Undivided
1 Corinthians 7:32-35 - "I want you to be free from anxieties. The unmarried man is anxious about the things of the Lord, how to please the Lord. But the married man is anxious about worldly things, how to please his wife, and his interests are divided. And the unmarried or betrothed woman is anxious about the things of the Lord, how to be holy in body and spirit. But the married woman is anxious about worldly things, how to please her husband. I say this for your own benefit, not to lay any restraint upon you, but to promote good order and to secure your undivided devotion to the Lord."
In November of 2017, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings stood on a conference stage and named his company’s real competition. He wasn’t worried about HBO or Amazon. When a great show hooks a viewer late at night, he explained, “We actually compete with sleep…and we’re winning.” Some of the largest companies on earth now employ brilliant engineers and designers to win slivers of human attention. Glance by glance and scroll by scroll. Sleep is officially a competitor. So is dinner. So, presumably, is prayer. Whatever else our age has failed to settle, it has settled this: human attention is one of the most scarce resources on earth.
Paul understood the spiritual stakes of divided attention nearly 2,000 years earlier. Read his paragraph again and notice what he says he is actually after. He names it in the final line: “to secure your undivided devotion to the Lord.” The Greek beneath that phrase means “without distraction.” The New Testament gives that word family a face in Luke 10. Martha was “distracted with much serving” while her sister sat at Jesus’ feet. Martha was pulled in every direction, while Mary was settled before the Lord. Then Paul pairs undivided with devotion, a word meaning constant attendance or devoted service. Its Greek roots carry the picture of someone seated nearby, present, attentive, and ready. Taken together, Paul’s words give us a picture of undivided devotion: a chair pulled close to Christ and an attention that stays there.
That doesn’t make marriage unspiritual. Caring for your husband or wife is holy covenant work. Paul is just identifying the cost carried by every good commitment: it makes a real claim upon a finite life. But Paul refuses to rope anyone, single or married, into a ranking. He is doing what we could call the mathematics of attention. Marriage multiplies legitimate cares.
A husband is commanded to spend costly, Christlike concern on his wife, and children multiply that concern. None of it is sin, and every bit of it divides attention. The single believer holds a rarer currency: attention that can be spent whole. That is the advantage and strategic edge our single brothers and sisters carry into the Kingdom’s work. The war of this age is a war for attention, and the Lord wants ours undivided.
I'll tell you where that war is hardest for me, and it may surprise you: Sunday morning. It’s the hazard of being a lead pastor. In the one room where my attention should be whole, it scatters worst. I’m going over the sermon in my head, checking the sound, tracking who is hurting, who I need to talk to, who I forgot to email, all while the church is singing to Jesus. I also know where my attention comes back together: an empty chair in a quiet place with an open Bible. Every one of us has both places, one that shreds our attention and one that mends it, and most of us spend far more of our lives in the first.
But here’s the good news under all of it. Christ’s attention toward His people has never once divided. Right now He is seated beside the Father praying for us, His gaze steady while ours flickers. He “always lives to make intercession” for those He saves (Hebrews 7:25). We are loved with undivided attention, and love like that should pull our attention back. Even responding to Him is His work, because the Spirit in us keeps gathering our scattered minds back to one face. That is why the psalmist asked for focus as a gift: “unite my heart to fear your name” (Psalm 86:11). One heart, aimed at one God.
Today: Find five undistracted minutes where you put the phone in another room and sit beside the Lord in awe and reverence, with nothing to produce.
Prayer: “Father, this loud world scatters my attention a hundred ways a day. Gather my heart back into one piece before You. Teach me to sit at Your feet the way Mary did, unhurried and unworried. Thank You that Your eyes never leave me and help mine learn to stay fixed on You. In Jesus’ name, Amen.”
-PK