Hopefully, you’ve had an impactful week looking at Passion Week through the lens of those who encountered Jesus on the way to the cross. So familiar are we with Bible narratives, that we often don’t really process that these are real people, with real stories, that we are reading about. They often are relegated to the stature of characters in a play or movie, a protagonist or antagonist.
Today, Dr. Ferguson looks at the man for whom he says,
“… there was one man for whom the day started as the worst day in his life, but ended not only as the last day, but as the best day.
Well, that’s the business Jesus is in – the business of changing lives. This day can turn out to be your best day, as well, if you embrace Him as your Lord and Savior and receive His forgiveness that was secured through His work on the cross.
It’s been a meaningful and humbling week to find ourselves in each of the people Dr. Ferguson has referenced this Holy Week. Their traits are our traits, their ambition our ambition, their fears our fears.
Today, Ferguson turns our sights towards Simon of Cyrene, who just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time … or was it the right place at the right time? The book of Mark reads,
“And they (the Roman execution squad) compelled a passerby, Simon of Cyrene, who was coming in from the country … to carry the cross.”
Friends, there are no true and ultimate “accidents” in our lives. Everything happens for a purpose (or more). As we’ll see today, Simon’s happenstance timing of passing by at that exact moment happened to change his life.
After looking at Judas, who betrayed Jesus, and Peter, who denied Him, Sinclair Ferguson now takes the angle of Pontius Pilate, who condemned Him, and connects Pilate’s conundrum with our own:
The Gospel writers tell Pilate’s story in a way that makes you realize why the Bible is likened to a mirror. You read about Pilate and you feel you’re watching scenes that reflect moments in your own life, moments that nothing can really prepare you for. You’re faced with a question that will determine what happens to you in the future. There’s no escape from it.
At some point(s) in our lives, we will all likely be pressed to make decisions that will have huge implications, not only for our own lives, but those lives around us; and higher your title or position, the wider the impact. That was certainly true for Pilate.
In yesterday’s opening Passion Week podcast, Sinclair Ferguson looked at the final week of Jesus’s life through the eyes of Judas, who betrayed Him. In today’s devotional, he looks through the lens of Peter, who denied Him, and considers the following:
So here’s a question: If you’d encountered both these men, would you have been able to tell that one of them would take his life in despair while the other would be saved? Put it another way: Is the difference between denying Jesus and betraying Jesus a difference in magnitude or a difference in kind? Or put it yet another way: How come Peter denied Jesus and yet was saved, whereas Judas betrayed Jesus and was damned?
Of course, that begs the question … what about me? Where will I be found? While Ferguson cannot answer that question for his listeners, he narrows the scope and gets to the heart of the matter.
An essential component of healthy relationships is balanced two-way communication – being open enough to share honestly what’s on your heart and mind, and being willing to truly listen well.
As we begin 2023, one way you might deepen your relationship with God is by further engaging with Him by listening better to what He has had to say and what He has to say, as well as sharing with Him your thoughts and responses.
To aid you, we’d like you to take a look at the following Bible reading plans, to see if there’s one that would fit your schedule and your interest. It doesn’t really matter which one you choose. One isn’t better than the other. Just choose one that fits you best.
If you’d like some help in figuring out a plan to choose, feel free to reach out to a TD counselor. Arthur and Sandra have also been through a few of them. Joni and Ken Tada read through the Chronological reading plan each year.
Thanks to our friends at Ligonier Ministries for providing these plans. Happy reading … and listening!
R.C. Sproul reminded us that “Disciples of Christ abide in His Word. Those who abide in His Word know the truth and are free.”
As you make plans for 2023, we invite you to explore Bible reading plans designed to help you prioritize abiding in God’s Word. Each plan differs slightly, and we encourage you to find one that fits your unique learning style and study goals for the year. Whether you’d like to read straight through the Bible from Genesis to Revelation or focus your attention on one book, we hope these plans will serve you as you grow as a disciple of Christ and share the truths you are learning with those in your life.
52-Week Bible Reading Plan
Read through the Bible in a year with each day of the week dedicated to a different genre: epistles, the law, history, Psalms, poetry, prophecy, and Gospels.
Read through the New Testament in a year, reading Monday to Friday. Weekends are set aside for reflection and other reading. Especially beneficial if you’re new to a daily discipline of Bible reading.
Four daily readings taken from four lists: Psalms and wisdom literature, Pentateuch and history of Israel, Chronicles and prophets, and Gospels and epistles.
The Old Testament readings are ordered similarly to Israel’s Hebrew Bible, and the New Testament readings attempt to follow the order in which the books were authored.
A year-long study in the Gospel of Matthew from Tabletalk magazine and R.C. Sproul.
Duration: One year | App: Accessible on YouVersion. Download the app.
Bible in a Year
This plan takes you through the entire Bible with two readings each day: one from the Old Testament and one from the New Testament.
Duration: One year | App: Accessible on YouVersion. Download the app.
Professor Grant Horner’s Bible Reading System
Reading ten chapters a day, in the course of a year you’ll read the Gospels four times, the Pentateuch twice, Paul’s letters four to five times, the Old Testament wisdom literature six times, the Psalms at least twice, Proverbs and Acts a dozen times, and the Old Testament history and prophetic books about one and a half times.
Two readings each day, one from the Old Testament and one from the New Testament. You can also follow the Tabletalk reading plan through the Ligonier app.
This plan does not have set readings for each day. Instead, it has set books for each month and a set number of Proverbs and Psalms for each week. It aims to give you more flexibility while grounding you in specific books of the Bible.
Have you struggled to read through the entire Bible? R.C. Sproul’s basic overview of the Bible may help you.
In addition to your daily Bible reading, consider readingTabletalkmagazine for daily Bible studies to help you understand the Bible and apply it to daily living. Sign up for a free 3-month trial.
I just read an article written by perhaps truly the happiest person I personally know, Joni Eareckson Tada. She also happens to be one of the circumstantially least likely to be that happy. She’s an example of what pastor Eric Geiger referred to today as “the logic-defying unconditional love of God.” It just doesn’t make sense. A quadriplegic of 54 years who cannot do any of the dozens of things that you and I do dozens of times every single day, and who struggles and fights every moment for her body to do the little it can do, probably has more honest-to-goodness true joy than all of us in TD put together. How does that make any sense??? It really doesn’t … but it’s true.
Possessing that kind of joy is hard-fought-for and hard-won over many years, as Joni herself has shared. Anything truly worth possessing is. It’s one reason that so few possess actually possess it. But if you’re at the point in your life where you desperately want that kind of happiness and joy, and are ready to let the Lord have His way with you so that can be a reality, then today’s article and video are a start.
The article, Paralyzed and Blessed: My Unlikely Path to Happiness, isn’t short, but it’s gold, it’s true, and it’s foundational to obtaining the kind of happiness and joy that far, far surpasses the kind of happiness that comes from earthly achievement and acquisitions.
The video, A Personal Conversation with Joni Eareckson Tada is a candid, unscripted, heart-to-heart conversation that my family had with Joni during COVID quarantining that we first posted exactly one year ago today. Not only is her content so insightful, you’ll pick up something just by carefully observing her. It is by far the most viewed TD video ever posted, and has been viewed and enjoyed nearly 11,000 times in the last year by viewers the world over.
I’d encourage you to reach out to a TD leader that you feel could help you begin your journey towards true happiness and joy. None of us leaders will have all the answers for you, but we can at least be a starting point and a resource towards pointing you in the right direction and sincerely praying for you along the way.
– Arthur
Paralyzed and Blessed
My Unlikely Path to Happiness
Article by Joni Eareckson Tada, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Joni and Friends
When pain jerks me awake at night, I first glance up. If the digital display on the ceiling says only the second watch of the night, I push through the pain and try to breathe my way back to sleep. But if the clock says 4:00 a.m., I smile. Jesus has awakened me to enjoy communion with him, even though it’ll be hours before I sit up in my wheelchair.
Do I need more sleep? Of course. Will my pain subside? Unlikely. But at four in the morning, there is a more necessary thing, and it makes me happy to think that long before dawn, I am among the early ones who are blessing Jesus. Filling my chest with Jesus. Rehearsing his Scriptures, murmuring his names, and whisper-singing hymns that cascade one into another, all filled with adoration.
It’s hard to do that when you’re wearing an external ventilator. And so I wordlessly plead that he unearth my sin, fill all my cavernous, empty places, and show me more of his splendor. He always responds with tenderness. He sees me lying in bed paralyzed and propped with pillows, encumbered by a lymphatic sleeve, wheezing air-tubes, a urine bag, and hospital railings that “hold it all together.”
One of my helpers knows all about these nighttime rendezvous with Jesus, and so one night after she tucked me in, she stood over my paralyzed frame with an open Bible. “This is you,” she said, and then read Psalm 119:147–148: “I rise before dawn and cry for help; I hope in your words. My eyes are awake before the watches of the night, that I may meditate on your promise.”
That pretty much describes it. In the morning when a different helper draws the drapes, unhooks my ventilator, drops the guard rails, removes the lymph-sleeve, and pulls out my many pillows, she’ll usually ask, “Sleep well?”
“Not the best, but I am so happy.”
Blessings that Bruise
Real happiness is hard to come by. Many Christians default to the lesser, more accessible joys of our culture. But the more we saturate ourselves with earthy pleasures, the more pickled our minds become, sitting and soaking in worldly wants to the point that we hardly know what our souls need. We then seize upon the loan approval, job promotion, the home-team victory, or rain clouds parting over our picnic as glorious blessings sent from on high. Yet if Jesus were counting our blessings, would these make his top ten?
I am the most blessed quadriplegic in the world. It has nothing to do with my job, a nice house, my relatively good health, or a car pulling out of a handicap space just as I pull up to the restaurant. It does not hinge on books I’ve written, how far I’ve traveled, or having known Billy Graham on a first-name basis.
Jesus goes much deeper than the physical-type blessings so reminiscent of the Old Testament. Back then, God blessed his people with bounteous harvests, annihilated enemies, opened wombs, abundant rains, and quivers full of children. Jesus takes a different approach. He locates blessings closer to pain and discomfort.
How Suffering Invites Blessing
In his most famous sermon, Jesus lists empty-handed spiritual poverty, hearts heavy with sorrow, a lowly forgiving spirit, eschewing sin, and struggling for unity in the church. Jesus tops off his list with, “And what happiness will be yours when people blame you and ill-treat you and say all kinds of slanderous things against you for my sake! Be glad then, yes, be tremendously glad — for your reward in Heaven is magnificent” (Matthew 5:11–12, J.B. Phillips).
How does one accept these hard-edged things as blessings? First Peter 3:14 suggests that “even if you should suffer for righteousness’ sake, you will be blessed.” It is affliction that sends us into the inner recesses of Christ’s heart and shuts the door. There, “a new nearness to God and communion with him is a far more conscious reality. . . . New arguments suggest themselves; new desires spring up; new wants disclose themselves. Our own emptiness and God’s manifold fullness are brought before us so vividly that the longings of our inmost souls are kindled, and our heart crieth out for God” (Horatius Bonar, Night of Weeping, 74).
“A godly response to suffering places you under a deluge of divine blessings.”
These new desires and wants give birth to a strong desire to obey him (James 1:2; 2 Corinthians 5:9). David the psalmist knew this. He said, “Before you made me suffer, I used to wander off. But now I hold onto your word” (Psalm 119:67). A godly response to suffering places you under a deluge of divine blessings.
‘If You Love Me’
Jesus summed it up, saying, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments” (John 14:15). Here, Jesus is not likening himself to a stern husband who walks through the front door, notices that dinner is not on the table, and mutters to his wife, “If you love me, you will have my meal ready when I come home!” Biblical obedience is not a duty to do the right thing because that’s what good Christians should do.
John 14:15 is like a promise. Like Jesus saying, “If you love me, if you make me the center of your thoughts, delighting in me and doing your most ordinary tasks with an eye to my glory, then wild horses will not be able to stop you from obeying me.” Obedience that is motivated by unbridled love for your Lord has a powerful sanctifying effect. What euphoria when your delight in Christ meshes perfectly with your delight in his law! (Psalm 1:1–3) You are then able to cry out, “My soul is consumed with longing for your rules at all times” (Psalm 119:20).
So David could say, “It is good for me that I was afflicted, that I might learn your statutes” (Psalm 119:71). Think of affliction as a sheepdog that snaps at your heels, always driving you through the gate of obedience and into the safety of the Shepherd’s arms. Affliction and sanctification then go hand in hand as you are constrained on all sides and pushed hard “toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:14).
This Blessing Has Fallen to Me
All the New Testament-type blessings that Jesus preached about now lose their hard edge. No longer off-putting, Matthew 5:11–12 feels smooth to your soul. You can rejoice with the psalmist who effused, “This blessing has fallen to me, that I have kept your precepts” (Psalm 119:56). We are blessed — supremely happy — not when we have everything going for us, but when all of us is going for God.
“We are blessed, not when we have everything going for us, but when all of us is going for God.”
Does it get any better? Yes. Jesus describes an extraordinary blessing between obedience and the prize of himself in John 14:21: “Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me . . . and I will love him and manifest myself to him.” This is the sweetness of obedience. When you sanctify yourself, he opens layer upon layer of his heart, inexorably wooing you with his loveliness — and his holiness (Hebrews 12:10):
This is the blessing which above all others [God] desires for us . . . when we come to be perfectly at one with him, then the struggle ceases. How blessed when his desire to deliver us from sin, and ours to be delivered from it, meet together . . . then divine fullness flows into the soul without a check, and, notwithstanding the bitterness of the outward process by which [it is secured], joy unspeakable and full of glory possesses the consecrated soul. (Night of Weeping, 68–69)
Beholding Holiness Himself
In the hours before dawn when I lie awake, I fill my chest with such thoughts. I marvel at Jesus’s loveliness, picturing him carving out canyons, puckering up mountains, ladling out streams, rivers, and seas. He breathes suns and stars into orbit; nebula and galaxies, all spinning in motion, all so that we might behold his glory. Even more glorious, “he upholds the universe by the word of his power” (Hebrews 1:3). Mountains, seas, and stars would — poof! — disappear, every molecule would vanish, if he stopped willing the universe to be.
This barely scratches the surface. Our Creator God then wills himself to be nailed to a cross. He gazes up into the eyes of a soldier about to drive in iron spikes. But as the soldier reaches for the mallet, his fingers must be able to grasp it. His heart must keep pumping. His life must be sustained nanosecond by nanosecond, for no man has such power on his own. Who supplies breath to this Roman’s lungs? Who holds his molecules together? Only the Son can, through whom “all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17).
Jesus wills the spikes be driven through his flesh. He gives the executioners strength enough to lift the cross, heavy with his impaled body. God then goes on humiliating display — in his underwear. He can scarcely breathe. Yet he looks down upon these poorly-paid legionnaires jeering at him and utters, “Father, forgive them.” Jesus graciously and unbegrudgingly grants them all — every wretched one — continued existence.
Yet his crucifixion was a mere warm-up to the greater horror. At some point during that dreadful day, Jesus began to feel a foreign sensation. An unearthly foul odor began to waft in his heart. He felt dirty. Human wickedness crawled upon his spotless being — the living excrement from our souls. The apple of his Father’s eye was turning brown with the rot of our sin (see Steve Estes, When God Weeps, 53–54).
This is what Jesus was talking about in John 14:21. This is the Ancient of Days manifesting himself to us. And wonder of wonders, the Father now calls us the apple of his eye (Psalm 17:8).
Who Will Have Your Heart?
If you long for divine fullness to flow into your soul without a check, embrace your afflictions, get actively engaged in your own sanctification, and let your delight in Christ mesh with your delight in his law. For God has given you the sun, stars, and the universe; he has given you flowers, friendship, goodness, and salvation. He’s given you everything — can you not give him your heart? If God does not have our heart, who or what shall have it?
I trust that at four in the morning, Christ has yours.
As we pick up steam in the new year, are you sensing where God is leading you in 2022? We often have an uncomfortable relationship with the ideas of old and new. For some, new is always better and old is always tired and passé. For others, it’s the exact opposite. The truth sometimes is on either pole, though it is often found somewhere in-between.
Today’s article helps us think through the idea of new through Jesus’s lens, as He is daily making “all things new.” Enjoy!
We all enjoy new things. There’s something exciting about all the potential held within something new— the promise and expectation for the future. A new school year. A new job. A new calendar year. As we flip the page to 2022, we all carry great expectations for what the new year will hold. Perhaps we’ll finally meet that goal we’ve been striving toward. Maybe this is the year that broken relationship will finally be restored. Maybe we’ll see fruit develop in our ministry. Perhaps this year will be better than the last.
That desire for the new is not misplaced. It’s not strange to feel hope and anticipation as we look to the future. It’s not a matter of foolish optimism or wishful thinking to want things to change for the better. We hope for what is new because we know that things are not as they should be. We know that the world God created is now broken and fallen in sin. We know that life should not be filled with suffering, heartbreak, and discord. And so we long for healing and redemption; we long for the world to be made right and new.
In Revelation 21:5, Jesus says, “Behold, I am making all things new.” What a marvelous truth. For all those who long for healing and redemption, this is news that our hearts need most. Jesus Christ entered this messy, sin-stained world to live the life we could not live and to die the death we deserved so that He could undo the curse we’ve carried since the moment our first parents sinned. And because Jesus conquered sin and death, in the words of Samwise Gamgee, “everything that is sad is going to come untrue.”
We witness Jesus making all things new each and every day as the Spirit works in the redeemed, remaking us into the image of Christ. We see it as He convicts and purifies us of sin and helps us put on righteousness. We see it, too, as we get up each morning and labor to push back against the effects of the fall—as we till the soil of this world and plant seeds of the gospel. We see it in lives that are transformed by the gospel as the good news of Christ bears fruit in the hearts of those in our communities, across our nations, and around the world. We see it as we pour into the next generation, passing on the truths of God’s faithfulness to our children, our grandchildren, and the youth in our congregations. We see glimpses of it as we worship together with the gathered body of Christ—as we practice and prepare for eternity spent worshiping in the very presence of God.
As we look at this new year, whatever goals we set, whatever “new” that we hope and long for, we can know with confidence that the very Spirit of Christ is on the move in our hearts and lives, ensuring we are “new” and blameless at the day of Christ (1 Cor. 1:8).
Behold, He is making all things new.
Christina R. Fox is a counselor and retreat speaker, and she serves on the national women’s ministry team for the Presbyterian Church in America. She is author of several books, including A Holy Fear: Trading Lesser Fears for the Fear of the Lord.
Originally published in the January, 2022 issue of Tabletalk Magazine.
Have you set any goals or made any commitments or resolutions for 2022? If I may, I’d like to add one to your list – a commitment to reclaim your ability to concentrate; something I think we ALL struggle with to some degree.
Today’s article argues that our attention isn’t just collapsing on its own. It’s being stolen right before our very eyes … literally; and we’re doing it to ourselves. It is an excerpt of the forthcoming book, Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention. While this isn’t a “Christian” article, per se, and while I don’t agree with a couple of his side comments, it is a worthwhile read that lays out the data and its implications on our minds.
The irony is not lost on me that most of you will not be able to concentrate long enough to finish reading the article, for it is lengthy (I even thought of incentivizing you by rewarding those who read it in full); but there may be a few of you for whom “enough is enough,” and you are serious about turning your ship around.
If that’s you, please reach out to a TD leader, so we can support you and journey with you. After all, biblical life transformation begins with the renewing of our minds
“… do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.”
Romans 12:2
God be with us all in 2022! – Arthur
Your attention didn’t collapse. It was stolen
Illustration by Eric Chow.
Social media and many other facets of modern life are destroying our ability to concentrate. We need to reclaim our minds while we still can.
When he was nine years old, my godson Adam developed a brief but freakishly intense obsession with Elvis Presley. He took to singing Jailhouse Rock at the top of his voice with all the low crooning and pelvis-jiggling of the King himself. One day, as I tucked him in, he looked at me very earnestly and asked: “Johann, will you take me to Graceland one day?” Without really thinking, I agreed. I never gave it another thought, until everything had gone wrong.
Ten years later, Adam was lost. He had dropped out of school when he was 15, and he spent almost all his waking hours alternating blankly between screens – a blur of YouTube, WhatsApp and porn. (I’ve changed his name and some minor details to preserve his privacy.) He seemed to be whirring at the speed of Snapchat, and nothing still or serious could gain any traction in his mind. During the decade in which Adam had become a man, this fracturing seemed to be happening to many of us. Our ability to pay attention was cracking and breaking. I had just turned 40, and wherever my generation gathered, we would lament our lost capacity for concentration. I still read a lot of books, but with each year that passed, it felt more and more like running up a down escalator. Then one evening, as we lay on my sofa, each staring at our own ceaselessly shrieking screens, I looked at him and felt a low dread. “Adam,” I said softly, “let’s go to Graceland.” I reminded him of the promise I had made. I could see that the idea of breaking this numbing routine ignited something in him, but I told him there was one condition he had to stick to if we went. He had to switch his phone off during the day. He swore he would.
When you arrive at the gates of Graceland, there is no longer a human being whose job is to show you around. You are handed an iPad, you put in little earbuds, and the iPad tells you what to do – turn left; turn right; walk forward. In each room, a photograph of where you are appears on the screen, while a narrator describes it. So as we walked around we were surrounded by blank-faced people, looking almost all the time at their screens. As we walked, I felt more and more tense. When we got to the jungle room – Elvis’s favourite place in the mansion – the iPad was chattering away when a middle-aged man standing next to me turned to say something to his wife. In front of us, I could see the large fake plants that Elvis had bought to turn this room into his own artificial jungle. “Honey,” he said, “this is amazing. Look.” He waved the iPad in her direction, and began to move his finger across it. “If you swipe left, you can see the jungle room to the left. And if you swipe right, you can see the jungle room to the right.”
If you read your texts while working, you lose that time, but also the time it takes to refocus afterwards, which is a lot
His wife stared, smiled, and began to swipe at her own iPad. I leaned forward. “But, sir,” I said, “there’s an old-fashioned form of swiping you can do. It’s called turning your head. Because we’re here. We’re in the jungle room. You can see it unmediated. Here. Look.” I waved my hand, and the fake green leaves rustled a little. Their eyes returned to their screens. “Look!” I said. “Don’t you see? We’re actually there. There’s no need for your screen. We are in the jungle room.” They hurried away. I turned to Adam, ready to laugh about it all – but he was in a corner, holding his phone under his jacket, flicking through Snapchat.
At every stage in the trip, he had broken his promise. When the plane first touched down in New Orleans two weeks before, he took out his phone while we were still in our seats. “You promised not to use it,” I said. He replied: “I meant I wouldn’t make phone calls. I can’t not use Snapchat and texting, obviously.” He said this with baffled honesty, as though I had asked him to hold his breath for 10 days. In the jungle room, I suddenly snapped and tried to wrestle his phone from his grasp, and he stomped away. That night I found him in the Heartbreak Hotel, sitting next to a swimming pool (shaped like a giant guitar), looking sad. I realised as I sat with him that, as with so much anger, my rage towards him was really anger towards myself. His inability to focus was something I felt happening to me too. I was losing my ability to be present, and I hated it. “I know something’s wrong,” Adam said, holding his phone tightly in his hand. “But I have no idea how to fix it.” Then he went back to texting.
Johann Hari at his home in London. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer
I realised then that I needed to understand what was really happening to him and to so many of us. That moment turned out to be the start of a journey that transformed how I think about attention. I travelled all over the world in the next three years, from Miami to Moscow to Melbourne, interviewing the leading experts in the world about focus. What I learned persuaded me that we are not now facing simply a normal anxiety about attention, of the kind every generation goes through as it ages. We are living in a serious attention crisis – one with huge implications for how we live. I learned there are twelve factors that have been proven to reduce people’s ability to pay attention and that many of these factors have been rising in the past few decades – sometimes dramatically.
I went to Portland, Oregon, to interview Prof Joel Nigg, who is one of the leading experts in the world on children’s attention problems, and he told me we need to ask if we are now developing “an attentional pathogenic culture” – an environment in which sustained and deep focus is harder for all of us. When I asked him what he would do if he was in charge of our culture and he actually wanted to destroy people’s attention, he said: “Probably what our society is doing.” Prof Barbara Demeneix, a leading French scientist who has studied some key factors that can disrupt attention, told me bluntly: “There is no way we can have a normal brain today.” We can see the effects all around us. A small study of college students found they now only focus on any one task for 65 seconds. A different study of office workers found they only focus on average for three minutes. This isn’t happening because we all individually became weak-willed. Your focus didn’t collapse. It was stolen.
When I first got back from Graceland, I thought my attention was failing because I wasn’t strong enough as an individual and because I had been taken over by my phone. I went into a spiral of negative thoughts, reproaching myself. I’d say – you’re weak, you’re lazy, you’re not disciplined enough. I thought the solution was obvious: be more disciplined, and banish your phone. So I went online and booked myself a little room by the beach in Provincetown, at the tip of Cape Cod. I announced triumphantly to everyone – I am going to be there for three months, with no smartphone, and no computer that can get online. I’m done. I’m tired of being wired. I knew I could only do it because I was very lucky and had money from my previous books. I knew it couldn’t be a long-term solution. I did it because I thought that if I didn’t, I might lose some crucial aspects of my ability to think deeply. I also hoped that if I stripped everything back for a time, I might start to be able to glimpse the changes we could all make in a more sustainable way.
In my first webless week, I stumbled around in a haze of decompression. Provincetown is a little gay resort town with the highest proportion of same-sex couples in the US. I ate cupcakes, read books, talked with strangers and sang songs. Everything radically slowed down. Normally I follow the news every hour or so, getting a drip-feed of anxiety-provoking facts and trying to smush them together into some kind of sense. Instead, I simply read a physical newspaper once a day. Every few hours, I would feel an unfamiliar sensation gurgling inside me and I would ask myself: what is that? Ah, yes. Calm.
Later, I realised when I interviewed the experts and studied their research that there were many reasons why my attention was starting to heal from that first day. Prof Earl Miller, a neuroscientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, explained one to me. He said “your brain can only produce one or two thoughts” in your conscious mind at once. That’s it. “We’re very, very single-minded.” We have “very limited cognitive capacity”. But we have fallen for an enormous delusion. The average teenager now believes they can follow six forms of media at the same time. When neuroscientists studied this, they found that when people believe they are doing several things at once, they are actually juggling. “They’re switching back and forth. They don’t notice the switching because their brain sort of papers it over to give a seamless experience of consciousness, but what they’re actually doing is switching and reconfiguring their brain moment-to-moment, task-to-task – [and] that comes with a cost.” Imagine, say, you are doing your tax return, and you receive a text, and you look at it – it’s only a glance, taking three seconds – and then you go back to your tax return. In that moment, “your brain has to reconfigure, when it goes from one task to another”, he said. You have to remember what you were doing before, and you have to remember what you thought about it. When this happens, the evidence shows that “your performance drops. You’re slower. All as a result of the switching.”
This is called the “switch-cost effect”. It means that if you check your texts while trying to work, you aren’t only losing the little bursts of time you spend looking at the texts themselves – you are also losing the time it takes to refocus afterwards, which turns out to be a huge amount. For example, one study at the Carnegie Mellon University’s human computer interaction lab took 136 students and got them to sit a test. Some of them had to have their phones switched off, and others had their phones on and received intermittent text messages. The students who received messages performed, on average, 20% worse. It seems to me that almost all of us are currently losing that 20% of our brainpower, almost all the time. Miller told me that as a result we now live in “a perfect storm of cognitive degradation”.
For the first time in a very long time, in Provincetown I was doing one thing at a time, without being interrupted. I was living within the limits of what my brain could actually handle. I felt my attention growing and improving with every day that passed, but then, one day, I experienced an abrupt setback. I was walking down the beach and every few steps I saw the same thing that had been scratching at me since Memphis. People seemed to be using Provincetown simply as a backdrop for selfies, rarely looking up, at the ocean or each other. Only this time, the itch I felt wasn’t to yell: You’re wasting your lives, put the damn phone down. It was to yell: Give me that phone! Mine! For so long, I had received the thin, insistent signals of the web every few hours throughout the day, the trickle of likes and comments that say: I see you. You matter. Now they were gone. Simone de Beauvoir said that when she became an atheist, it felt like the world had fallen silent. Losing the web felt like that. After the rhetorical heat of social media, ordinary social interactions seemed pleasing but low volume. No normal social interaction floods you with hearts.
Provincetown: a place to switch off. Photograph: Maddie Meyer/Getty Images
I realised that to heal my attention, it was not enough simply to strip out distractions. That makes you feel good at first – but then it creates a vacuum where all the noise was. I realised I had to fill the vacuum. To do that, I started to think a lot about an area of psychology I had learned about years before – the science of flow states. Almost everyone reading this will have experienced a flow state at some point. It’s when you are doing something meaningful to you, and you really get into it, and time falls away, and your ego seems to vanish, and you find yourself focusing deeply and effortlessly. Flow is the deepest form of attention human beings can offer. But how do we get there?
I later interviewed Prof Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in Claremont, California, who was the first scientist to study flow states and researched them for more than 40 years. From his research, I learned there are three key factors which you need to get into flow. First you need to choose one goal. Flow takes all your mental energy, deployed deliberately in one direction. Second, that goal needs to be meaningful to you – you can’t flow into a goal that you don’t care about. Third, it helps if what you are doing is at the edge of your abilities – if, say, the rock you are climbing is slightly higher and harder than the last rock you climbed. So every morning, I started to write – a different kind of writing from my earlier work, one that stretched me. Within a few days, I started to flow, and hours of focus would pass without it feeling like a challenge. I felt I was focusing in the way I had when I was a teenager, in long effortless stretches. I had feared my brain was breaking. I cried with relief when I realised that in the right circumstances, its full power could come back.
At the end of every day, I would sit on the beach and watch the light slowly change. The light on the cape is unlike the light anywhere else I have ever been and in Provincetown, I could see more clearly than I ever had before in my life – my own thoughts, my own goals, my own dreams. I was living in the light. So when the time came to leave the beach house and come back to the hyperlinked world, I became convinced I had cracked the code of attention. I returned to the world determined to integrate the lessons I had learned in my everyday life. When I was reunited with my phone and laptop after taking a ferry back to where they were stashed in Boston, they seemed alien, and alienating. But within a few months, my screen time was back to four hours a day, and my attention was fraying and breaking again.
In Moscow, the former Google engineer James Williams – who has become the most important philosopher of attention in the western world – told me I had made a crucial mistake. Individual abstinence is “not the solution, for the same reason that wearing a gas mask for two days a week outside isn’t the answer to pollution. It might, for a short period of time, keep certain effects at bay, but it’s not sustainable, and it doesn’t address the systemic issues.” He said that our attention is being deeply altered by huge invasive forces in wider society. Saying the solution was to just adjust your own habits – to pledge to break up with your phone, say – was just “pushing it back on to the individual” he said, when “it’s really the environmental changes that will really make the difference”.
Nigg said it might help me grasp what’s happening if we compare our rising attention problems to our rising obesity rates. Fifty years ago there was very little obesity, but today it is endemic in the western world. This is not because we suddenly became greedy or self-indulgent. He said: “Obesity is not a medical epidemic – it’s a social epidemic. We have bad food, for example, and so people are getting fat.” The way we live changed dramatically – our food supply changed, and we built cities that are hard to walk or cycle around, and those changes in our environment led to changes in our bodies. We gained mass, en masse. Something similar, he said, might be happening with the changes in our attention.
I learned that the factors harming our attention are not all immediately obvious. I had been focused on tech at first, but in fact the causes range very widely – from the food we eat to the air we breathe, from the hours we work to the hours we no longer sleep. They include many things we have come to take for granted – from how we deprive our children of play, to how our schools strip learning of meaning by basing everything on tests. I came to believe we need to respond to this incessant invasion of our attention at two levels. The first is individual. There are all sorts of changes we can make at a personal level that will protect our focus. I would say that by doing most of them, I have boosted my focus by about 20%. But we have to level with people. Those changes will only take you so far. At the moment it’s as though we are all having itching powder poured over us all day, and the people pouring the powder are saying: “You might want to learn to meditate. Then you wouldn’t scratch so much.” Meditation is a useful tool – but we actually need to stop the people who are pouring itching powder on us. We need to band together to take on the forces stealing our attention and take it back.
Illustration by Eric Chow.
This can sound a bit abstract – but I met people who were putting it into practice in many places. To give one example: there is strong scientific evidence that stress and exhaustion ruin your attention. Today, about 35% of workers feel they can never switch off their phones because their boss might email them at any time of day or night. In France, ordinary workers decided this was intolerable and pressured their government for change – so now, they have a legal “right to disconnect”. It’s simple. You have a right to defined work hours, and you have a right to not be contacted by your employer outside those hours. Companies that break the rules get huge fines. There are lots of potential collective changes like this that can restore part of our focus. We could, for example, force social media companies to abandon their current business model, which is specifically designed to invade our attention in order to keep us scrolling. There are alternative ways these sites could work – ones that would heal our attention instead of hacking it.
Some scientists say these worries about attention are a moral panic, comparable to the anxieties in the past about comic books or rap music, and that the evidence is shaky. Other scientists say the evidence is strong and these anxieties are like the early warnings about the obesity epidemic or the climate crisis in the 1970s. I think that given this uncertainty, we can’t wait for perfect evidence. We have to act based on a reasonable assessment of risk. If the people warning about the effects on our attention turn out to be wrong, and we still do what they suggest, what will be the cost? We will spend less time being harassed by our bosses, and we’ll be tracked and manipulated less by technology – along with lots of other improvements in our lives that are desirable in any case. But if they turn out to be right, and we don’t do what they say, what’s the cost? We will have – as the former Google engineer Tristan Harris told me – downgraded humanity, stripping us of our attention at the very time when we face big collective crises that require it more than ever.
But none of these changes will happen unless we fight for them. Just as the feminist movement reclaimed women’s right to their own bodies (and still has to fight for it today), I believe we now need an attention movement to reclaim our minds. I believe we need to act urgently, because this may be like the climate crisis, or the obesity crisis – the longer we wait, the harder it will get. The more our attention degrades, the harder it will be to summon the personal and political energy to take on the forces stealing our focus. The first step it requires is a shift in our consciousness. We need to stop blaming ourselves, or making only demands for tiny tweaks from our employers and from tech companies. We own our own minds – and together, we can take them back from the forces that are stealing them.
The above is an edited extract from Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention by Johann Hari, published by Bloomsbury on 6 January.
One of many great lunches with RC, Vesta, and Sherrie
Hey TD,
Last week marked the fourth anniversary of the passing of one Robert Charles Sproul, most commonly and affectionately known as RC. RC’s profound impact on my life cannot be gainsaid. Like a few others in my life who God has used to indelibly shape me, I miss him greatly.
I recently read this tribute of remembrance by the brilliant Scottish theologian and scholar, Sinclair Ferguson, in Tabletalk magazine. It’s a tremendous read that is not only helpful in gaining insight into who RC was, but is instructive for how to live life. Learn and enjoy! – Arthur
I could take you to the exact spot where I first heard R.C.’s name and to the place where we had our first conversation.
Forty years ago, at a conference I was speaking at in Scotland, a friend who had studied in the United States came up to me and asked, “Have you heard of R.C. Sproul? He’s said to be the best communicator of Reformed theology in the world.” I hadn’t, but I was immediately intrigued. What did R.C. stand for? The best communicator of Reformed theology? In the whole world? “This man,” I thought, “I would love to hear!” But for me as a twentysomething, visiting the United States and hearing R.C. seemed to be almost as unlikely as going to the moon. Little did I know. How good and kind God has been to me in the years in between. Not only did both of these unlikely things take place, but in due course, R.C. became to me a dear and esteemed friend and a beloved elder brother in Christ.
Several years were to pass before I heard R.C. speak and then had my first conversation with him and Vesta. It was on the steps of the First Baptist Church of Pensacola, Fla. We were both speaking at the old Pensacola Theological Institute, held at the McIlwain Memorial Church, in the early 1980s. R.C.’s presence had mightily increased the attendance. A much larger sanctuary had to be rented for the evening meetings at which he was preaching. Meanwhile, the other speakers had to give each of their daily addresses twice in the McIlwain Church. My first memories of his preaching are still with me. His powers of illustration were remarkable; the depth of conviction in his preaching was palpable; his ability to communicate complex philosophical ideas and trends and their effects with clarity was unique; and in addition—a trait I have always admired in his preaching—he never said too much.
Some readers of Tabletalk will remember that in those days, R.C. would sometimes make a point by transforming himself into the TV detective Lieutenant Columbo. He did this superbly well—the only thing missing was the raincoat. He described Columbo as “the greatest American detective.”
In the course of our first conversation, I rather naively offered a different detective for that accolade: “I thought Hiram Holliday was the greatest American detective.” I should explain that Hiram Holliday was a somewhat wimpy-looking newspaper proofreader who despite his appearance was in fact a great man of action with unexpected skills. He was the creation of the author Paul Gallico and had appeared on TV in the United States in the 1950s. A decade or two later, the series was run (in black and white) in the United Kingdom, and I had watched it as a youngster. He was in fact the only American detective I knew. “Hiram who?” R.C. responded in astonishment. Half an hour later, as he rose to speak, he told the crowded sanctuary that he needed to settle a difference of opinion he had with one of the other speakers. He asked the congregation how many of them had ever heard of a detective by the name of Hiram Holliday. My hand went up—and to her credit, so did Vesta’s! But I think we were in a minority of two. Case closed.His ability to communicate complex philosophical ideas and trends and their effects with clarity was unique.SHARE
The following morning, when I was called to answer my first question during the daily speakers’ Q&A session, I decided to take my life in my hands. “Before I respond to the question,” I said, echoing R.C.’s opening words from the previous evening, “I would like to try to settle the dispute that began last night over the identity of the greatest American detective. How many of you know the Christian name of Detective Holliday?” A sea of hands went up. “How many of you, then, know the Christian name of Lieutenant Columbo?” The blank response delighted me. And with victory in my grasp, I went on to the question. As I returned to my seat, R.C. barked affectionately at me, “You were up all night thinking about that?” I think he knew I had been willing to take a risk. Shortly afterward, to my amazement (and pleasure), I received an invitation to speak at a Ligonier conference in Canada with him. And so began a treasured friendship that lasted through four decades of shared conferences and many hours of conversation.
I suppose it was in the Q&A sessions at conferences, and perhaps only there, that most people saw that the men R.C. invited to preach alongside him were not only invited guests but friends and brothers. He led that fellowship of brothers, and we all reveled in it. I certainly feel this for myself. Preaching is demanding and can be very costly. Travel is wearying, and the glamour of long flights and hotel rooms soon grows old. But the compensations, largely hidden from public view, have been for me very substantial indeed—behind-the-scenes times of fellowship, shared concerns for the cause of Christ and for one another, and mutual affection, appreciation, and encouragement.
In more than one letter, John Calvin described times with close friends by writing (perhaps surprisingly), “We had a good laugh.” I could certainly say the same about times with R.C. He was the epitome of the whole-souled Christian. He took even his laughter seriously, and he excelled in it. Indeed, one memorable night when several of us were having dinner together, there was such joyful humor and side-splitting laughter that we had to call Steve Lawson’s brother Mark, a physician, to come over to the restaurant to make sure that R.C. had not seriously injured himself laughing. Perhaps men who can never laugh together are not likely to be able to cry together either. It was not so with R.C.
Many of R.C.’s qualities were obvious. There were the intellectual gifts that enabled him to grasp dense and difficult subjects; the powers of mind and expression that enabled him to articulate them with such clarity; and his sense of the penetration of the world of philosophy into the day-to-day world-and-life views expressed in contemporary culture. But all of these gifts were placed in tribute to God and served his passionate commitment to communicate the truth and power of the biblical gospel to ordinary people, because he understood that how we think shapes how we live. And behind that was the profound impact on his soul of the biblical truth that in so many ways was the melody line of his life’s work—the holiness of God. No one has done more to put the knowledge of the Holy One front and center in the thinking and living of Christians today, and for that I for one am deeply grateful to and for my friend.He was the epitome of the whole-souled Christian.SHARE
But I would like to mention several of R.C.’s special characteristics that perhaps one would need to have known him personally over a number of years to appreciate fully.
The first was that over the decades, I felt I saw him “grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” (2 Peter 3:18). Paul urged Timothy to minister in such a way that “all may see your progress” (1 Tim. 4:15). It is one of those hidden statements in the New Testament that is so easily (and perhaps all too readily) overlooked. But I am glad to be able to testify that I saw in R.C. a progress in Christlikeness and in the fruit of the Spirit. He was not only a great communicator; he was a man who had communion with Christ and therefore grew to be more like Him. The fruit of the Spirit—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control—were increasingly evident to me as he grew older.
In that context, I tasted one of those fruits in R.C.’s life in a way that reminded me of words written by Augustine in his Confessions. In one of Augustine’s soliloquies, he reflects on Ambrose the great preacher-bishop of Milan (under whose ministry Augustine eventually came to Christ). He notes that Ambrose left an indelible impression on his life. But the reason he gives is illuminating. It was not so much that the bishop was a great teacher (although he was one of the greatest)—for Augustine did not expect at first to discover truth in the church. Rather, he notes, what first impressed him was that Ambrose “was kind” to him. I felt that myself from R.C. And I stumbled on the same grace in his hidden deeds of kindness to others. For example, I was playing golf one day with Edmund Clowney, president of Westminster Theological Seminary (who, humanly speaking, was responsible for bringing me to the United States). “These Ping clubs,” he told me, “were given to me by R.C. Sproul.” R.C. had played with Dr. Clowney on one occasion and told him he would never be able to play decent golf with such bad equipment. And then he gave him a set of top-of-the-line golf clubs.
Another feature that endeared R.C. to me was that he was not only a public stage Christian teacher and apologist but an everyday witness to Christ. One of my favorite stories in this regard comes from a mutual friend who had experienced this firsthand. His initial encounter with R.C. was at the golf club where they both played. R.C. was sitting with a group of men. When the topic of the Christian faith came up, our friend commented that the Bible was a book full of contradictions. R.C. responded wisely, “Oh? Why don’t you look up several them, note them down, and come back and we can talk about them.” That was being wise as a serpent and harmless as a dove. Some years later, when our mutual friend told me this story, he was himself leading a regular Bible study on Romans with a considerable number of men.
There is space to mention only one further quality of grace that I saw the Lord work into R.C.’s life over the years. In many ways, I think it took both of us by surprise—so much so that I am not sure which one of us it surprised more. After a lifetime of teaching college and seminary students and providing a library of teaching materials through the Ligonier Study Center and then through Ligonier Ministries, R.C. became a church planter and the pastor of a local church. As the result of a series of providences, Saint Andrew’s Chapel was born and has flourished.
I have never forgotten his telling me years ago how much he loved being a pastor. It was as if he had been given a late Christmas present that turned out to be the best of all those he had received. He flourished in the ups and downs of ordinary congregational life; he rejoiced in growth; he was thrilled to be able to craft a liturgy that gave expression to his long-held passion to find ways of exalting God and exulting in God in worship; and he found the deepest satisfaction in the long-term, week-by-week, consecutive exposition of God’s Word to the eager congregations that he delighted to feed. Blessing for Saint Andrew’s was blessing for R.C. I appreciated and loved him the more for this, that the most fundamental ministry of all for him was serving among people he loved and who knew him not as the world-famous international speaker, theologian, and author that he was to others, but as the undershepherd of the flock of Jesus Christ, the Great Shepherd of the sheep—their own pastor, teacher, and friend.
Many years ago—I cannot now remember when or where—I found myself having dinner with a young Christian couple. The husband was keen to tell me the story of his pilgrimage to the Reformed faith. And then he related a marvelously vivid dream he had one night. In it, he had seen some of the great heroes of the faith coming over a hill toward him, like a mighty army ready to defend the truth and advance the gospel and the cause of Christ. As happens in the strange world of dreams, he was apparently able to recognize some of the great figures of the past, including Augustine and Calvin. And then, at the front of these great theologians, and leading them all toward him, he saw another figure he recognized—but this time from life, not from books. Yes, it was R.C. Sproul. For he was the one who had first introduced him to the wonders of the gospel and the privilege of belonging to the church in every age.
That young man’s experience has been repeated in hundreds, thousands, yes, tens of thousands of lives. Only the last day will make clear what blessings the Lord gave the church through R.C. and how many Christians were first introduced by him to the wonderful world of the story of the church, to the teachers of the ages, and ultimately to the endless riches of God’s Word.
I have been privileged to call R.C. Sproul a friend and father in the faith. I think I can echo Paul’s words and say that his friendship has encouraged me to “comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that [we] may be filled with all the fullness of God” (Eph. 3:18–19).
R.C. wrote a hymn, “Saints of Zion,” for the bicentenary of First Presbyterian Church in Columbia, S.C., where both Derek Thomas and I have served as ministers. We sang it especially when our elders greeted new members arrayed at the front of the church. Now I am especially reminded of its penultimate verse and refrain:
The church of God triumphant Shall in that final day Have all her sons and daughters Home from the well-fought fray.
Then come, O saints of Zion In sweet communion wed The bride awaits her Glory Lord Jesus Christ, her Head.
R.C. was never afraid of or shrank from the fray. He fought well, and his faith conquered. Now he beholds the Lord in His glory and is fully like Him. We do not begrudge our friend the fulfilment of his heart’s desire to behold the Holy One. Long ago, by faith, he “saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up” (Isa. 6:1) and pursued “the holiness without which no one will see the Lord” (Heb. 12:14). Now that faith has become sight and he sees the Holy One in all His infinite majesty. Those who loved him best will miss him most; we will all miss him. But we would not keep him back from that vision of God for which he lived and in which he has died. Soli Deo gloria!
Editor’s Note: This post was first published on December 15, 2017.
Dr. Sinclair B. Ferguson is a Ligonier Ministries teaching fellow and Chancellor’s Professor of Systematic Theology at Reformed Theological Seminary. He is author of numerous books, including Maturity.
During this Thanksgiving and Christmas season, I would like to ask … no … I would like to urge and plea with you to take your normal Thanksgiving and Christmas routines and up it, deepen it, transform it, … whatever you want to call it; but in some way, shape, or form, I would like to challenge you to make a concerted effort to give your thanks to our Lord with more than words.
Let Him receive your effusive words of thanks, for sure, but let Him receive thanks that are so thankful, that it results in some action that you joyfully and whole-heartedly do that honors Him and helps Him feel closer to YOU.
“… HAVE WE EVER GIVEN THOUGHT AS TO HOW CLOSE GOD FEELS TO US?”
I know that we always gauge the level of our relationship with God by how close we feel to the Lord, but have we ever given thought as to how close He feels to us? Let’s spend some extra effort this Thanksgiving and Christmas season drawing nearer to the Lord and giving Him the gift of time.
Some suggestions for this include:
Planning a time for a more special time with the Lord during your personal devotions/Bible study, preparing for and treating your time with Him like you do when you meet with someone special. Perhaps dress up for the occasion or meet with Him at a special place. Special things often happen at special places and events!
Write Him a letter of gratitude and appreciation (not the same as journaling)
Serve someone in a way you normally wouldn’t/don’t in Jesus’ Name – on His behalf, with His flavor, essence, generosity, and warmth.
Share of His goodness and beauty to friends/people who haven’t yet seen or beheld Him as good and beautiful yet.
Create something for Him that highlights and honors Him – poetry, music, art, crafts, etc.
Commit to extra diligent study and understanding of Him and His things – i.e. review TD material (messages, studies, blog essays/videos/podcasts), review SS material, read a book, listen to a message or teaching series, etc.
In this spirit, I offer you the 12-minute video above from one of my favorite Bible teachers, John Piper, on “Loving Jesus More Than Life.” Enjoy.
Total Devotion 
