Weapons of mass distraction

Have you ever been distracted when you try to pray? I think we all have at one time or other. At those times, what can we do? What should we do?

The problem

In his fictional book The Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis has the senior demon, Screwtape, tell his nephew, the junior demon Wormwood, “You can weaken his prayers by diverting his attention.”¹ That’s it! All Satan has to do is keep us from concentrating our attention on God and His will for our lives.

You could say that in Satan’s arsenal are “weapons of mass distraction.”² This is a play on the term “weapons of mass destruction,” popularized by George H. W. Bush during the Gulf War in 1990. Satan does not have to defeat us in all-out war, per se. All he needs to do is keep us busy thinking about anything else so we don’t spend the time with God in prayer that we need.

Choosing right priorities

The Bible shows us many instances where people were called to choose the right thing to do. It is a matter of priorities. The story of Jesus’s visit to His friends Martha and Mary (Luke 10:38–42) is a good example. Martha was distracted by her preparations for entertaining Jesus. While hospitality is a good thing, Jesus said that “Mary has chosen the good part” (v. 42). Why? Because she had chosen spending time with Jesus over trying to serve Him.

There are two other situations I would like us to look at, one in the Old Testament and the other in the New. In Exodus 18, Moses was being harried by his position of being the sole mediator between God and the people. His father-in-law, Jethro, helped him see where his priorities lay.

In Acts 6, the apostles had come to an impasse when it came to complaints from the Greek-speaking Christians regarding their widows getting enough food. The Twelve had to come up with a plan that not only solved the problem but also enabled them to do what they felt was most important.

The solution

Just as Martha’s priority should have been the same as Mary’s—putting Jesus first—Moses and the apostles had to choose what was most important for them. We can learn from what they decided.

Moses’s father-in-law recommended three things. Moses’s priorities were to pray (“be the people’s representative before God,” Ex. 18:19), “teach them the statutes and the laws” (v. 20), and delegate authority to qualified men (v. 21). He did those things, and everyone was much better off because of it.

The apostles chose seven deacons (Acts 6:3, 5) because “it is not desirable for us to neglect the word of God in order to serve tables” (v. 2). Instead, their priority was to “devote ourselves to prayer and to the ministry of the word” (v. 4). When first things are put first, everything else falls into place.

It’s our turn now

What does this mean for us? As we see with Moses and the apostles, we have responsibilities that we must fulfill. That does not mean we have to do everything by ourselves. If our schedule is so full that we can’t take time to pray, then something is wrong. Are there things we can delegate to others? There might even be things better left to others (though we might not want to admit it). Though serving tables is honorable, as ministers of the Word, our first priority should be to pray.

1. C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1975), 29.
2. Daniel Henderson, Defying Gravity (Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2010), 59.
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