BROADCASTS.com

WINNING WITH THE WORD “Winning with the Word” is a weekly blog that will help you to be a winner in life by applying God’s principles for living the abundant life as found in the Bible, God’s manual for life. AN INVITATION TO YOU: To subscribe to this blog, click here.  To subscribe to this podcast, click here. If this blog and podcast have blessed you, please encourage your family and friends to subscribe as well. Thank you! Be sure to check out our Featured Book of the Week at the end of this post. ______________________________________ t  Do you prefer listening instead of reading? Then click below to listen to today’s blog post on podcast. https://media.blubrry.com/winning_with_the_word/content.blubrry.com/winning_with_the_word/WWW_07_05_2021_The_Dangers_of_Distraction.mp3 ______________________________________ Hello and Happy Day! This is Dr. MaryAnn Diorio, novelist and life coach, welcoming you to another episode of Winning with the Word. Today is Monday, July 5, 2021, and this is Episode #22 of Series 2021. This episode is titled “The Dangers of Distraction". _______________________________ Never in my 75 years of life have I seen people so distracted as they are today. Wherever I turn, people's noses are in their cell phones, often to their own danger. Recently, our town removed some tree limbs from a tree on the street behind our house. The limbs were hanging low and posing an obstacle to pedestrians. As I watched the workmen cut down branches and throw them into a dumpster, a woman approached, staring at her cell phone. She was totally oblivious to what was going on a few feet ahead of her. Had one of the workmen not warned her of falling tree limbs, she could have been struck and seriously injured, if not killed. All because she wasn't paying attention but had her focus on her cell phone, not on her surroundings. Focusing on the wrong thing in the natural can harm us, even to the point of natural death. But focusing on the wrong thing in the supernatural can harm us even more for all eternity. Satan uses many tactics to steer our focus away from the things of God. One of the most subtle is distraction. What is distraction? The Online Dictionary defines distraction as "a thing that prevents someone from giving full attention to something else." The word "distraction" comes from two Latin words: dis, meaning apart or away from, and trahere, meaning to drag. In the Greek language, the word distraction means to drag all around, especially mentally. And that is exactly what a distraction does: it drags us around mentally from thought to thought or activity to activity, leaving us feeling out of control and at the mercy of whatever is going on around us.  So distraction signifies a dragging apart or a dragging away from one's assigned task. In the case of a believer--of a Christ-Follower--a distraction is something that takes us away from God's assigned task for us at that particular moment in time.  One of the chief dangers of distraction, then, is that it drags us away from God's will. And to be dragged away from God's will can only end up in harm, whether spiritual, physical, or both. When we are distracted from the important things of life--like our relationship with God and our relationship with others--we suffer loss. Moreover, we also open ourselves up to attacks from Satan that hinder us from our God-given purpose in life. The word distraction appears only a few times in the Bible. Let's take a look at those occurrences and the people who are involved in them. A well-known example of the subject of distraction occurs in Luke 10: 40 NKJV, where Scripture describes Martha: "But Martha was distracted with much serving…" (Emphasis mine). We all know from this story that Martha was running around, trying to put a meal on the table for Jesus, her family, and the other people present. But Jesus told Martha that she was anxious for many things and that her sister Mary had ch...