3 Spiritual Warfare Strategies for Your Distracted Mind

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Every generation has had their own battle, and if I could take a wild guess at the battle this generation is facing I would say it is being distracted and over-stimulated.

We have endless entertainment readily available at our fingertips 24/7.

People of my generation and older remember when TV channels didn’t broadcast 24 hours a day, you couldn’t skip past commercials, and you couldn’t watch a missed program on TV (except if a kind friend recorded it on VHS for you).

And somehow, most of us didn’t seem to care. FOMO wasn’t really a thing for most.

Boredom stimulated the imagination and made room for creativity.

The problem we face in this age of endless stimulation and entertainment is disengaging with all of the opportunities waiting to distract us long enough to engage with God.

But if we want to truly cultivate a relationship with God that is deep and fulfilling, we have be willing to walk away from the notifications and endless stream of social media feeds to wait on Him until we hear His voice.

Otherwise our heart can’t truly receive God’s Word – just like the parable Jesus gave in Matthew 13

1. Our heart is too heavily trafficked

The sower scattered seed, and some of the seed fell by the “wayside” – or on a walking path where people walked day in and day out for years, creating a path that was too hard for the seed to sink into and take root.

It just sat on top of the hard path, and eventually the birds of prey (the enemy) came and snatched it up.

How much are we allowing media and entertainment to traffic in our heart?

Social media feeds were purposely designed with their endless scrolling feed to cultivate FOMO – a fear of missing out – and addiction.

So we sit and scroll, thinking “Just another second and I’ll turn it off”, and another second turns into a half-hour as we vainly try to meet that longing for the next exciting post.

Taking time to meditate on God’s Word, without the distraction of constant media bombardment, is what will plow up our hearts and make it good soil for God’s Word to take root.

2. Our heart is too distracted

Some of the seed fell into some spots where there was some soft dirt, but also a lot of rock and thorns. The seeds sprouted and started to grow, but the rocks didn’t really allow roots to take.

Eventually, the leaves withered and the plant died.

My dear friends, we don’t become fruitful Christians by reading a Christian meme or a Bible verse while scrolling through our feed.

We don’t even become fruitful by reading a good devotional.

If we want to be a fruitful, enduring Christian, we must be willing to put our phones down, walk away from our devices, turn off the noise, read our Bibles undistracted, and wait on God in the silence until we hear Him speak.

And then….resist the urge get up and walk away with a sense of satisfaction because we heard Him….

But sit even longer, digesting those words, meditating on those words, allowing those words to take strong root in our heart so that they bear fruit!

The greatest temptation we face in this generation is thinking it’s enough that we heard from God.

So, we grab our phone, take a picture of the verse with a pretty filter, post it to social media with something super-inspiring….and then go about our digital noise-packed day, and never really meditate on what God said, allowing it to take strong root in our heart.

Eventually, it’s forgotten — and just like that seed among the rocks and thorns, it withers and dies.

3 Spiritual Warfare Strategies for Your Distracted Mind

1. De-stimulate your brain

This is something God has been speaking to me this year.

The constant bombardment of media in our lives has created a media addiction and silence has become something that makes us uncomfortable.

We feel nagging fear of missing out on….whatever (I personally can’t put my finger on what) that keeps us scrolling our feeds.

An addiction to the adrenaline rush of going viral keeps us chasing after the latest craze, as we try to push through the millions of posts online to get more likes and views than before.

But not only does the constant media stimulation cause fatigue physically and mentally, it exhausts us spiritually as well.

It depletes our spiritual strength, as our mind and attention become too honed in on latest internet craze and the need for virality, or distracted by our never-ending scrolling to escape our boredom or real-world problems.

But what would happen if we took one hour a day to just sit in God’s presence undistracted?

No phones, no Bible selfies, no Bible-verse images….

Just you and God, undistracted. Day after day, week after week, month after month. How much more fruit would we see in our lives?

When we destimulate our brain, we begin cleaning up the soil of our heart so that the seed of His Word can grow uninhibited and undistracted.

This will be a war, because your flesh will crave the distraction it has learned to depend upon, but if you begin renewing your mind with the next two steps, you will win the victory!

2. Meditate on God’s Word

We must pay the most careful attention, therefore, to what we have heard, so that we do not drift away. Hebrews 2:1

This phrase “drift away” in the Greek means “glide past”. You get a mental image of a boat carried off in the waves, drifting out to sea, or gliding right past the safe harbor – without noticing what is going on.

What have we heard from God?

We have to pay attention to it; we have to anchor ourselves to it, otherwise we become that drifting boat out in the crashing waves of unending stimulation and entertainment.

Always promising fulfillment, but never delivering.

How do we anchor ourselves on “what we’ve heard” (God’s Word)? We do this through biblical meditation.

Biblical meditation is taking God’s Word and thinking on it deeply word by word, asking ourselves how it applies to our life right now, and then putting it to practice in our lives until it becomes a part of who we are.

This is the practice of breaking up the hard ground of our heart; it is the practice of renewing our minds; it is what makes the soil of our heart not only soft, but fertile and able to bring forth fruit like what Jesus talked about in Matthew 13 – 100-fold.

3. Live intentional lives

See then that you walk circumspectly, not as fools but as wise, redeeming the time, because the days are evil. Therefore do not be unwise, but understand what the will of the Lord is. Ephesians 5:15-17

I know the word “intentional” has been a kind of buzz word for a while, but it is actually a biblical concept.

The word “circumspectly” means diligently.

What this means for us as God’s children is that everything we do – even our recreational activities – should have a purpose.

That purpose should be to “redeem the time”.

What does that even mean?

The word “redeem” is “exagorazo”, which is the same Greek word to describe how God redeemed us from our life of sin and eternal destruction.

It means to buy from the slave market never to be sold into slavery again. To make it our own.

The word “time” is “kairos”, which means a period of time or opportunity.

So Paul is urging us to live our lives diligently, not foolishly, but to buy back this time we’re living in and make it our own — possess it, seize it, and take total control over it.

Why? Because we’re living in evil times. But God has sent us here as His ambassadors to take dominion over this time we’re living in, to redeem it for Him and His purpose.

Therefore do not be unwise, but understand what the will of the Lord is. Ephesians 5:17

So, don’t live rashly, without reason or reflection about what you’re doing, but consider what the Lord’s (someone to whom you belong, because He redeemed [exagerazo] you) desire is for you to do.

This level of intention demands that we take regular times of quiet reflection and meditation on God’s Word, renewing our mind so that our thoughts begin to align with God’s thoughts.

It requires that we spend time in His presence, so that we recognize His voice as well as we recognize our husband’s voice or best friend’s voice.

It demands that we filter every activity through this concept of “redeeming the time”, so that we are not living foolish, careless lives.

Dear sister, does this sound radical to you? Maybe this sounds exhausting and burdensome. Remember, Jesus told us to come to Him and that He gives us rest. His yoke is easy and His burden is light, if we will just learn from Him.

The truth is, while this kind of intentional living may seem exhausting and burdensome, it is just the opposite. It only seems that way, because it is the opposite of the way we’ve always lived.

But when we begin living with this level of intention and purpose, even in our recreational activities, using “redeeming the time” as our filter, we will discover freedom we never knew!

We will also discover a new kind of rest we never knew.

God’s ways always seem foreign to us, but His ways flow along with the way He created us to live, so that instead of living foolish, careless lives that in constant opposition to how He created us, we live intentional, purposeful lives that flow in synch with the Holy Spirit.

This gives us rest.

Resources for Renewing the Mind:

Resources for Spiritual Warfare

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Rosilind

Owner at A Little R & R

Rosilind, a Pacific Northwest native, is a missionary living in Croatia and married to her Bosnian hero. Together they live in the country with their 2 active boys where she enjoys fruity candles and a hot cup of herbal tea on a blustery fall evening. She holds an Associates of Practical Theology and is passionate about discipling and encouraging women. Her passion for writing led her to author a number of Bible studies. She is the author of A Little R & R where she encourages women to live for the glory ofGod. She leads an online Bible study affiliated with Good Morning Girls. You can find her on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and YouTube.

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