The Cure For Busyness - Colossians 3:1-4 - Clint Leavitt 9.3.23

1. Attention Economy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_economy#:~:text=Attention%20economics%20is%20an%20approach,Davenport%20and%20John%20C 2. Interview with Sean Parker: https://www.axios.com/2017/12/15/sean-parker-unloads-on-facebook-god-only-knows-what-its-doing-to-our-childrens-brains-1513306792 3. Tristan Harris biography: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tristan_Harris 4. Phantom Vibration Syndrome: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3677878/ 5. Losing to Goldfish in attention spans: https://www.wyzowl.com/human-attention-span/ 6. “The largest, most standardized, most centralized form of attention control in human history.” -James Williams, tech ethicist at Oxford University 7. "I Used To Be A Human Being," by Andrew Sullivan 8. “You need to die and be raised. You need to come out altogether from the shadowy powers that operate within the present creation, doomed as it is to decay and perish. You need to belong instead to God’s new world, the new creation that is being brought in to replace the old. The truly human life you seek — the life of a genuine, glad holiness that runs right through the personality — is to be found in that new world.” -N.T. Wright, "Colossians For Everyone" 9. “Never in so short a time has any other set of ideas, religious, political, or economic, without aid of physical force or of social or cultural prestige, achieved so commanding a position in such an important culture.” -Kenneth Scott Latourette, "A History of the Expansion of Christianity" 10. “Paul is certainly not pleading for an other-worldliness in which the Christian withdraws himself from all the work and activities of this world and does nothing but contemplate eternity….From now on the Christian will view everything against the background of eternity and no longer live as if this world was all that mattered. This will obviously give him a new set of values. Things which the world thought important, he will no longer worry about. Ambitions which dominated the world will be powerless to touch him. He will go on using the things of the world but he will use them in a new way. He will, for instance, set giving above getting, serving above ruling, forgiving above avenging. The Christian's standard of values will be God's not men's.” -William Barclay, "Commentary on Colossians" 11. “The first and most basic thing we can and must do is to keep God before our minds. This is the fundamental secret of caring for our souls. Our part in thus “practicing the presence of God” is to direct and redirect our minds constantly to Him. In the early time of our “practicing” we may well be challenged by our burdensome habits of dwelling on things less than God. But these are habits–not the law of gravity–and can be broken. A new, grace-filled habit will replace the former ones as we take intentional steps toward keeping God before us. Soon our minds will return to God as the needle of a compass constantly returns to the north. If God is the great longing of our souls, He will become the pole star of our inward beings.” -Dallas Willard, "The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus’ Essential Teachings on Discipleship" 12. “The real problem of humanity is that we have stone-age emotions and brains, medieval institutions, and God-like technology.” -E.O. Wilson