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The Distraction Strategy
Chaos does not need to defeat you. It only needs to keep your attention.
Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life.
– Proverbs 4:23
The word translated in Proverbs 4:23 for “vigilance” means a guard post, a watch station. It’s often used as a military command, telling us to keep watch over our heart the way a soldier keeps watch over a gate. Why? Because from the heart flows the springs of life.
In Hebrew thought, the heart isn’t considered to be primarily the seat of emotion the way we use the word in English. It is considered the seat of our mind, our will, our whole inner life. When the heart is referenced, it’s referring to the place where we think, make decisions, anchor ourselves. The heart refers to the control center. And the word translated as “springs” describes what comes from this. Everything that flows outward from you into the world originates there. Your words. Your decisions. Your ability to stay rooted in Shalom. Your response to chaos. All of it comes from the same source. That’s why the gate matters so much.
The strategy of chaos isn’t to attack us from outside but to gain access to the inside: to our mind, heart, and soul. It doesn’t just want to affect our circumstances. It wants access to the control center. Because if it gets inside, everything that flows out of us carries chaos instead of Shalom.
Decades ago, I took physiology classes in college and I was amazed to learn how a virus is able to spread so rapidly through the body. Once a virus enters the body, it hijacks host cells and essentially turns healthy cells into virus-producing factories. It uses our own cells against us. Chaos, once it gets inside, works the same way. It doesn’t just occupy space. It replicates. Social media, political outrage, endless entertainment, constant noise – these aren’t neutral. They are ways that chaos gets inside, gets control, and begins to propagate.
Digging Deeper
Yeshua’s parable of the sower (Matthew 13) includes the sobering category of seed that falls among thorns: “This is the one who hears the word, but the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches choke the word, and it proves unfruitful.” The Greek word translated as “cares” here means anxious distraction, or a divided mind. Notice that the Word of God isn’t destroyed. It’s choked. Chaos doesn’t need to kill or even counter the Word in you. It just needs to consume our attention until the Word gets pushed to the outer edges of our lives.
In Deuteronomy 6:4-6, the Shema is given:
‘Hear, O Israel: YHWH our God, YHWH is one. You shall love YHWH your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.’
– Deuteronomy 6:4-6
The command is to love the Father with all that you are, because a divided mind is vulnerable. It has already begun to drift. Attention scattered across many things is far easier to pull away from the Father than attention that is anchored to Him.
Chaos is not powerful enough to take you from YHWH. But it can take your attention from YHWH, which has the same effect.
Romans 12:2 gave us the counter-strategy: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind.” The Greek word for “conformed” means pressed into a mold, shaped from outside in. The chaos of the world is always pressing from the outside in. Transformation takes place from the inside out. And every moment of every day, one of them is winning in our lives.
The Chaos Didn’t Get Stronger. He Just Forgot Shalom
Key texts: Matthew 14:22-33
The incident of Peter walking on water is a great example of distraction causing us to lose focus on the power of YHWH. While his eyes were on Yeshua he was standing so completely in Shalom that the laws of physics had been circumvented. Peter was walking on water.
Then he noticed the wind. He didn’t trip. He didn’t lose his faith. He simply redirected his attention from the source of Shalom to the evidence of chaos. And the moment his attention shifted, he began to sink.
The chaos didn’t get stronger, it just got Peter’s attention.
Yeshua reached out immediately and spoke to him, calling him one of little faith and asking him why he doubted. Notice that he didn’t say Peter was without faith, just that his faith was small. Faith was there, but Peter got distracted by chaos. The question of why he doubted wasn’t a condemnation, it was a diagnosis of what had happened.
Chaos got his attention and he looked away from his source of Shalom.
Day 4 Takeaway
Chaos never needed to defeat you. It only needed your attention. Every time you redirect your attention back to the Father, you have already won the battle.
Are We Agents of Shalom or Agents of Chaos?
So why am I telling you all of this and why do I feel it is so important that you understand? Because whether we realize it or not, we have all functioned as agents of chaos rather than agents of Shalom at one point or another.
Remember when I told you about the virus that gets into a host cell and then reformats that cell so that it starts replicating more of the virus? That’s what we have been doing for chaos. It gets inside us and steals our focus. When our focus is stolen, something shifts. We stop being agents of the Father and start being agents of the adversary, regardless of our intent. Every moment we spend amplifying chaos instead of countering it with Shalom, we are working for the wrong side.
Amid all of this growing chaos, I’ve spent an awful lot of time searching Scriptures and asking the Father to show me how I can best represent Him and serve as His agent in this world. This study is made up of what He has shown me.
Chaos is the weapon being used against us. Chaos is also the wound, and that wound is easy to spot. It shows up as irritability, anxiety, stress, depression, inability to focus, overwhelm, hopelessness. You have felt it. We all have. Shalom, the greater weapon, is the answer in both cases.
Jesus left us His peace. That peace that allowed him to sleep in the boat while the disciples panicked and the storm raged around them. It was that peace that people were hungry for when they came to hear Him speak, to see Him perform miracles, to instinctively know that just touching the hem of his garment would make them whole again. The people we have read about are people who learned how to reside in, tap into, and sustain themselves by the constant strength of YHWH and His wholeness of peace, which is Shalom.
In Philippians 4:5-7, when Paul tells us that YHWH is at hand and near to us, he is calling us out of the chaos and back into contact with the Father. Do not be anxious about anything. Instead, remain in constant contact with YHWH. The result of that constant seeking – through prayer, supplication, and thanksgiving – is a connection to His Shalom, a peace so complete that it surpasses our understanding, standing guard over our hearts and our minds.
The Lord is at hand; do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
– Philippians 4:5-7
Why is the world so full of chaos? Because the adversary knows that a distracted believer is an ineffective one. If you keep your eyes on the noise, you’ll forget the Kingdom you have been called to represent.
How, then, do we represent the Father and His eternal Kingdom to the world before us? The answer is the one thing most desired by anyone living in the midst of chaos, the cure for hearts that are troubled and afraid: with a wholeness of peace from our God, the source of Shalom.
As disciples of Yeshua, we represent Him by bringing His Shalom into every room we enter and every place we have a voice.
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