Daniel Rose: The Pastor Next Door

Welcome back to the Pastor Next Door.

This is a podcast for honest conversations about faith, especially when faith feels complicated, uncertain, or worn down.

I’m not here to give you easy answers or fix anything.

I’m here to sit with you for a bit, maybe ask a few good questions, and make some room for grace and honesty along the way.

Wherever you’re coming from today, I’m really glad you’re here.

Now let’s get started.

Today, I want to talk about attention.

Not discipline, not willpower, just attention.

Because you see, we live in an age of distraction, and attention is constantly being captured.

And what captures us shapes us.

So you see, if we are living in this, as we live in this age of distraction where it is just so easy for our attention to be grabbed by a million and one different things, it becomes very, very difficult for us to focus our attention and to really attend to things that matter.

And this is important because we need to understand that spiritual formation really begins with attention.

What we repeatedly give our attention to quietly shapes our loves, fears, desires, and faith.

And so we need to pay attention.

For us to build a resilient faith that is not fragile, we need to give our attention to the good and the beautiful.

For what you repeatedly attend to, you eventually become shaped by.

So let’s think about this reality that we are always being formed.

No matter what happens throughout the day, our lives are being formed.

Our faith is being formed.

Who we are is being formed.

Who I was yesterday is not the same person I am today.

And who I am today is not the same person I was 10 years ago, thankfully.

We are constantly in a state of formation because formation isn’t optional.

It’s not like we can wake up one day and go, oh, I don’t want to be shaped today.

I don’t want to be formed today.

I don’t want to change today.

I want to stay stagnant.

We can try.

We can try to stay stagnant.

But the reality is that we don’t.

We never are the same.

We are constantly being formed.

We are constantly being shaped.

The question becomes, what are we being shaped by?

What are the factors and the forces in our lives that are forming us spiritually, relationally, emotionally?

What are those things?

Perhaps they’re news cycles.

Perhaps the news is what shapes and forms you.

Perhaps you are somebody who is just absolutely locked in on the headlines.

You know everything that is going on around you.

You know everything that’s happening from East Coast to West Coast, from North to South.

You know everything that’s happening on the other side of the world because you are locked in on the news.

So perhaps the news is what forms you.

Or maybe we’re people who are shaped and formed by outrage.

We read the things that are on the Internet, on social media, and our immediate response is outrage and anger and frustration.

And so we get shaped by that.

Or perhaps we’re shaped by comparison.

We look around at our neighbors and we see the things that they have and the lives that they live.

Boy, do we want that.

Our life in comparison to their lives isn’t all that great.

And so comparison shapes us.

Perhaps we’re shaped by fear.

We look around and there are those people out there that are different from us, that speak a different language or dress differently or love differently or believe differently.

And something happens in us and that creates fear in our souls and in our hearts.

And so we get shaped by fear and we respond to the world with a fearful mindset and a fearful attitude.

Or maybe it’s just hurry, right?

We are somebody who is by and large shaped by hurry because the world is always in a rush.

Things are just constantly in motion.

Our lives are utterly filled to the brim, to the point of breaking, because every minute of every day is planned and scheduled and the to-do list is never-ending and we can never find our way to a place of rest.

And so we are in a constant state of hurry and rushing.

We hurry through our days, we hurry through our lives, and that is the thing that ultimately marks us.

Now, I’m not trying to lay blame here on any of us.

I know in my life I’ve been marked and shaped and formed by all of these things.

And even to this day, I know that I struggle by being shaped with these things still.

And there are times where I have to reattune myself to things that really matter.

What I want us to do is think through those things and just try to raise an awareness in our lives.

Because the question isn’t whether you’re being formed.

The question is by what, right?

We want to be formed.

We want our spiritual formation that lays the groundwork for a resilient faith to be shaped by the good and the beautiful.

We want to set our minds and our hearts on the things that are above.

We don’t want to ultimately, at the end of the day, be formed by things like news cycles or outrage or comparison or fear or hurry.

We want to be shaped and formed by love, grace, mercy, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, self-control.

And so one of the things as I consider this and think about this from the perspective of the spiritual life and building a resilient spiritual life is to even begin to think about habits differently, begin to think about habits in terms of spirituality, thinking of them as liturgies.

So when you are in a worship service and you’re practicing a liturgy and there is a liturgy to the worship service, it is this repetition.

It is this kind of same flow that happens.

And so we can begin to think about habits as liturgies.

One of the other things that’s kind of cool as we practice different spiritual habits, as we begin to set our minds on the things that are above through these liturgical practices or spiritual habits, if you will, is that we begin to engage in repetition.

And repetition trains desire.

As we do the same things over and over again, something happens in us where we begin to desire those things.

Like for instance, I was never somebody who liked going to the gym.

I didn’t know how to lift weights.

I don’t know.

Everything about the gym was not something that really interested me.

It smells funny.

There’s a bunch of really intimidating people there.

And so it was something that I kind of knew I probably should do, but it was really hard to break into that habit and develop that habit.

But there was a year where I decided that I was going to give myself to the gym.

I was going to do it, right?

I just kind of had finally come to this decision point of, yeah, I’m going to start working out.

And you know what happened is the more I went to the gym, the more I exercised, the more I lifted weights, the more I desired to lift weights, the more I wanted to lift weights, the more I liked kind of the feeling of my hands and the calluses.

And I liked the feeling of soreness in my various muscle groups after particular lifts.

And I began to kind of chase that.

I desired that in a real way.

So that’s just a good example, I think, of how repetition trains desire.

Now, in the scriptures, we get this great little moment from Jesus.

I know, shocker, right, that I’m going to talk a little bit about Jesus.

But in the midst of the Sermon on the Mount, there’s this passage in Matthew 6, verses 19 through 24.

Jesus says, Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal.

But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal.

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

The eye is the lamp of the body.

If your eyes are healthy, your whole body will be full of light.

But if your eyes are unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness.

If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness?

No one can serve two masters.

Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other.

You cannot serve both God and money.

You see, it is this amazing thing, this amazing truth out of that passage is this.

Love follows attention.

What we give our attention to is ultimately where our love is going to land.

So we get those couple of lines, where your treasure is, your heart will be also.

The eye is the lamp of the body.

The idea there is the eyes really were kind of understood to be the doorway to the soul in the first century.

We also get this thing about not being able to serve two masters.

We can’t split our attention.

We like to think of ourselves as multitaskers.

We like to think of ourselves as people who can look around and do multiple things at once.

But the reality is that we can’t.

Even more so when it comes to this place of spiritual attention.

Because if we’re going to set our minds and our hearts on a variety of other things, we are going to be shaped by those other things.

We’re going to be shaped by culture.

We’re going to be shaped by the news.

We’re going to be shaped by entertainment.

We’re going to be shaped by our relationship with family or our relationship with friends.

Whatever it is that we are giving significant attention to begins to shape us.

And so if we are going to be shaped, hopefully, by God to build this resilient faith, then we really need to give our attention to God.

Because love follows attention.

What we give our attention to is what we end up loving.

And that is an important thing for us to wrap our minds and our hearts around.

What I like thinking about it in this way, this idea of love and the various liturgies that we practice.

And because we live in a world, in the world, we live in this messy world, there are kind of liturgies of the world that compete with liturgies of the Spirit.

One of them, the liturgies of the world, I would argue, build fragility.

They build a fragile spirituality, a fragile faith that is easily, that gets cracks and breaks easy.

The other side, the spiritual liturgies that we can begin to practice and consider, that compete and push against the worldly liturgies, they’re the things that help us to build a resilient faith.

A faith that can hold up under suffering.

The kind of faith that can hold up under grief, under pain.

The kind of faith that holds up as we face this broken and messy world.

So, in our world, I would say the four big, maybe four of the big liturgies that we face these days, first is the liturgy of outrage.

This is what gets traction, right?

We get caught up and sucked in to outrage so easily.

And I do too.

I scroll, as I look at the news, or I look at my social media feed, and I see the things that come out, and I just, oh, I get so angry.

And outrage catches me.

And there are seasons where that is like every day, man.

It is like, it is all the time, over and over and over again.

We can also embrace and practice a liturgy of scarcity.

This idea that there’s never enough, right?

That we are always wanting, that we are always falling short.

Everything comes up short, whether it’s time, money, emotional capacity, relationships.

No matter what it is that we have going on, it is, we always look for the scarcity.

And so we practice that.

We practice that as though it is the only reality before us.

There’s also the liturgy of self-optimization.

This liturgy draws us into a constant practice of trying to make ourselves better in our own strength, right?

We just keep trying to wrestle through things, almost in the sense of a vacuum.

It’s as though we are completely isolated from community.

We are completely isolated from the divine.

And so it’s all about self-optimization.

I will make myself the best version of myself that I can make myself.

And we get sucked in to this liturgy.

And then there’s the liturgy of endless scrolling, right?

Where we just scroll and scroll and scroll on the social media.

Whether it’s Facebook or Instagram or Twitter or Mastodon or Threads, so on and so forth.

We scroll and we scroll and we scroll.

And that becomes a spiritual practice.

When we start, when we feel any sense of boredom, any sense of quiet, any sense of there’s a moment where we’re not, where our attention has not been caught by something, we pull out our phone and we scroll.

So what do these liturgies train us in?

Well, they train us in anxiety, right?

Like that’s the first thing.

If we are constantly in a state of outrage, if we are constantly in a state of feeling scarcity, if we’re constantly feeling like we’re not good enough and we have to make ourselves better, if we’re constantly scrolling, those things throw at us or build into us a sense of anxiety because we are always, we’re just always left in a place of either outrage or scarcity or shame.

It also trains us in comparison, you know?

I mean this, when we are, especially when we’re constantly scrolling, we are constantly seeing other people’s lives.

And it turns out that what people post online are the good things.

They don’t post the hard things.

They don’t post the bad things.

They don’t post the difficult things.

They don’t post the suffering.

They don’t post the grief.

They post, you know, all of the good when the hair is perfect and the outfit is perfect and the scene is perfect.

And so we get caught up in comparison where we never feel like we’re good enough.

And these things also, these four liturgies train us in impatience.

We think that we have to accomplish the thing right here, right now.

We always feel like we’re behind.

We always feel like somebody is further along than us and we are somehow falling short and so we become very, very impatient.

And another way of understanding what patience is is long-suffering.

And so if we become impatient, then what we do, what we’re constantly trying to do is short-circuit those seasons of life that are hard as opposed to persevering through them.

We try to escape from them.

And that’s what impatience begins to do to us.

So that is contrasted with the liturgy of faith, the liturgy of setting our attention on Christ.

So we’re going to get to some specific training practices here in a moment.

But just in general, when we focus our attention on Christ, what does that train us?

How do spiritual liturgies, spiritual habits begin to train us as we set our attention on Christ?

As we give light to our eyes, that is the Christ way.

Well, it helps us.

It builds in us patience.

We train patience.

We don’t have to rush through everything.

We can sit back and say, okay, let’s see how this goes.

We don’t have to clutch our pearls.

We don’t have to wring our hands.

We don’t have to try to escape seasons of difficulty.

We can patiently endure them because we know that Christ is faithful.

We know that God is faithful.

We know that grace is abundant.

We know that mercy is abundant.

We know that there is love from an unconditional love from the divine.

And so we can patiently endure.

It also teaches us to trust.

It teaches us to trust because, again, as we practice the liturgies of setting our attention on Christ, what we begin to see is how faithful Christ is.

We begin to see again and again and again how God makes good on God’s promises and how Christ was perfectly faithful in every way.

And so we can trust Christ.

It helps us have humility.

What humility is, it is a right self-understanding.

And so as we set our attention on Christ, then what happens is we realize we don’t have to practice self-optimization.

We don’t have to focus our attention on ourselves.

We begin to develop a right understanding of ourselves.

And so we see ourselves in the both and.

We see that, you know, hey, we do some things really, really well and we can celebrate that.

We do some things really, really badly.

And we can confess that.

And we can begin to deal with that.

We see ourselves not as perfect people or not as dirty, rotten, filthy sinners.

We see ourselves as people who are loved, people who are cared for, people whom Christ says, walk with me.

Walk with me and set your attention on the things that are above.

And then the other thing that it does is it gives us hope.

It gives us hope that in the midst of hardship, in the midst of trial, in the midst of struggle, in the midst of grief, in the midst of doubt, in the midst of pain, in the midst of all the things that exist because we live in this broken world, we can have hope that we’re going to come out the other side.

And that hope is what helps us persevere.

It kind of flips us right back around to the patience thing.

Because we have hope, we can have patience.

Because we have patience, we can trust.

Because we trust, we have humility.

And then from this humility, we begin to see a hope that is very real.

And so you can begin to see how if we can set our attention on Christ, then our perspective on things change.

We stop being such fragile people who are just so easily broken by the difficulties of life.

And we can be a people then who are able to hold on to love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control because we have set our attention on Christ, which reminds us that we are deeply loved because attention is the doorway to love.

So here are some things that I would love for you to experiment with.

Some things just to try.

Some simple, easy, well, easy in the sense that they’re easy to say, spiritual liturgies.

All right, some spiritual habits.

First, first habit.

Start your day without looking at your phone for five minutes.

I know most of us have our phone set to be the alarm clock.

So what I’m saying is your alarm goes off.

You turn it off.

Turn off your alarm.

Leave your phone on your charger.

Don’t look at it.

Go brush your teeth.

Put on your robe, whatever it is.

Go make your coffee.

Maybe even try to drink a whole cup of coffee before you look at your phone.

Just see what happens.

Just see what happens.

What’s the worst that can happen?

You miss a Facebook message from somebody?

From, you know, 11 o’clock at night or midnight or 2 o’clock in the morning when they should have been asleep anyway?

Give it a go.

See what happens if you can start your day without your phone for five minutes.

Just try to pay attention in that five minutes and see what you notice.

Another practice that I would challenge you to do is to read one psalm slowly or read one chapter in Proverbs slowly.

Just try that for a few days.

Start and maybe you can combine the first one with this one, right?

Where you sit there with your cup of coffee and an open Bible and, you know, read a psalm.

Read a chapter in Proverbs.

Takes about five minutes.

Don’t look at your phone.

And again, pay attention to what it is that you begin to sense in you, what’s going on in your heart, your mind, your soul.

Just pay attention.

Or maybe you think, boy, five minutes, that’s a long