We all need the ability to focus. It’s not just about focusing on getting things done and doing, but God has this call on our lives, the call to be more like Christ.

In the midst of the challenges in our day or the struggles that we face, it’s the focus that helps us to remain centered in our relationship with the Lord. When we’re centered in our relationship with Christ, then God is able to do more work in our hearts.

Our passage today is about distraction.

Nehemiah is distracted in three ways: opportunities, criticism, and fear. I think those are things that we face in our lives. Sometimes we don’t even know what’s going on with the distractions. We just kind of go with them and we don’t realize what they are doing.

We can admire Nehemiah as a leader that we can emulate because of his ability to say NO. “No, I’m not going to do this,” He’s has pondered and realized that the distractions aren’t helpful and he takes a stand to remain steadfast in what God had for prepared for him to do.

What does Spiritual Protection look like? When is it needed?
Wow, what an amazing  practical teaching about this subject for each of us. We tend to either take these things for granted or we don’t even understand them. If we focus on “the doing” continually, we might miss the truth that we need to believe in order to gain the spiritual benefits from God’s protection.

As Pastor Scott further explained with his diagram below “The problem, though, with all the doing and action and activity that we often look at, is that we can in some ways become so focused on the activity and the action and the doing that we do that we miss out on the believing that we must have as well. If we focus too much on the application without the depth, the belief, then we end up in a place where we almost become humanist. I need to do this myself. I need to protect myself and so on. That’s why at the very center of my circle I put the blood of Christ. It is because of the blood of Jesus Christ that we have protection. “