People today are too scattered. They are too busy. Most people are trying to manage several different things at the same time. Our society has become so fast with so many things needing our attention that we often loose sight of the really important things. Even children suffer from our scatter-brained way of living. How many of us were ever diagnosed with things like “Attention Deficit Disorder”? Or how many of our childhood friends do we ever remember being put on medications designed to modify behavior, like so many children are today? These are not new “disorders” that have just popped up out of nowhere in the past 20 years or so. They are the result of a lack of focus. Children are not taught how to focus but are allowed to do whatever the young mind comes up with. It’s normal for a child’s mind to turn from one thing to the next very rapidly; he’s learning everything for the first time. So what do we expect when we don’t train that active young mind to focus its attention on a given point? Chaotic, unfocused thinking! The society in which we live is very proficient in causing us to shift our focus from what is truly important to things that are purely temporal in nature. However, we know, as Christians, that we are not to focus on the material but on the spiritual (1 Peter 2:11-12). What are we to do about such divided attention and misplaced priorities? The

In Luke 24:13-27, we read of two disciples of Christ on their way to Emmaus. Luke tells us this was the first day of the week (24:1, 13) and that it was the same day that the tomb in which Jesus had been laid following his death was found to be empty (24:3, 13). As they walked, they discussed these events. Along the way, they encountered what they supposed to be a stranger and discussed these matters with him. It is obvious from the response Jesus gave to their account that they expressed an amount of doubt in the testimony of the women that Jesus had risen from the grave and was alive. Notice what they said in verse 21, “we were hoping that it was He who was going to redeem Israel” [emphasis mine, NF]. They spoke of their hope in the past tense, “were,” indicating that those hopes had died on the cross with Jesus. And even though we cannot hear the manner in which they relayed what the women at the tomb had told them, the doubt in their voices must have been evident for Jesus rebuked them for a lack of faith. This rebuke was given because of a lack of faith in “all that the prophets have spoken.” These men should have had no confusion in these matters for the prophets of old had given them great detail concerning these matters. And so, “beginning at Moses and all the prophets, He expounded to them in all the Scriptures