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This week's eNote
July 14, 2025 by pastor chip freed
On Sunday, we began our new teaching series which will run for the rest of the summer entitled: The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry. Living continually hurried and distracted lives can have major detriments to our spiritual life and growth. Researcher, Michael Zigarelli, conducted an “Obstacles to Growth Survey” of over twenty thousand Christians across the globe and discovered that busyness was the number one distraction from the spiritual life. Here is what he reported after his findings:
“It may be the case that
(1) Christians are assimilating to a culture of busyness, hurry and overload, which leads to
(2) God becoming more marginalized in their lives, which leads to
(3) a deteriorating relationship with God, which leads to
(4) Christians becoming even more vulnerable to adopting secular assumptions about how to live, which leads to
(5) more conformity to a culture of busyness, hurry and overload. And then the cycle begins again.” (Michael Zigarelli, “Distracted from God: A 5 Year Worldwide Study,” emphasis mine).
I heard an expression years ago that stated, “If you and God aren’t as close as you used to be, who moved?” When hurry and busyness envelop our lives, it moves us away from God, prayer and spiritual disciplines. Hurry and busyness edge God out. As we kicked off this series on Sunday, I quoted John Ortberg, a Christian teacher and spiritual director, who wrote: “We are so used to spiritually mediocre days – days lived in irritation and fear and self-preoccupation and frenzy –
that we throw our lives away in a hurry.”
That idea of settling for “spiritually mediocre days” haunts me. Most of us don’t settle for mediocrity in our careers, our parenting, our health & fitness, or even our leisure activities. For example, regular golfers spend 3 to 5 days per week at the golf range practicing for 30 minutes to an hour on average (do I pray that much weekly?!); and best estimates is that $1 billion dollars is spent annually in the U.S. on golf lessons. Listen, I love to golf and fish, and I’m not trying to be judgmental; but the question is: As followers of Jesus are we content to settle for “spiritually mediocre days?” I don’t think that was the goal of the adventure that Jesus was inviting us to when he said, “Follow me.”
I hope you will journey with us through this teaching series as we seek to untangle ourselves from lives of “busyness, hurry and overload.”
If you would like to get this book and read along on your own or in your small group from July 13th through Labor Day weekend as we preach and teach from its themes, you can purchase it here.
