The following is an excerpt from our daily devotional Fellowship With the Father, written by IFA contributing writer Remco Brommet.

Hurry goes hand in hand with busyness. The busier we are, the more hurried, and harried, we become. And down the dominoes fall – we have overcrowded schedules, we hurry, we get tired, but our minds stay busy. We can’t sleep, we get more tired, and we burn out or get sick.

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Have you taken your place on the wall?

Busyness is the tyranny of the urgent. And tyranny it is. That’s why people have coined the word “busy” as an acronym: Being Under Satan’s Yoke.

If the devil can’t keep you from praying, he’ll keep you busy, so you won’t have time. Busyness constantly demands your attention and keeps you from focusing a healthy portion of it on God

Here is Scripture verse that speaks to that:

“Behold, as the eyes of servants look to the hand of their master…so our eyes look to the Lord our God, till He has mercy on us.” Psalm 123:2

Coming, being still, listening, delighting, praying and blessing are all about where we put our attention. And for us to give God the firstfruits of our attention and time, we must slow down and simplify.

A number of years ago a pastor in Southern California lamented to me: “We pastor a generation of distracted Christians.” Too busy to get involved in church other than attending Sunday morning services, too busy to pray, too busy to listen to God. And that was before smart phones. It is estimated that today, the average American has more than 2,700 interactions with his cellphone per day!

Busyness is not the same as productivity. In fact, studies have shown that our productivity stops at a certain number of hours each day. The busier we get, and we try to “multitask,” the less we produce both in quality and quantity.

But wait, there’s more! New research has found that all this non-stop preoccupation with tasks, visual imagery, data and non-stop information is severely undermining our mind’s capability for abstract thinking, like meditating on Scripture and prayer.

That is alarming.

Time for a reset. Time for an intentional slam on the breaks and evaluate how much time we spend on our phones, running around, “multi-tasking” and evaluating how much of that we really need to do and how much of it is distracting us from communing with God. In other words, what is consuming our attention and energy?

To simplify means to eliminate unnecessary busyness from our lives in whatever form it comes. Just like busyness goes hand in hand with hurry, simplifying goes hand in hand with slowing down. In some ways, the nationwide emphasis on self-quarantine has already helped us with that.

Today’s Prayer Assignment

I invite you to go before the Lord today and ask the Holy Spirit to shine His light on your calendar and your daily activities and show you how to simplify your life, so Jesus is uppermost in your attention, thoughts, affections and time. He wants your attention, so I guarantee you, He will help.

Download this entire series in a PDF format.

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Author Remco Brommet is a pastor, spiritual growth teacher, and prayer leader with over 40 years’ experience in Europe, Southeast Asia, Africa, and the US. Born and raised in the Netherlands and pastoring his first church in Amsterdam, he moved to the US in 1986. He and his wife Jennifer currently live north of Atlanta, GA When not writing books, he blogs and assists his wife as content developer and prayer coordinator for True Identity Ministries. Jennifer and Remco are passionate about bringing people into a deeper relationship with Christ. Photo Credit: zbindere/Getty Images Signature.