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: Spark is my email, so I get a lot of emails and definitely cannot keep up with them.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: You know, in iOS 3, what are we on now, like 18 something?
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: iOS 3 is when notifications came out, which means there existed iPhones that didn't disrupt your day all day.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: Which is crazy.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: You would you you would just pick it up like you would your computer or something and go do something.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: It was you being the agent of it, rather than now what happens is you're in the middle of something and then you get a notification and you tap on it and you immediately get distracted to something else.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: And this is the this is the cause of everything.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't matter how good they make notifications, it doesn't matter how vigilant you are on your own screen time, it doesn't matter how you know determined you are as a person, like it just creates these distractions in our life.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: I always tell people it's the hardest thing in the world.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: Because 50 years ago, if somebody wanted your attention, they had to go to you.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: Like they had to drive their bodies to you, okay?
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: And uh maybe a little bit before that uh was the invention of the phone, uh quite a bit before that, the invention of the phone, but the phone it was an interrupter as well, right?
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: Because it was really cool, uh, because the phone, you can now call somebody, but that meant that you could interrupt their life.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: Now, a lot of people put the phones on the walls.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: Anybody grow up at the house?
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: Uh a phone on the yeah, I did.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: A phone on the wall with the long cable because you'd walk around the kitchen.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: Ours was in the kitchen, and uh and you'd have this phone on the wall, and but it was nowhere else in the house.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: Which meant that you're super intentional about the time that you spent on the phone, you also back in the day had to pay for that time.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: Like you'd have to pay for the minutes.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, my grandparents used to always want to be getting off the phone with me, and I didn't talk to them that much, so I was always confused.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: Why do you want to get off the phone?
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's because they grew up in the time where you had to pay for the minutes, so they didn't want to waste the minutes.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: Things have changed completely now.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: Now, if I want to interrupt your life, it's very easy.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: I was thinking about all the ways that you can do this in somebody else's life, and let's just pretend for a second that you have a real trust of this person, you have their location.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: You all should not have each other's locations.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: Just give it to your parents and maybe like two other people, whatever, but not to the rest of the world.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody has your locations, and now everybody watches.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's so bad.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: Uh just don't do the notification or the location thing.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: But let's think for a second, if I wanted to contact you, and let's think for instance, my wife and I want to contact each other, I she'll send me a text message and I won't respond, because that's pretty normal.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: And so she'll send me a text and I won't respond.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: So then she will call me.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yesterday we were riding bikes with our girls, and I had kind of taken off with Collins.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: They were the ones back there, by the way.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I had taken off with Collins and Allison was falling up with Dylan, and I'm trying to teach Collins to ride a bike, right?
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: And so uh I'm trying to get her to balance, and this is really cool.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: You get this awesome opportunity to learn this as a father, but I'm trying to teach her and trying to keep her calm, and my watch is like vibrating, like nonstop.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: Like, please stop calling me and I keep hanging up, and she's like mad that I didn't answer it, right?
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, other ways that you could contact each other, you guys use snap.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: Or a thousand other different messaging applications.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: You can contact each other.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: My wife sometimes, when uh I won't respond to the text or the phone call, she does find my.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: You know, or you can make make because we share our iClouds or whatever, she can make my phone beep, which at that point I know like something's wrong.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: Like, I probably should respond.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: But that's the truth, is that like we have a lot of ways to get into each other's lives and then immediately distract them from what else could be happening.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the problem with distractions, right?
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: Put that slide up there, Hannah, about distractions.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: Distractions create a barrier.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: When we create distraction with a barrier, it's a barrier between us and reality and opportunity.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: So we're creating something that like takes us out of where we currently are, what we're currently experiencing, and tries to pull our attention somewhere else.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: That's the problem with distraction.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: Now I want to go to this text from Luke 4, and you're gonna say, How in the world is this distraction when you first read this?
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm gonna hopefully walk you through this.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: This is uh the continuation of last week.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: If you were here last week, we talked about the Jubilee, and let me just catch you up real quick because we're kind of in the middle of the story here.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus is in his hometown.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_00: What's his hometown?
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: Nazareth.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: He's in his hometown, and he read, he stands up in the synagogue where they would gather for worship, and he reads the scroll from Isaiah.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_00: Isaiah is a prophet.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, he reads a text out of Isaiah 61, and he talks about the Jubilee that they had had in their previous life, and uh, or in the early parts of the Israelites.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: And uh so they have he's talking about the Jubilee, and he finally says, like, I am the Jubilee.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: He he says this verse right here, today the scripture has been fulfilled just as you heard it.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: Next verse.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone was raving about Jesus.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: So impressed were they by the gracious words flowing from his lips.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: And then they said, This is Joseph's son, isn't it?
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: Then Jesus said to them, Undoubtedly, you will quote this saying to me, Doctor, heal yourself.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: Do here in your hometown what we've heard you did in Capernaum.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: He said, I assure you that no prophet is welcome in the prophet's hometown.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: And I can assure you that there were many widows in Israel during Elijah's time when it didn't rain for three and a half years, and there was a great food shortage in the land.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yet Elijah was sent to none of them, but only to a widow and the son of Zarephath.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: I just pretend I know how to say that, in the region of Sidon.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: There were also many persons with skin diseases in Israel during the time of the prophet Elisha.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: If you remember from when a retreat, those of you who were on there, it's Elisha, and then he raises up Elisha.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, important is just to know that they're two different people of the prophet Elisha, but none of them were cleansed.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: Instead, Naaman the Syrian was cleansed.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: When they heard this, everyone in the synagogue was filled with anger.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: They rose up and they ran him, meaning Jesus, out of town.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: They led him to the crest of the hill on which their town had been built, so that they, and hear me out, could throw him off the cliff.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: Which is not the best way to spend your day, right?
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: And then he passed through the crowd and went on his way.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: So I want to back up for a second.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: I think there are three distinct distractions within this text.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: And it's gonna seem strange because there's no phones involved.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: There's no snap, there's no find my, there's no even interruption of your life.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: But again, remember I said the point of distraction is to remove you out of reality, to make you miss the main part, to make you miss the main piece.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: That's the point of distraction.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's what happens here.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: The first distraction I want to talk about kind of overarchingly is popularity.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: Because I think we see this in our own lives dramatically.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: This first verse, 20, verse 21.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: He began to explain to them uh today this scripture has been fulfilled just as you heard it.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone was raving about Jesus.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: So impressed were they by the gracious words flowing from his lips.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_00: And they said, Joseph's son, isn't it?
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: Now hold up just a second.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone was what about Jesus?
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: Raving about Jesus.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: That's good or bad?
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_00: Good, yeah.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: So he goes through this whole thing and talks about Jubilee.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: He says, Hey, this I said it last week, like it's like a mic drop, right?
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: Where he says, Hey, in the the the words of the prophet have been fulfilled in your hearing of them today, meaning, I am that guy, I read them to you.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: And then he sits down and they all go, whoa, right?
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: Like, look at him, and they are raving about Jesus.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: So impressed they were by the gracious words flowing from his lips.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: And then they said, This is Joseph's son, isn't it?
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: Now, we're gonna skip a few verses here.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_00: Hannah, go all the way down to what 28.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: Because what happens is Jesus then goes through this little rant, which he sometimes can do.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: And when we go down to verse 28, then they do something different, right?
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_00: When they had heard this, everyone in the synagogue was filled with anger.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_00: And they rose up and they ran him out of town, and they led him to the crest of the hill under the town on which they built so that they could throw him off the cliff.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: And then, but then he passed by the crowd and went on his way.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_00: I think a lot about college students and popularity.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_00: I think a lot about college students and people pleasing.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: I think a lot about people pleasing in general because that's me.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: And the very first thing that I notice in this is that Jesus is not worried about people pleasing.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: It's not even part of it, it's not part of his vocabulary.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't even seem to bother him.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_00: I love this last thing because they were about to murder him.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_00: I need you to hear that.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: Throw him off the cliff, and then it just says, but he passed through the crowd and went on his way.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_00: Like, y'all have a good day.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_00: See you later, you know.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: Like, isn't that wild that it doesn't seem to bother him that a whole bunch of people are angry at him?
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the truth is that the popularity between being popular and then suddenly not being popular, that's a hard thing for us to balance in our lives.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: I am so guilty of this.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: Often staff will tell you that when I gather us for meetings and we're having to make decisions, and sometimes they're popular decisions, and sometimes they're not.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: I often will ask, hey, what do you think the students are gonna think about this?
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_00: Or what do you think about this subsection of the students are gonna think about this?
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if staff's gonna like that.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: What happens is I get so distracted by the popularity.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: I get so distracted that people still like me at the end of the day, then I miss the whole point.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_00: Because sometimes, this is the hard truth, sometimes you gotta make decisions that are just the right thing to do.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_00: And it doesn't matter who likes you, they might want to throw you off a cliff.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: Hopefully not.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: But it is such a distraction, the allure of popularity.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: That's the first thing I see.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: The second distraction I'm gonna call preconceived notions.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to go, I want to take you to verse 21 here.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: He began to explain to them, today the scripture has been fulfilled just as you heard it.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_00: You've heard this a few times now.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_00: And then everyone was raving about Jesus, so impressed were they by the gracious words flowing from his lips, and then they said, This is whose son?
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: Joseph's son.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: Now, who's Joseph?
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_00: His father.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, yeah, Mary's husband.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_00: If you know anything about the birth story of Jesus, uh, the Holy Spirit comes to Mary who has not slept with Joseph and uh impregnates her.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_00: Work that on your own.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_00: And Joseph is there thinking, oh my gosh, this woman is pregnant by somebody other than me.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_00: And then she says, but it's God, and he goes, Okay, I don't I don't know what he was really thinking.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: But this is Joseph, but this is Joseph as the father of Jesus.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: Now, Joseph is a carpenter, right?
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus becomes a carpenter.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_00: Joseph's a carpenter.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_00: Joseph's not a scholar, he's not a theologian, he's not a rabbi, he's nothing that is like this kind of next level thing.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_00: Joseph is a carpenter.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_00: That's it.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_00: He's a lowly carpenter, and Jesus is a carpenter too, because you would often follow in the steps of your father.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_00: So when they say this is Joseph's son, they're saying a couple things.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: First of all, they're saying we recognize him, right?
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_00: We know who he is, right?
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: They're saying that.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: Number two, they're saying, wait, is this the carpenter that just told us that the reading of the prophet's words were fulfilled in our hearing by him reading it?
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_00: Is this Joseph's son?
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_00: They're happy with him.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_00: But there is this, like, ah, not quite sure.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_00: I think this is uh we get distracted by the preconceived notions and qualifications often.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_00: How many times in your life have you seen somebody and thought, they would never do that?
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_00: And then they do.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_00: Or if you're trying to decide something like leadership or something like that, and somebody just comes out of the woodwork totally surprising you, and you're like, oh my gosh, I would have never thought about that person.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_00: Holy cow, no, that's perfect.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_00: Because we get so ingrained into what we expect out of people, don't we?
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_00: We like to put people in the boxes, right?
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_00: If you are this major or you are this person, or you are this race, or you are this nationality, or you are this type of you are this gender, or whatever.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_00: We put people in all of these boxes and we expect certain things.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_00: Boys are gonna be dirty.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_00: Don't we expect that?
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_00: You haven't been to Howie's room, you know?
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_00: Clean.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_00: Mostly.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_00: No, just kidding.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_00: Don't go to A, though.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_00: Bob.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_00: We have that all the time where we place people into these boxes.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_00: So I can't I can't help but read this.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_00: Like, I think they were raving about him.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_00: I get that, all that.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_00: But they're they're also saying, like, this is Joseph's son.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_00: Help me make sense of that.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_00: And it's so easy to get distracted by the notions, the preconceived things that we put into place that stop it.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_00: I want to show you four examples of this.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um, this is Howard Schultz here on the left.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: He uh was the CEO of Starbucks.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_00: He got, I don't remember the exact number, but he got denied from 243 banks for a loan to start Starbucks, and it worked out for him.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_00: He came from a low-income environment and neighborhood.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_00: And so when he was going to get approved for a loan, the banks always measure risk before anything else.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_00: And just because of where he grew up, there was a lot of risk.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_00: This next person is uh Dr.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_00: Kopana Cho Chala.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_00: She was born in India and grew up with basically no education, where a female struggle to have an education in India, especially then.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, tragically, she died in the Challenger, uh, sorry, not the Challenger, the Columbia disintegration in 2003.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but she was the first female Indian to go to space.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_00: But she started with basically no education, no shot.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_00: Who's the next guy?
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_00: Walt Disney was fired early on in his life from a newspaper because he quote lacked imagination and had no original ideas.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_00: Madam C.J.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_00: Walker, who's the next one, she was born to uh former slave.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_00: She was born in 1867.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, right during that time.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_00: And obviously, I don't know if you know anything about post-slavery in America, but uh people of color were the poorest of the poor, especially in the South.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_00: And she became a uh a female millionaire, the first self-made female millionaire, because she uh devoted her life to making hair products for black women.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_00: In all of those cases, there was somebody who said no simply because of the box that they were put in.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_00: We get so distracted by our preconceived notions.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_00: The next one I want to talk about is the distraction of the narrow mindset.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to read uh this confusing section in the middle to help open our eyes to this.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_00: This is verse 23.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_00: Then Jesus said to them, Undoubtedly, you will quote this saying to me, Doctor, heal yourself.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_00: Do here in your hometown what you've heard, uh what we've heard you did in Capernaum.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_00: Now I want to stop for a second.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_00: Capernaum was kind of Jesus' home base for ministry.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, if you go just Google uh what happened in Capernaum in terms of Jesus' ministry, there are miracle after miracle after miracle after miracle after miracle after miracle after miracle happened.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_00: Now, if I'm in Nazareth and this guy who's from Nazareth goes to Capernaum and he's doing miracle after miracle after miracle after miracle after miracle after miracle, when he comes home, I want to be like, hey, don't forget the little people.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_00: Don't forget the people who made you who you were, don't forget the people who wiped your push, you know?
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_00: Like, don't forget the people who who put all of their energy into you, and then you go out there and you heal all of them?
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_00: What are you talking about?
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_00: Like, if I'm if I'm in Nazareth, that's what I'm thinking, and that's what he says.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_00: He he says, I sh uh do do here in your hometown what we've heard you did in a Capernaum, meaning, like, can you show us what you've been doing?
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, I assure you that no prophet is welcome in the prophet's hometown.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_00: And I can assure you that there were many widows in Israel during Elijah's time.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_00: Many, this is important, many widows in Israel, the chosen people, right?
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_00: Elijah's a uh a Jewish prophet, many widows in Israel during Elijah's time when it didn't rain for three and a half years, and there was a great food shortage in the land.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yet Elijah was sent to none of them, but only to a widow in the city of Zarephath, in the region of Sidon.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_00: I did better that time.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_00: There were also many persons with skin diseases in Israel during the time of the prophet Elisha, but none of them were cleansed.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_00: Instead, Naaman the Syrian was cleansed.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_00: What's the narrow mindset here?
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, you Nazareth people, you Israelite people.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_00: You focus on here.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_00: What I'm telling you is that the prophet Elijah went outside of Israel.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_00: What I'm telling you is the prophet Elisha went outside of Israel.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_00: If I'm the Nazareth people, I'm like, man, can you just do for us what you did to personal?
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_00: William, we have people who are hurting here.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_00: We have people who need this here.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_00: We need people who need miracles.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_00: We need a miracle in our lives.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_00: And all of it is me, me, me, we, we, we.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_00: And he says, hey, throughout history, what happened is that the prophets went elsewhere.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_00: They went outside of it.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_00: So get out of the narrow mindset of focusing on yourself and focus outside.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_00: Man, that's such a distraction in our lives.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_00: Because at the end of the day, we very rarely see something more important.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_00: Especially if it negatively affects us.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_00: What do we see?
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't get what I wanted.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_00: That wasn't fair.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_00: Doctor, heal yourself.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_00: Do for us in your hometown what you did in Capernaum.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_00: Why didn't I get that?
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_00: What's up with that?
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_00: And he says, Man, prophets, they're not welcome in their hometowns.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_00: Because what the prophet does is the will of God.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_00: And he takes everything from me and takes it.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's a distraction in our own lives.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_00: I think we get distracted by our sense of selfishness.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_00: We get distracted because we're so inwardly focused.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_00: The theologian Augustine, Augustine, if you're in the academic world, says he calls it a curvatus in se, meaning like it's an inward focus on ourselves.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_00: We call that sin.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_00: That's the word we often use for it.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's also a distraction from the main thing, which is the work that Jesus is doing in our lives.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_00: All of us have these distractions.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_00: All of us, me included, particularly this one.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_00: A narrow mindset.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_00: A focus on ourselves.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_00: An inability to see outside of the boxes we've placed them in.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_00: A search for popularity.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_00: We get so distracted by those things that we miss it.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_00: I know they were bothered by what Jesus did.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I know it was against the world's or the kind of establishment and the rules that they had set up for themselves.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_00: Why?
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_00: Because they went from being super happy and quote, raving about him to wanting to throw him off a cliff.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_00: Man, that is an inspiration for me.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_00: Because it's very easy to see ourselves as people who are kind of ruled by the ways of the world.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's very easy for me to ask, how are people gonna think people are gonna think about this?
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_00: Is this gonna be a popular decision?
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_00: It's very easy for me to think that.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, it seems normal.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_00: It didn't bother Jesus.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_00: Here's my challenge to you this week.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_00: One of these distractions probably spoke to you in some point this week.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_00: It might be the popularity thing, it is for me.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_00: It could be the boxes that you put each other in, this kind of preconceived notions that you create about people.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe that's something you're being convicted of.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_00: Like, man, I do that.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_00: I do that all the time.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's this like narrow mindset where you only focus on yourself and what you can get out of it.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe that's you, but there's something this morning that spoke to you there.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_00: Here's my challenge.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_00: Put that thing in prayer this week.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's not gonna cure itself.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_00: You can't fix it because you would have already.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_00: But the Holy Spirit can move in your life.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_00: The Holy Spirit can change you from the inside out.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_00: The Holy Spirit can challenge you.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_00: The Holy Spirit will do that, but you've got to lift that up in prayer.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_00: So for some of you, you may not know how to pray or what to do.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_00: Here's my suggestion: just take one of those things and just think about it.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_00: And just kind of in a spirit, you don't have to say, Dear God, we gathered here together, right?
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_00: You don't just say, Hey God, I don't want to do this anymore.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_00: I don't want to put people into the boxes that I constantly put them in.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_00: I don't want to just focus on myself.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_00: God, I don't want to seek popularity over everything.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_00: Those are distractions to the things that you're doing in my life.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_00: Help me set those aside.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_00: Just lift that up in prayer.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_00: I guarantee you the Holy Spirit will move in your life.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_00: The Holy Spirit will challenge you, push you.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus is the ultimate example for how we are to live as Christians.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_00: The ultimate example for what it's like to be both human and holy.