Staying Focused on Your Calling in a World of Noise

But the concept of having a calling, that’s an issue in itself. How to treat that concept and what to do with noise when there’s noise all around us, and how to I had to stay focused on that work that we’re called to do, okay? And I’m a PowerPoint cowboy here, Google Slides cowboy to get things working. But as we begin, I want to begin in prayer. This is a god thing.

It’s not a me thing. I do these webinars so that we can just fellowship together in prayer and get some teaching to grow towards this goal. Abba Father, please be present with us during this teaching, and ultimately, may your word be spoken, may your truth be spoken, may the truth be spoken, and may the kingdom of God advance on earth. You shoot his name. So today’s teaching is called staying focused on your calling in a world of noise.

And I want to start out with kind of a hot topic or a buzzword or something called Pizza Gate. I don’t know if anybody has heard of Pizza Gate. There’s so much noise is in media since Pizza Gate. There’s been so many other things in media. But I just think it’s an interesting story.

It was a man who was convinced there was something bad happening in a pizza joint, that the children were being victimized in a very unfortunate way. And he took to arming himself and coming into a pizza parlor armed in order to rescue children, and he went to look for the basement. He heard through his connections on social media, through his listening to messages and to information, he heard that this pizza place was victimizing children, and he went to go into the basement. He was armed. He went in, he opened the door to the basement, and it was a broom closet.

There was no basement. He was arrested by the authorities, and as you see here, he was sentenced to four years in prison. I guess he’s out now, I don’t know. But some bad things happen here because one, to name all the bad things, people were endangered. People were going to a pizza place, and somebody showed up arms, so they were put in danger.

But also, this man made this choice, and he was away from his family for four years. He was in prison because he took the step. And I have my notes up here, and they kind of use them. This is an example of somebody who listened to noise and acted on the noise. And I’m asking what contingencies need to be in place so that people don’t hear things and act on them in a negative way?

Bringing negative food, bringing bad food. That’s what I want to talk to you about today. I want to be clear. You have a mission, okay? I have a mission.

I talk about my mission here in these webinars, not just so you can listen to me, but so you can get together about the mission, we can share the mission, we can move forward, and I can encourage you in your mission. And we can ask what is a mission? We’ll get to that, but we have an assignment. Each of us have some sort of assignment to do on this planet, in this life with what we have and what do we have? I’ll tell you about it in a minute.

We’re trying to conserve those things. The goal here is to conserve our time, our energy and our resources. That’s what we have. We have time, energy and resources to use towards this mission, towards this calling that we have. And it’s so easy to say I don’t have the money, I don’t have money, I don’t have the resources yet.

But you have time to a degree, we all have the same amount of time. You have energy to a degree, you have those things as well. And it’s our goal here. The noise is coming at us and it wants to take our time, energy and resources. And we need to conserve time, energy and resources so we can do the mission that we’re called to do.

What’s the mission? Well, if you’re here with me in these webinars, we’re talking about transformation, about seeing the world change. And specifically in my story, and what I’m going for is an indie music culture. I have a music project called Har Adonai, and I want to see the culture transform through making music, through doing that. What’s the problem though?

Reminder that we’re trying to create an environment of holiness with anticipation, which facilitates the holy spirit to come and transform that culture. Will the holy spirit do these things? We don’t know. We need to come in humility, but if we walk in holiness and create an environment, anticipation, we increase our chances of staying that transformation happen. What is the problem?

We’re full of noise. We’re in a world where we can’t focus. You want to get your work done and there’s noise pulling at you in every direction. And of course this has to do with social media. For the older people, it has to do with Facebook.

For the less older people, it has to do with Instagram. For the younger people, it has to do with Instagram and TikTok and Snapchat and so on and so forth. I’m sure there’s people who have problems with LinkedIn as well, but this is social media. There are other directions too. It should be pulled.

There’s noise coming at you and it’s hard to focus. And if we can’t focus, we’re not making progress. We can’t get our work done, we can’t do our mission. And if we’re not doing our mission, the world is not changing, at least not in the way that we want to see it changed. That’s the conversation today.

How do we see the world change? So right here in the beginning, I want to talk about a big list of things that I think need to be in place for all of us. And as I say that, I want to say that this is an ideal. It’s not something that I believe is easy for everyone just to have. It’s not an easy thing, but this is an ideal.

And I like Steven Covey Jr. Steven Covey, he said something about like, you could be good, you could even be great at what you do, and you can still be off track 90% of the time. The difference is that you know what being on track is and you know how to take steps to get there. So I want to see us here’s how we deal, here’s how we do our mission and how we deal with noise by installing rhythms into our lives. And I’m going to say the rhythms that I want to see in my life, that I pursue in my life, and I want to see in others.

And this is not an easy thing.

First of all, daily prayer, okay? A daily pursuit of connection with God. This also includes reading the word of God. Daily journaling. I don’t particularly like journaling.

I don’t like the idea of after a long day, pulling out a notebook and saying the right things. But it’s a practice that I just wanted to get into my life. And over the years, I found an easy way to rig it into my life. I asked myself a number of questions, and I have them on a template that I just copy, paste, and I just type out. I don’t write, I just type out an answer to these questions.

Weekly review. This I learned from goal setting. I learned this primarily from Michael Hyatt, and he was relaying this from David Allen. A very important to have a weekly tile reflection on your work and on your goals. A monthly journal review.

I’ve been doing this lately also because I’ve been journaling daily. I’ve been trying to find out the themes of my months after a whole month, a quarterly review, which I’ll get to why do we do a quarterly review? I’ll tell you why, because we do an annual review. Why we do an interview, because you do annual goal setting. Goal setting is very important.

And if there was one, this huge list, this big list, we really put a bold focus on daily prayer and annual goal setting. If you take everything away, I would just say keep the prayer, keep coming before God daily. Even if we’re worms and slugs that have no direction in life, as long as we come before the throne of God daily, that is a huge thing, but very basic to set goals and goals. I haven’t seen a lot of people doing that. I’ve seen various attitudes towards goal setting, including attitudes that you can’t set goals because you don’t know what’s going to happen and God will take you.

But I’m here to tell you that God is inviting us to set goals. He wants to partner with us in our goals.

Know your goals. Okay.

The world is full of noise. The world is trying to get you from doing your mission. I’m encouraging you to install rhythms to stay on mission, to stay on your goals, and to get clear. Here’s a verse that I love. And if you read this verse and you apply it to yourself and the relationship with others, it will really help you write the vision and make it plain on tablets that he may run who reads it.

Have the cookies here. I love the idea here that the guy is acknowledging format. I don’t know exactly what the format of a tablet was back in those days, but it was something that somebody could run with. So what was the size of the tablet? I don’t know.

It’s tempting to say it was a piece of paper. In Europe we have a four. In the US, we have letter size. It’s tempting to say it was like a letter size piece of paper or eight more paper, which is basically the size of an iPad or any other tablet device. It’s tempting to say that I don’t know what the size was.

But God here is talking about format. I think it’s very interesting. And if you know your calling and you know your mission in life, can you get it onto a tablet so he may run? Who reads it? There’s two things god’s acknowledging.

He’s acknowledging format and is acknowledging that somebody has to do something with it. You have to run. If you tell someone your vision and if you can’t get clear, you can’t do your elevator pitch in 5 seconds, that person is going to run. They need to know what you’re saying and get all of their lives because they have other things to do. So this can apply itself to social media today on somebody’s feed.

They need to know what you’re calling is. Or in Instagram stories, 15 2nd videos, five second videos, three second videos. Can you say who you are and make it clear to people? Why is it so important? It’s important that you know your mission and it’s important that you communicate your mission to others.

So you’re clearing your relationships with people.

Here’s a reminder. We’re partnered with God and I keep coming back to this verse. I love it. Out of the ground, the Lord God forbid every beast of the field and every bird of the air and brought them to Adam to see what he would call them. Genesis 219.

Listen again to see what he would call them. God did not tell Adam this is the name of the animals. He created a horse. And then he stopped and he said, wait a minute, Adam. Now you give names to the animals.

Why? It says here to see what Adam would do. God is putting himself in a place of anticipation to see what Adam would do with what he has stewardship over. So God is putting himself in a place of anticipation to see what are you going to do with your time, your resources and your energy? God has placed himself in anticipation to see what you will do.

We’re partnered with God, Donald Miller, a famous author who came up with the StoryBrand framework, that quote for him a lot. He reminds us, everybody, that our brains are just trying to survive. When we get bombarded with noise from social media, from media, from elsewhere, our brain is trying to say, is this going to help me or is this not going to help me? Because my brain needs to survive. I need my brain so that I could serve my wife, my children, my community, so I can do my mission, so I can conserve time, energy and resources.

Okay, it’s tempting to say that we’re all idiots and we need everything given to us in 5 seconds because we’re all idiots, but that’s not what this is about. These formats developed, the screens and the Instagram stories and reels and TikTok, all this stuff developed because our brains are adapting to a new reality, a new future, and we have to survive.

It’s tempting to say that the phones are making us stupid and back in the day things were better this and that. But I like what Ray Edwards says. The famous copywriter. He says it’s neutral our phones and our social media networks. Well, let’s start with the devices themselves.

The technology itself is neutral. It’s not good or bad. I’ve seen people use social media in today’s formats for good and for bad people. We can lead on the bad and see all the bad that’s happening. But bad happened before.

Bad messages get out before. In the days of carrier pigeons and people nailing letters on buildings and things like that. That message has got out. There people yelling in the crowd, creating blood loss and pogroms and all kinds of things like that. But the technology itself is neutral.

The question is, how do we survive and thrive and focus on our mission in an environment like that? So let’s look at the bad guys. Let’s go to the extreme and see what’s an extreme example of succumbing to noise. What are we up against? And tragically, pornography is an issue.

Someone who engages in pornography using today’s technology, every moment that person is engaging in pornography is a moment where that person is not working on their calling and not making the world a better place. Unfortunately, they’re making the world a worse place. Okay, but we’re not going to stop there. We have gaming now. Gaming?

Is gaming good? Is gaming bad? Excellent question. I don’t know the answer. But it does take up time.

It creates immersive worlds that take up our time. And we have to ask ourselves, does our time belong in these worlds. Some people make a living through esports and provide for their families through gaming. But I’m just saying that it is something that will take your time and it’s got little cousin there called gambling, online gambling which is not I don’t see a line here, okay, I’m not a gambling person. I don’t see the value of gambling but that’s another thing that can suck your time.

Okay? But what about the other guys? The things that are more innocent, so to speak when we talk to social media again, I just said social media is neutral, it’s not bad. But the problem here is that it takes our time in bits, okay? Our target sucked up in bits through stuff like microcontent which is a new buzzword for all these 15-second videos and five second videos on TikTok and Instagram.

And our minds get used to this dopamine hit of just all these things. Is it good? Is it bad? I’m not here to tell you that this is bad. I hope it can be used for good.

But it is something that we need to know is our time going to go to this or not? Is this helping me do my mission or not? And I like to throw a few other ones like binge watching. I mean binge watching is not something it gets said so much that it’s like a part of the culture. It’s not necessarily something very good.

We’re not supposed to watch TV excessively. I think I first discovered it when the show 24 came out 20 years ago because it was 24 episodes and it was like real time. And so you get together with your friends and you binge watch 24 once a year, once a season. That’s great. People are binge watching everything now and that’s a big time waster.

And YouTube rabbit holes which I don’t think anybody is safe with YouTube rabbit holes. The YouTube algorithm can have us in the chat. Let me know if you suffer from YouTube rabbit holes because they can just suck you in. But you have to ask yourself I list all these things. Are we doing these things?

Do we want the first thing is absolutely negative and there’s no value. But are we doing these things, our time, energy and resources going to these things and are we working on our mission? A lot of what’s getting stirred up is famous term that we hear a lot today is FOMO. Fear of missing out. Fear of missing out.

Are we getting drawn to social media because we’re afraid of something happened? And how do we combat this? We combat this by knowing our calling, by knowing our goals, by being clear about it.

Now there’s a powerful connection with social media and people because social media is one thing if it’s just like watching TV, it’s like people you don’t know doing stuff but it’s another thing when it’s people you do know you get sucked in to the noise of family and friends. And there is a verse from the Bible if you don’t take anything from this teaching away, but this verse, the section from the Bible, that would be very good for me, because this next week for the Bible changed my life, and I want to focus on it. Okay, this is from Micah 75 to seven. It says, do not trust in a friend. Do not put your confidence in a companion.

Guard the doors of your mouth from her who lies in your bosom for son dishonors father daughter rises against her mother. Daughter in law rises against her mother in law. A man’s enemies are the men in his own household. Therefore, I will look to the Lord, wait for the God of my salvation. My God will hear me.

That’s a doozy. And I want to hone in on one sentence here in a different translation. A man’s enemies are the members of his own household.

When I realized that in my own home there were enemies, my life changed. Now, let me be very clear. I love my family. I myself can be one of those enemies. And I think the problem is that we bring to the people around us the things that are meant to be brought to God.

We come home with our problems, with our emotions, and we dump them on people like our siblings and our wives and our spouses and our family. People, they can’t solve our problems. They love us.

It’s like you see animals doing this. They fight and they bite each other, not because they hate each other, but because they’re in conflict. And these are the people around them. They’re hungry, they’re angry, they’re frustrating. And we’re like the snarling dogs because we’re trying to deal with the hurt and the fallen nature of this world.

And God is saying, hey, I’m right here. Bring to me your problems. Don’t bring your problems to social media. Don’t bring your problems to Facebook. Don’t bring your problems to WhatsApp.

And don’t even bring your problems to your own family members. Bring them to me.

Of course, there’s a place to talk about your problems with others, especially when you’re working on communication and you’re trying to solve problems together. Of course. But you need to know that you can very easily turn the members of your family into enemies, and you can very easily be an enemy to the own members of your household by not caring to take your problems to God.

Change my life.

I want to encourage you to start your day with truth. We talked about the rhythms that need to be in place. And when I mentioned daily prayer, that includes reading the word of God.

I see people, unfortunately, in my life. Sometimes kids. I see some kids, they wake up and the first thing they do is they go to Instagram. And I hate seeing that it makes me so sad. I see this one in movies where there’s, like, the trader character, the character that trades stocks, the finance guy, and the first thing they do when they wake up is they look to see how their thoughts were doing.

I hate that because people are basing their day on something that is not true, on something that the world says about them. If I base my day, if I start my day with what the stock market says about me, I put my value in the hands of the financial institutions. Okay? If I wait to start my day to see what Instagram says about me. How Instagram treats me.

That I’m starting a day on a false idea. I believe strongly that we need to look at the Word of God like we’re looking at a mirror. So we can start the day with truth. What the Word of God says about each of us. God’s love for us.

God’s plan for us. That’s truth. We need to take that truth, and from that place of truth face the world, face social media, face are the financial institutions and Instagram and so on and so forth. Okay? So now I want to bring this to a summary.

I’m describing the world of noise, the world of noise that we face. And I want to bring it to a summary. What’s the cost of you succumbing to the noise, giving into the noise? The cost is for all of us. We can’t focus.

We’re not making progress, and the world is not changing. That requires you to believe in who you are and what you are called to do.

There’s a verse in the Bible, and it’s a mistake to think that that verse applies to only one person. It is famously attributed to one person, to Esther, but it applies to all of us. Who knows if you were called the Kingdom for such a time as this, for such a time that everybody here who’s listening was called to the kingdom of God for such a time of this. And you have a mission, and God is waiting to see what you’re going to do. He put himself in a place, anticipation.

I said, what are you going to do with the time and the resources and the energy that you have? Are you going to let those things go to the noise, to the social media? And even when it’s good, even when we’re neutral?

So I talked about putting rhythms in your life, okay? Talked about daily prayer, daily journaling, weekly review, monthly journal review, quarterly review, annual review, annual goal setting. But I’m going to go a little bit broader here and talk about three things to do. And one thing you really need is revelations. In order to figure out your calling, you need to have some sort of spiritual moment with God.

I’ve talked about this before. I refer a lot to the idea of the Spirit quest that serve made American tribes. People go out on a spirit quest and they find something and inspires them to how they want to live their life. There’s something to be said about that. But I want to be extremely clear.

I don’t want anything in my life, any kind of guidance, any kind of spiritual guidance that does not come from God Himself, from His Word, or from Yeshua. But the idea of searching for truth outside of what you see, outside of what you know, there’s something special about that, about going to a place of stillness and listening to get some revelation. Now I say that to you because I’m hoping that you’ve already had that revelation that, you know, I talked in a previous webinar about my origin story. I had a revelation that I could change the world when I was twelve years old. And that revelation is something that’s helped me grow in my calling.

If you haven’t had that revelation, seek revelation. Seek it by getting out of the noise. That you know, that’s why we do prayer and fasting, because we’re changing up our environment. We’re going to quiet places to let God speak to us, to get revelation. But once we have revelation, things that get a little bit more practical.

Reflection and all those things I listed earlier daily prayer, daily journaling, weekly review, especially monthly journal review, quarterly reviews and annual reviews, annual goal setting. Again, also important, reflecting on where we are in that relationship to that revelation. Am I following the calling that I got? The revelation is where things are really spiritual and out there, and the reflection is where it starts getting practical and it gets the most practical. When we finally start setting goals, we start saying, okay, I believe I had a revelation.

I believe that I have in me the power to change the world. So how am I going to set goals accordingly? And I do this every year. I set seven to ten goals every year. Do I achieve them all?

I don’t think I’ve ever achieved them all. I achieved some, I change others, you learn a lot. But I know that I can set goals because God wants to see what I’m going to do, to see what names I’m going to give the animals, to see what I’m going to do with the time, energy and resources he has given to me. And so I want to encourage you to see those rhythms in your own life. And I want each of you to change the world.

And what does that mean? To change the world for good, for bad? Well, essentially we are agents of the advancement of God’s kingdom on earth. That’s what I mean when I say trying to change the world, to see God’s kingdom advancing on earth, but he chooses to do it through us. That is what I wanted to talk about.

I open the conversation to questions because I like having a conversation. I like doing questions. I’ll remind you that I have a music project called Har Adonai (Mountain of the Lord), and I’m inviting you to give visit this link call to my net donate, and you can give so you can keep doing these teachings and I can keep doing my podcast, Beauty Truth, which just got started again. See some two of my podcasts out there. And if you want to find that stuff, you can visit haradonai.net/partner and you can see the podcast and the webinars.

And this is all just a credit conversation to kind of build the foundation so I can start releasing music into this. Because you need a lot of resources to make music, and I need their help. They’re people who give their time and their resources, who give money so that I can do this. Thank you. And I need it.

And so that’s what I’m asking for now as well. Any questions? I’m going to do my ten second thing. I’m going to do 10 seconds for questions, and then we’re going to wrap it up.

All right? Thank you for being with me. May Lord bless you. I encourage you to know your calling and to know how to face the noise that is in this world. Have an awesome, awesome day.