Devotion in Motion: Are you too busy for God?

11 Lest Satan should take advantage of us; for we are not ignorant of his devices.

2 Corinthians 2:11 (NKJV)

By Bro. John L. Cash

A dear friend of mine spent part of his life as a missionary in a very primitive country. The village that he lived in abounded with witch doctors and demon-possessions, curses and pagan ceremonies. In that foreign land, he often saw open manifestations of the power of Satan—things like a person would see in the movie “The Exorcist.”

Here at home, we don’t commonly see many dramatic outbursts from the occult. When I asked my friend why that is, he gave a very interesting answer. “The devil doesn’t have to work openly and to try to terrify people in the United States. He has so many OTHER weapons he can use.”

I firmly believe that fact. For almost 30 years I’ve been telling everyone, “In America, the devil doesn’t have to try to scare folks. He doesn’t even have to make people bad—the devil just finds ways to make people busy.” You see, whenever people become busy (even if they’re busy doing good things) they are apt to become too busy to remember God.

And in the past 5 years, I’ve seen a change take place in Satan’s tactics. Now the Evil One doesn’t even have to trip people up by making them busy. He only needs to make sure that folks are always distracted by a multitude of petty details and meaningless tasks.

There’s a lot of talk lately about how much more we get done by “multi-tasking.” But I’m not sure that multi-tasking is something the Bible teaches us to strive for. Jesus always had time for people, and He always gave them His undivided attention. So if you find that your whole life consists of always doing several things at once, you’re probably trying to do more things than the Lord ever intended for you to do.

O Lord, help us to do good with all our might.

Help us never to be too busy to think of You.

Help us to keep our minds on Your business–

That we can always do Your work in this world

By always keeping “first things first.”

Dr. John L. Cash is the “Country Preacher Dad.” He was raised in Stuttgart, Arkansas, and has spent the last 28 years being a country preacher in the piney woods five miles south of the little town of Hickory, Mississippi. (On week days has a desk-job at a public school, and until recently taught Latin on closed-circuit-television.) He and his lovely wife, Susan, live in the parsonage next door to the Antioch Christian Church (where the folks are hoping that Tropical Storm Karen isn’t anything like her cousin Hurricane Katrina.) Their kids include Spencer (age 22), his wife Madeline (age 22), and Seth (age 19).