Episode Transcript
[00:00:05] Our dear heavenly Father, please teach us the healthy rhythms of life that allow us to accomplish everything you created us to accomplish and to do it well, but also to live with a sense of peace and well being.
[00:00:31] I pray that we would learn some new life skills that would glorify your name.
[00:00:39] In Christ's name, amen.
[00:00:44] Pope Julius II was called the warrior pope.
[00:00:53] He wore armor more than he wore liturgical robes, and he wasn't a man that you could say no to.
[00:01:05] He asked Michelangelo to paint a chapel at the Vatican, and Michael ignored him.
[00:01:19] Well, that didn't work very well, and the pope ended up forcing him to come to Rome.
[00:01:27] And Michelangelo didn't actually prefer to paint. He preferred sculpture, but he painted the Sistine chapel in 1508 to 1512.
[00:01:43] It's considered one of the greatest works of art that humanity ever produced.
[00:01:56] He didn't just have to paint the ceiling.
[00:02:02] They plastered the ceiling with fresh plaster and then painted on the fresh plaster so the paint would last longer.
[00:02:18] He made drawings on paper and took a pen and poked holes all along the lines.
[00:02:26] And then he put the paper on the ceiling, and with ashes from charcoal, they padded all those poked holes, and it left a little outline of what he wanted to paint on the ceiling. And then he launched into painting it.
[00:02:50] I've read several books on this, and he would concentrate so profoundly on what he was doing that he'd lose all track of time.
[00:03:03] He commonly didn't eat because he was so focused. He just forgot that it was dinnertime.
[00:03:11] And he would do this from morning until evening when it got too dark, go home, sleep in his clothes, get up and do it all again. The next day.
[00:03:26] He had what psychologists now call flow.
[00:03:32] He was concentrating so thoroughly on what he was doing that it just flowed.
[00:03:44] Many of you are thinking, yeah, but he was Michelangelo, and he was a genius. And I'm just Dave.
[00:03:54] The truth is, this kind of living is possible for everyone, but it takes work to do.
[00:04:09] We often talk about important ideas, but today I want to talk to you about some important practices.
[00:04:19] Many of these ideas come from Cal Newport's book called deep work.
[00:04:25] So Paul said to Timothy, do not neglect the gift you have which was given to you by prophecy. When the council of elders laid their hands on you, practice these things.
[00:04:46] Immerse yourself in them so that all may see your progress.
[00:04:53] Keep a close watch on yourself and on your teaching.
[00:04:58] Persist in this, for by doing so doing, you will save both yourself and your hearers.
[00:05:07] I want to talk the this morning about how can you possibly accomplish everything God created you to accomplish, and how could you do everything? You're doing better.
[00:05:31] I hope it's your goal.
[00:05:34] It's one of my life goals. I want to do everything God sent me into the world to do. I don't want to leave anything undone.
[00:05:45] I don't want to show up in heaven and God say, dude, I gave you all that time, and the list is not finished.
[00:06:03] What's up?
[00:06:09] I'm certain it won't content him for me to say, well, I had these favorite tv shows I had to watch.
[00:06:19] I had this sport that I had to get better at church.
[00:06:29] I want to hear the Lord say to me, well done, good and faithful servant.
[00:06:36] And I want to push on that in your heart a little bit. I want to accomplish everything God asked me to do, and I want to do it all well.
[00:06:48] And for that to happen, we have to have some healthy life skills.
[00:06:55] So the very first thing Paul says to Timothy is, do not neglect the gift that you have.
[00:07:02] If I'm gonna accomplish the work that God sent me into the world to do, I have to start recognizing that God made me good at some things and not good at other things.
[00:07:14] And I need to let go of the things that God didn't make me good at. I will never be an NBA basketball player.
[00:07:22] That's just not going to happen.
[00:07:29] Basketball is for boys who couldn't wrestle.
[00:07:41] We spread ourselves so thin to doing so many things that don't really matter.
[00:07:48] Do you hear me, church?
[00:07:50] When you look at your life, you say, I'm busy. I'm doing all this stuff. But at some point, you got to ask yourself, what really matters?
[00:08:00] Where has God gifted me that I have a genuine chance of doing things very well that really matters?
[00:08:12] I want to talk to you about a concept called deep work.
[00:08:16] This concept comes from Cal Newport. This is what he says.
[00:08:21] Deep work is activities performed in a state of being, distraction free concentration that push your thinking capacities to their limitations. These efforts create new value, important skills, and are hard to replicate. So, basically, deep work is learning how to fully concentrate on something that you're doing and not to be distracted.
[00:08:58] It turns out much of our life is lost in distraction. But when we can fully concentrate on something, we have the ability to accomplish things that are far beyond what we imagine.
[00:09:16] It was a psychologist who created the concept of flow, and it fits with deep work. What is flow? It's the mind functioning at its fullest capacity.
[00:09:30] It's total concentration.
[00:09:33] It's losing yourself in an activity. All right, now let's just do a little self check.
[00:09:41] When was the last time you remember forcing your mind to work at its fullest capacity?
[00:09:54] When was the last time you shut everything, all your electronics off, and you sat down and you forced yourself to concentrate on something to the fullest of your ability?
[00:10:10] See, we make a big mistake when we think, I can multitask. Multitasking is a myth. Your brain doesn't work that way.
[00:10:25] And for many of you who have to work around interruptions, you know that you can really be getting close to understanding something. You get one interruption, and you're out of that thought pattern, and it's harder to get back there.
[00:10:48] Interruptions are, they're detrimental to us doing our best work.
[00:10:55] You say, well, doc, I can't keep from being interrupted. Yes, you can.
[00:11:02] Don't automatically assume that your life is different than everyone else's life. All right?
[00:11:16] To work in this way, to fully concentrate on something, it has to be learned. You can't get up tomorrow morning and say, I'm going to.
[00:11:30] I'm going to fully concentrate.
[00:11:33] It has to be learned. And you start by doing it in little bits. So, for example, hopefully there's something in your life you want to get better at. Hopefully, you're not absolutely content with where you are, but there's some area of your life that you'd like to get better at, or there's something that you would like to understand that you don't understand right now, or there's a hard book that you would like to read, but you tried a couple of times, and you gave up on it. All right, you have to start practicing.
[00:12:12] So you say to yourself, I'm gonna have. I'm gonna practice this. I'm gonna invest in this. And for ten minutes, I'm turning off my telephone, I'm turning off all the electronic stuff in my house. I'm not gonna have the radio or the tv going. And for ten minutes, I am going to fully concentrate on this one thing.
[00:12:40] And if my concentration drifts a little bit, I'm instantly bringing myself right back. And if my mind says, you need a drink of water, you say, I'll get that drink of water later. And you concentrate fully on the one thing.
[00:12:56] Now, when you teach yourself to concentrate for ten minutes, you can teach yourself to concentrate for 20 minutes. And when you teach yourself to concentrate for 20 minutes, you can teach yourself to concentrate for 30 minutes. All right. It turns out we all grew up with tv, and tv is detrimental to an extended attention span because tv is made to change the image every so many seconds. And we have taught ourselves to follow that pattern and expect a new picture every so many seconds. The problem is it's detrimental to us ever being our best self because our best self requires a concentration ability that's longer than what you get taught by tv. All right, so I want to be very practical.
[00:14:03] Decide what you have potential to do in what. Decide where your area of highest potential is and then commit yourself to get better in that.
[00:14:23] People say, I've tried to read the Bible and I can't read the Bible. Well, this is a perfect, this is a perfect way to start developing your concentration so that you can read the Bible.
[00:14:38] You say, I would like to understand the Bible better. So every day for ten minutes, I'm going to fully concentrate on the Bible. I'm not going to let myself be interrupted. The minute my concentration drifts, I'm turning it right back to what I'm doing, and I'm going to concentrate for ten minutes the very best I can on reading the bible.
[00:15:05] The same thing works for prayer.
[00:15:09] Have you ever been praying and your mind is a million miles away from where your prayer is? Yeah, yeah.
[00:15:22] One part of your mind says, I'm praying, and the other part of your mind is thinking about, whatever. All right, this is where this concentration, this deep work, makes us better because we start paying attention and we start forcing ourselves to concentrate. All right, so you choose this, and then you say, I'm going to manage my time so that I can do this concentration because it will make my life more meaningful.
[00:16:04] Do you understand? You can live semi conscious your whole life.
[00:16:13] You can live semi conscious your whole life. You can live your whole life and never be fully aware in the moment.
[00:16:29] And that's not the life God created us to live.
[00:16:32] God didn't create us to daydream through life.
[00:16:39] He created us to live meaningfully. And to live meaningfully, I have to give full concentration to what I'm doing.
[00:16:48] In fact, I also read this week that when they ask people, are you living a satisfying life?
[00:16:57] The people who answer, I'm living a satisfying life, the majority of them are people who, they understand their abilities and skills, and they're giving themselves completely to those abilities and skills.
[00:17:14] And when asked, they say, I'm living a satisfying life. The satisfying life is not the life of leisure and daydreaming. The satisfying life is. Is the life that says, I'm working on this and I see I'm making progress. The satisfying life says, I'm accomplishing things that are meaningful to me. The satisfying life says, I'm trying hard things and succeeding at it.
[00:17:45] So Paul said to Timothy, Timothy, you gotta practice these things where you are gifted. You have to practice that and make your giftedness rise to its full potential.
[00:18:00] All right, now, I know some of you aren't going to do this, but some of you are. So for you who are going to do this, how do you do it? Well, the very first thing you do is you go home today, you get out your calendar for next week, and you put a time every day where you're going to work on this.
[00:18:19] You go home, you get out your day planner, and you say, every day I'm going to work on developing my ability to concentrate and I'm going to start working on something that will make my life better and more meaningful. I'm going to start working on something that I have a skill at, but if I develop it, I have a greater potential to, to accomplish what God wants me to accomplish. If you don't put it on your calendar, you won't do it. And some of you will put it on your calendar and not do it anyway. But you don't have a chance if you don't put it on your calendar.
[00:19:00] All right, the second thing you do is you say, when you put it on your calendar, you say, this is my start time. This is my stop time.
[00:19:11] You pre plan and say, Monday at 630 in the morning till 645, I'm going to concentrate on this thing I want to do.
[00:19:29] Monday morning at 615, I'm going to get out my bible. I'm not going to have, I'm going to put my phone in another room.
[00:19:39] I'm going to concentrate completely on what I'm reading.
[00:19:49] If you don't schedule it, it's not going to happen.
[00:19:53] Then the third thing you do is you choose the place that all of this is going to happen.
[00:19:58] You say, when I'm going to work on concentrating, when I'm going to develop myself, I'm going to do it in this place.
[00:20:09] Ah.
[00:20:10] So it becomes a life habit or a life ritual. At this time, in this place, on this day, I develop myself. And the way I develop myself is I work on fully concentrating on what is before me.
[00:20:36] I'm hearing crickets.
[00:20:40] All right, let me tell you two things about this practice.
[00:20:50] Your goal is complete focus on the specific thing that you desire to learn or you desire to understand.
[00:21:04] The goal is complete focus, requiring yourself to return to full focus again and again and again through that time period.
[00:21:16] All right?
[00:21:20] Feedback is also healthy.
[00:21:24] The best coaches are coaches who can tell players while they're in the moment.
[00:21:39] I saw you make that shot, and you looked a little off balance to me.
[00:21:44] So the next time they make the shot, they think about their balance. All right.
[00:21:50] I believe that we need spiritual feedback, and I believe in. When I'm trying to fully focus, one of the things I do is I say to the holy spirit, I'm asking you, I want to be the best man you created me to be. And I'm asking you to give me feedback in my thinking as I do this. I'm asking you to help me think the right thoughts while I do this. I'm asking you to help me fully develop my concentration. I'm asking you to make me aware when I have drifted so I can get right back on it.
[00:22:31] There was an amen from someone. May the lord be with you.
[00:22:38] All right.
[00:22:40] I also want to say in the pursuit of this rest and refreshment is necessary.
[00:22:53] So the very best people who do this are good for about 4 hours, and then they need a break.
[00:23:01] So this isn't about torturing yourself. It's about developing a new skill.
[00:23:09] So if you can concentrate fully for ten minutes, then get up and walk around, relax a little bit, take a drink of water, do whatever you do, and then give yourself another ten minutes. Because it turns out that the rest and the recovery are as important as the full concentration. Concentration.
[00:23:36] Do you see?
[00:23:38] Somehow or another, our brain does stuff when we're not aware.
[00:23:45] If we give it the right things to do something with. If I fully concentrate for ten minutes and then I let it go for a few minutes, my brain keeps doing what my brain does, sorting things out, organizing things, putting things together.
[00:24:03] All right. Then Paul says to Timothy, immerse yourself in this.
[00:24:13] You decide what is important.
[00:24:16] You create the concentration time, and you immerse yourself in it.
[00:24:24] If you don't understand what's important, you won't be motivated to do this.
[00:24:32] Clarity about what really matters provides clarity about what doesn't matter.
[00:24:39] Do you see?
[00:24:41] No one can tell you what is really, really, really the most important thing you'll ever do. You have to decide that for yourself.
[00:24:50] And if you don't decide about the important things that you want to try to do, you'll never be motivated to develop yourself to do what you have the potential to do, do you see? But once you've decided, this is really important to me, this is so important to me, I'm going to immerse myself in it. I'm going to understand it. I'm going to be competent because I believe my life will have meaning if I'm accomplishing these things that God. God asked me to do.
[00:25:24] Without that sense, you just never force yourself to do what you have to do to become your very best self.
[00:25:35] So if you're going to immerse yourself in this, you have to ask yourself, what am I willing to sacrifice?
[00:25:47] What am I willing to sacrifice?
[00:25:54] I might as well pick on everybody today.
[00:25:59] Do you really, do you really want to trade being a highly effective person and accomplishing God's eternal purpose for a better golf score?
[00:26:18] I don't have anything against golfing. I'm not. I'm just. I'm searching around for illustrations. I don't have a thing against golfing.
[00:26:27] But if you're.
[00:26:32] If the most meaningful thing in the world is you had a good golf score at the last outing, and you haven't developed yourself into your best self, is that really a good trade?
[00:26:52] People say, I don't have any time. Okay? You have as much time as everybody else. You just haven't decided what's important to you, and you're saying yes to things you should say no to do. You see?
[00:27:06] So if you're gonna really be the person God created you to be, you have to ask yourself, what am I willing to sacrifice?
[00:27:16] What am I willing to sacrifice to be what God created me to be here? I'm not done offending people.
[00:27:30] You have to escape the tyranny of social media.
[00:27:35] You do know that they have this figured out to be addictive?
[00:27:42] You know, they've got, they do algorithms that create an addiction that people have to check their cell phone every five minutes.
[00:27:55] I see the craziest thing. I saw this thing on tv about people getting in accidents on their cell phone. This kid was riding a bike with his cell phone and crashed. A lady was walking through the mall with her cell phone and fell into a reflecting pool.
[00:28:18] I mean, does that tell us that things are out of hand? All right, please, listen.
[00:28:27] You got, you have to get social media under control.
[00:28:35] You can live without it. I'm not on one single social media platform.
[00:28:40] Do you hear me? I live a great life.
[00:28:43] Frankly, I don't give a darn what everybody's doing, and I'm certainly not interested in putting everything that ever happens in my life on the Internet. Okay? All right.
[00:29:06] It is a tyranny that is robbing you of precious time and keeping you from being what you have the potential to be.
[00:29:16] All right, since I'm in this deep, I might as well go in a little bit deeper.
[00:29:23] Your cell phone and computer is a tool. It is not your boss.
[00:29:30] I want to say that again. Your cell phone and your computer are a tool.
[00:29:39] They are not your boss.
[00:29:43] You know, believe it or not, you can go a whole day and not have your cell phone in your pocket.
[00:29:49] Believe it. Trust me, I do it and nothing bad happens. The world does not come to an end.
[00:30:02] All right, here's what I'm trying to say.
[00:30:07] I want to be my best self.
[00:30:10] I want to grow into my full potential.
[00:30:13] I want to be able to accomplish hard things that God sent me into the world to accomplish. And to do that, I have to take on the things that are distracting me and keeping me from being that person.
[00:30:31] Then Paul says to Timothy, let your progress be seen by everyone.
[00:30:39] Your progress should be visible.
[00:30:43] Busy does not equal productive.
[00:30:47] I'm not saying are you busy? I know you're busy. But there's a big difference between being busy and being productive. There's a big difference between being busy and accomplishing things that have meaning.
[00:31:02] There's a big difference between being busy and living well.
[00:31:07] In fact, the speed, as the speed of your life goes up, the quality of your life goes down. I'm not talking about working twelve hour days. I'm not talking about cramming every minute. I'm talking about using the time you have to its maximum, not continually adding something else on. Using the time you have to its maximum by developing the skills to fully concentrate on what's important and grow into your best self, you need to measure your progress by production. What are you getting done that's meaningful in life?
[00:31:53] Think about last week.
[00:31:57] Think about Monday through Saturday last week. Okay, I know you were busy, but I wonder, what did you get done?
[00:32:07] What did you get done last week that will make the quality of your life better?
[00:32:14] What did you get done last week that will make the quality of the lives of the people around you better? We have to stop judging ourselves by did we punch the clock for 40 hours week? And we have to start saying, I get one life. I only get to live it one day at a time. But every day matters. And if I'm using up a lot of days keeping myself busy, but not getting anything meaningful done, I'm not living well.
[00:32:52] Make your progress known.
[00:32:56] What do you want to learn?
[00:33:00] Hopefully you're not content just to coast the rest of your life where you are right now.
[00:33:07] What would you like to learn?
[00:33:11] We live in a world where there's so many learning aids, it's absolutely ridiculous. You can learn. There is an aid to learn. Anything you want to learn, and I mean literally anything. I saw on the news that a guy is doing a clinic on how to grow a pot because it's legal in Ohio now, and you go to a clinic and become an expert at growing weed, and people signed up.
[00:33:40] Maybe you did.
[00:33:44] Some of you still look a little 60 ish to me.
[00:33:50] All right, could you make the first step by saying, I have been always, I've had kind of an interest in this. Now I'm going to make it an issue, and I'm going to create a spot in my life every week to work on learning this.
[00:34:14] I saw a book that I thought was interesting. I'm going to get that book. I'm going to make a spot in my week, and I'm not just going to dull mindedly read it. I'm going to concentrate. I'm going to read it. I'm going to really understand.
[00:34:28] What do you want to learn and by when would you like to learn it?
[00:34:34] Now. Use the skills of full concentration to make that happen.
[00:34:41] There are people in here who tell you it feels good to finish reading a book cover to cover anyone.
[00:34:48] It feels like an accomplishment.
[00:34:51] And some books are so good, I say, oh, I wish this had another chapter in it.
[00:34:56] There is a sense of accomplishment. If I accept a challenge, I fully concentrate on it. I grow, I develop, I become better.
[00:35:09] Now, some of you, there are things you want to do. What do you want to do, and by when do you want to do it?
[00:35:19] Some of you can develop your very best, your very best self by doing something. You have life skills, and those life skills make you better than most people in that area. And if you fully developed that skill, you would be able to accomplish things that would glorify Jesus Christ.
[00:35:45] And then Paul said to Timothy, keep a close watch on yourself, Timothy. Pay attention to what's going on in your life.
[00:35:55] I learned a phrase this week called attention fragmentation.
[00:36:02] It sounds fancy, doesn't it?
[00:36:05] It really just means a propensity to be distracted, making distractions normal instead of abnormal.
[00:36:21] See, it's called a distraction. It draws your attention away from what you want to put your attention on.
[00:36:30] And sadly, in our culture, the distraction is the normal and the concentration is the abnormal.
[00:36:39] Then Paul said to Timothy, persist in this.
[00:36:43] This is not a one time deal. It becomes a lifestyle. I have to persist and persist. Persist.
[00:36:56] Excellence requires deep work and time.
[00:37:00] The Greeks had a word called eudaimonia, and it meant realizing your full potential.
[00:37:08] So in classical Greek, there was a word called eudaimonia. It dates back to about 400 years before Christmas, and already they were thinking about, how does a person realize their full potential?
[00:37:26] All right.
[00:37:29] This kind of life pleases God.
[00:37:33] This kind of life pleases God.
[00:37:36] If you look at the life of Christ, he is a concentrator.
[00:37:42] Despite all the distractions around him, he's able to concentrate on what's in front of him when they come with him with tricky questions. He concentrates thoroughly enough that he can say, give to Caesar what is Caesar's, but give to God what is God's. That's full concentration.
[00:38:04] Deep work pleases God. One, because it honors who he created you to be.
[00:38:12] You show respect for God by becoming the very best person he created you to be.
[00:38:21] We show disrespect for God by making it not meaningful in our life.
[00:38:32] God had a good idea when he created you, and you show him great respect when you grow into the full person God created you to be. Two, this honors God because it produces excellent work, and excellent work glorifies God.
[00:38:54] Let your light so shine before men that they can see your good work and glorify your father who is in heaven. Heaven. Do you hear that?
[00:39:05] You do the very best work you are capable of doing and that glorifies God.
[00:39:13] Pawning off second best on him does not glorify his name.
[00:39:20] Three, in this kind of concentration, God ends up having more influence on my thoughts and choices, and tv and the Internet end up having less influence.
[00:39:34] You know what's tragic for a lot of christians? That tv and the Internet have more influence on them than God because it gets more of our attention in this kind of concentration on God, focusing fully, giving myself to it, persisting in it, the Holy Spirit starts whispering to my heart. I start recognizing his whispers.
[00:40:02] He starts calling the best out of me. My sense of what is acceptable goes up.
[00:40:09] My love of excellence goes up because my inner self is being influenced more by God than by these, the Internet and tv and all these other things.
[00:40:28] All right.
[00:40:31] Okay.
[00:40:32] I'm asking you right now not to let yourself off the hook and make a commitment.
[00:40:39] I'm asking you right now, in your heart to commit yourself to God and say, I'm going to create a plan. And day by day I'm going to start focusing on what I need to focus on. I'm going to get rid of some distractions in my life and I'm going to step by step become the person that you created me to be. I'm going to accomplish everything and I'm going to do it well to glorify you.
[00:41:07] Our dear heavenly father, I ask that your spirit would do what only you can do.
[00:41:19] Father, I'm not asking for a behavioral change. I'm asking for a change in my character and in the character of everyone who heard this this morning.
[00:41:30] Not asking for a simple behavior change. I'm asking for an internal character development where I take seriously who you created me to be, where I engage to the very best of my ability to accomplish what you sent me into the world to accomplish.
