Dharius Daniels - It's Just a Distraction

I want you to tell someone around you the topic of tonight’s teaching. Tell them to keep calm; it’s just a distraction. Now, everyone in the room who already feels and senses the prophetic implications of that word, just give God praise like He’s about to speak to you. Keep calm; I know it’s frightening, but it’s just a distraction. Church, one of the most important and probably overlooked assets in the arsenal of the believer is the asset of attention. Everybody say attention. Attention is actually a weapon that we must use to win our future. You’re in a fight for your future, and whether or not you win is predicated on, and impacted by, our ability to know how to use our attention. You see, attention— you may not know this—is currency. Attention is like cash; it’s a medium of exchange. This is why we say specifically here in America, «Are you paying attention?» because are you all following me? Attention is what we exchange for our future, so whatever has our attention has our future. Okay, I’ll put it this way: whatever we look at today determines what tomorrow will look like. Somebody say attention. We have ability, and we are called, commissioned, and taught by the Scriptures to properly steward and use our ability. That’s important, but what are we doing with our attention? I know we have anointing, which is the empowering and enabling presence of the Holy Spirit, and that’s important for our future, but what are we doing with our attention? Because you’re getting what you’re paying for. What is our attention buying us? In church, I’m afraid that we have underemphasized the significance and the importance of attention. We aren’t aware of how consequential it actually is, but the enemy is aware of this reality, and this is why the enemy aggressively attempts to acquire your attention. Did you hear what I said? The enemy destroys our future by capturing our attention; he wants attention. What would have happened in the Garden of Eden if Adam and Eve had just ignored the serpent? Y’all aren’t talking to me. They couldn’t prevent him from showing up where they were, but they could dictate and determine how much attention they showed him. What would Jesus have been, and what would his future have looked like, if he had paid attention to the enemy when he was being tempted in the wilderness? Our future depends on what we learn to ignore. Did you hear what I said? Now, all of us know how to ignore things; we just often have not been trained, conditioned, and taught what things to ignore. Because the enemy is after our attention, the demonic shows up in distractions. He attempts to destroy our tomorrow by giving us distractions today. This is why one of the names for the enemy in Scripture— you’ve heard this—is Beelzebub. You know what that means? Lord of the Flies. Flies won’t kill you, but they’ll distract you. A fly can’t wreck our car, but a fly can distract us to the degree that we wreck the car ourselves. And as soon as you get focused on your future, as soon as you fix your eyes on the next chapter of God’s story for your life, you better believe that at work or at home, somebody say distractions. Come on, say it again: distractions. Distractions destroy futures. However, there’s good news: distractions are only distracting if we let them. We win with distractions when we refuse to give them what they’re after—our attention. But we don’t have to give it to them. This man in the text that we just read is an example of what I’m attempting to articulate. This book is called Nehemiah because it’s about the ministry, specifically one part of the ministry, of a Jewish man named Nehemiah. Everybody, don’t miss this: Nehemiah actually worked and served in what we call the marketplace. He was not a priest; he didn’t work in the temple; he didn’t work in the church; he was not in full-time ministry. He was, like Joseph, working in the marketplace. He was actually a cupbearer to a Persian king. Are you following me? I said, are you following me? All right, because everybody in this room has a mission field, and for most of us, the mission field is the marketplace. Everybody in Christianity is trying to get into full-time ministry, not knowing you’re already in full-time ministry because where light is needed is in dark places. The agenda— I’m not going to get into all this, but God’s agenda for Israel could not have been accomplished if there were not people in strategic places who had developed strategic relationships that turned into strategic partnerships that helped underwrite what God was attempting to do. Okay, let me see if I could—so what happens is Nehemiah, who is serving a Persian king, has a conversation with another Jew to get insight on the status of the Jewish people. They had been in Babylonian captivity and exile. They were released and freed to live with some degree of autonomy in their return to Jerusalem. So, here Nehemiah is in the palace asking somebody else, «How are my people doing?» They said, «Man, they’re broken; they’re disoriented; they’re all over the place. The walls that surrounded Jerusalem are being burned down, and the city needs to be rebuilt.» And the Bible says, although Nehemiah was positioned in the palatial palaces of Persia, his heart broke. This is so powerful, right? This is so powerful because here he is personally blessed, yet at the same time personally burdened. There’s a roof over.