[SUB12] CUIDADO COM AS DISTRAÇÕES - Luciano Subirá

The gospel of Lucas tells us about a moment where Jesus is in Bethany he goes to Martha and Mary’s house. Martha receives him with the willingness of any host, wanting to do the best for Jesus, to please him, but Mary, your sister, says the word of God, she sat at the feet of the Lord Jesus. On that moment, nothing was more important to Mary than being with Him, listening to his voice, relating to the person of Jesus Christ.

On the other hand, Martha, moved by a good intention, she wants to please Jesus, she wants to receive Him well, therefore, she is rebuked by Jesus himself that says: "Martha, Martha, you are worried, upset with many things. " Jesus goes on saying: “not many things are necessary, or only one. ” This is the moments he encloses it saying: "Mary, your sister has chosen the good portion, and it will not be taken away from her.

” On this moment Jesus defines what is really important, what is the most important, what we exist for, and that is seeking God. Mankind was created to seek God and a man should fulfill the purpose of his existence, that is seeking God doing it with all he has, putting all of his heart to it and making God the most important thing of his life without letting anything compete with that. But the lesson Jesus is bringing us trough Martha’s behavior, is that there are good things, there are things that are allowed, they’re not necessarily bad things, they’re not necessarily wrong, although, because they can steal our focus, because they can become an object of distraction of what should be our main focus, that is seeking God, they turn out to drag us to a place that is wrong, even though they’re not really wrong.

For example, in Exodus chapter 5 the Word of God that when Moses goes to Pharaoh with a very clear message from the Lord: “let my people go, that they may worship me”, God is not only suggesting the deliverance, the redemption of His people, He is presenting a purpose: “that they may worship me". I like to explore the idea that the purpose of redemption is not only to deliver God’s people from a place of slavery but to bring them to a place of fellowship with God, of relationship with Him, of worship to God. But what was Pharaoh’s first reaction?

Pharaoh says: “this people must be too loitered to think about worship. He says: “let's fill these people with work so they won’t have time to think about worship. " I want to advance an idea, even though I’m not going to be able to develop it completely because of time.

Pharaoh as the one who enslaves the people, that after redemption belongs to God, is a figure of Satan that also used to enslave us. Colossians 1:13 says that God rescued us from the dominion of darkness we were not only slaves, we were under the burden of Satan’s bondage. When does Israel leaves Egypt?

On the moment where the first easter is celebrated, the blood of the lamb is poured out, applied on the doorposts. Paul writes to the corinthians, He calls Jesus our Easter Lamb. He’s making a parallel of with them and what happened with us.

When they leave Egypt and get to Mount Sinai, the declaration of God about the nation of Israel is the same Paul the apostle declared about us in 1 Peter 2:9, when He says: “but you are chosen people, elected generation, royal priesthood, God’s special possession. " Therefore we have a parallel and what does it show us? Like Pharaoh wanted to fill the people with distraction, so that they wouldn’t have time to think about worship, I want to tell you, this is still a malign strategy to draw us away from the main goal of our calling that is communion to God.

if on that time there were enough distractions for them not to focus on the most important thing, the question that we must do is: what about today? what about our days? what is the level of the exposure that we have to so many things that could even be classified as good, they’re not necessarily a sin, but they take us away from our focus, of the main purpose that is to seek God.

Years ago, when my son Israel was still very young, I remember he got really excited when I gave him a playstation. It was still the time of the Playstation 2. I remember his excitement with that video game.

I remember that his first reaction was to hug me, to kiss me, "daddy, you’re awesome", he was truly excited about it. But I joke that it didn’t take long for me, as a dad, to be jealous of that videogame. Because until then, before the videogame, when I got home after a trip, Israel and Lissa were always waiting me on that door, when the door was opened they were already cheering, jumped on me, celebrated my return.

Normally I stay 2 or 3 days a week away from home so they celebrated it a lot. After that videogame, every time I got home, only my daughter Lissa was waiting behind that door and I missed Israel. When I asked: "son, where are you?

" His answer would come from upstairs, where he was playing: “hold on, I’m just gonna clear this level. " I remember one day I felt like throwing that videogame through the window. But God made me think about that example.

He said that in the same way, many times God has blessed us, with things that we as sons are happy about, the same way my son was happy with his gift. Sometimes we get excited about the Blessings of God, but in the same way my son was distracted by that toy, to the point that he stopped giving attention to the one who gave him the toy, the question is: are we doing the same thing with the blessings of God? On Luke chapter 14, Jesus tells a parable He speaks of the kingdom of God and compares it to someone who prepared a great banquet.

But when everything was ready, he starts to invite people and those who were invited, started to make excuses. One of them said: “I bought a field and I must go see it. Please excuse me.

” The other said: "I have just bought five yoke of oxen, and I’m on my way to try them out. Please excuse me. " The other said: "I just got married, so I can’t come.

" When you look to the reason of their excuses there was nothing wrong with these things. They were good things, licit maybe today we could even classify it as an answer for prayer. “I bought a field".

Who wouldn’t like to have another acquisition? be it an own home, a head office, a business structure, any type of acquisition, we would classify it as an answer for our prayers, as a blessing of God. But the problem is when what we classify as an answer or blessing, becomes an excuse for us not to attend His invitation to the banquet.

The banquet in the bible speaks of intimacy, it speaks of fellowship. When we grow attached of what we could rotule as good, but that becomes an excuse for us not to answer God’s calling to be in communion with Him, I want to tell you, what wasn’t necessarily wrong started being wrong because of the distraction. The other said: “I bought five yoke of oxen".

These were the Tractors back then. It was the way to increase productivity. Increasing the productivity is obviously increasing the income of resources and finances.

Today,if we said that our job, the capability of production and therefore our profit has increased, we would say this is good, we would classify it as a blessing, maybe even answer for our prayer. But according to what Jesus said, if that becomes a distraction to our greater calling, that is seeking the Lord, so, although it isn’t wrong itself, it started to occupy this place. The third excuse was: “I just got married, so I can’t come.

" “What is the Lord saying? Marriage could never be classified as something bad, specially coming from God, that created this institution. We can look to him and say: that definitely is a blessing.

In my life, after knowing the Lord Jesus, marriage was the best thing that happened to me, but not even this, something so important, created by God, idealized by Him, a gift from God to mankind, should be an excuse for us not to fulfill the purpose of our existence. Paul the apostle says in Acts 17, that through one man God created, every nation of men to seek Him. We exist to seek God, and we can’t allow that, the reason of our existence to be compromised.

when day by day, we get involved with so many things, that start being important, so important, and it steals our focus from the most important thing, above all else, that is seeking the Lord. Someone said very properly, that one of the good thing about social media today, is that on the Day that we are before the Lord we’ll not have excuses to say we didn’t have time, that we didn’t have time to seek Him. I’m not talking against any kind of entertainment.

I love entertainment, as long as it is not decompensating our lives, and becoming a distraction from what is the most important. My proposition to your heart, is to evaluate your life, your relationship with God. What is becoming, maybe for you, a distraction that has been stealing your focus?

Because what you should eliminate is the power that the distraction has and not the obsession, that is the reason of your existence, that is seeking the Lord should cause on your heart. Jesus still has to be the most important thing of your existence, in all of your dedication and effort to know Him more and more. Here I conclude, encouraging you not only in this moment to question what has been distracting you, even for a brief moment, at least as a prayer principle claiming God’s grace upon your life.

From me, I pray for you, I bless you so that you may win, overcome all distractions and have a deeper relationship with God. Mat the Lord bless you.