[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hey, thanks so much for listening to this message. My name is Jason and I'm one of the ministers here at the Madison Church of Christ. It's our hope and prayer that the teaching you hear today will bless your life and draw you closer to God. If you're ever in the Madison area, we'd love for you to stop by and study the Bible with us on Sundays at 5pm or Wednesdays at 7pm if you have questions about the Bible or want to know more about the Madison Church, you can find us
[email protected] be sure to subscribe to this podcast as well as our Sermons podcast. Madison Church of Christ Sermons. Thanks again for stopping by. I hope this study is a blessing to you.
I spoke to a youth group this summer in a very rural church setting and I asked the teenagers, what's your average screen time?
I'm 40. All right. So oldish. Depending on your age.
As to how old I am, I still think that single digits is reasonable.
There was a young man that said he was on his phone for on average, which means some days less, but some days more. On average, 15 hours a day.
To which I replied, whoa.
And I wasn't the only one. Thankfully, the other old guy over 40 that was in the class said the same thing, but this kid was like, yeah, I mean, I'm on it a lot. No, no, no. Like that's like time and a half. You're making a lot of money if that's a full time job.
15 hours a day, you're in school for like 7. So we're up to 22. Do you sleep? It's like, well, no, not really.
So this is an interesting spread. I intended to put another one on here for us to see what our demographic was tonight to see how our ages have changed from week one.
But I would imagine that the older you get, the lower that number probably is. That's the general trend, which makes a lot of sense.
When we talk about attention and we talk about our devices, particularly mobile devices, they are designed to grab our attention and they are designed to maintain and hold our attention.
Could you do me a favor real quick? Look right over there at that sign. Hey, look over there.
Thank you, Tanner.
Sometimes people guide our attention or things guide our attention. Sometimes crazy people scream and they grab our attention.
There's a difference in those.
There's an intent and a will that we're a part of. Not a will, Waldron, but a will. What we willingly give our attention to.
I haven't heard a lot of Bible classes I haven't heard a lot of sermons in my lifetime on the idea of my attention.
And until this study I really didn't put a lot of thought to my attention thinking about what I think about and how often I think about it. But in the digital age, as much as anytime, it's imperative that we not only have these conversations, but we think deeply about what we think about. I've got a video here. This is from Common Sense Media. Many of you probably are familiar with the platform commonsensemedia.org, they do a lot of reviews. That's how I first found out about them. For movies and TV shows, parents are very much in tune. They're not necessarily Christian based, but they're very pro family based. And I wanted to share with you just briefly a study that they came out with earlier this year.
[00:03:24] Speaker B: We've just released a new report about the media habits of kids in the US age 0 to 8. And the numbers might surprise you. Here are some of the key findings. First, kids eight and younger now spend about two and a half hours a day in front of screens. Second, nearly one in three kids use AI for learning. But interestingly, 55% of parents said it had no impact on their child's understanding of school material. Third, by the age of two, almost 40% of kids have their own tablet. And by age four, that number goes up to 58%. Next, by age eight, one in four kids has their own cell phone and most of those are Internet connected smartphones. And finally, gaming is bigger than ever, with time spent playing on devices up 65% since our last report in 2020. To read the full report, click the link in our bio.
[00:04:12] Speaker A: The stats for teenagers are a little bit different, but as you might imagine, the stats for teenagers are close to 98% of all teenagers have now not just a phone but a smartphone.
The difference in a teenager's cognitive development and 4 year old's cognitive development is pretty substantial. This is getting older. Now this particular graph, this goes up to the year 2018.
There's another one that I had that goes to 2021 that I guess I didn't replace it with. It follows the same trend.
You see a little dip in Covid, but then skyrockets after Covid.
The overall trends are the same is that the youngest generations among us are impacted very differently emotionally than the older generations among us. In fact, that bottom line, that green one for those that are aged 50 and over, it stays about the same. That's almost a straight line all the way through 2020 into 2021 during COVID they were at the greatest risk physically from the virus, but emotionally they were fine, very resilient. Those that are younger were physically at less risk of the devastating effects of the virus, but emotionally they were devastated.
But what's interesting about this is that it started way before 2020.
That climb begins right in 2012. That, that darker line there in 2012. That's the first time in America where more than 50% of teenagers had access to a smartphone by 2014, I believe it is. There's more than a million apps available on both Google and Apple app stores.
We see a completely different childhood. From 2010 to 2015 is when Jonathan Haidt would identify the changing of American childhood where we moved from the play based childhood to the phone based childhood. And there are some significant ramifications of that. Most of these have been very well documented over the last two years. The last time we did this class in fall of 23, his book had not come out yet.
There was a question in that class of okay, the sky is falling, we get it, we're concerned, how do we change? Like this seems to be like institutional level, government level, like this is epidemic.
And I didn't have a great answer that night.
The one thing I did say was whatever we do, all of us have to do some kind of minimum together.
And I think that was right.
Jonathan Haidt made it sound much better.
He's a professor from nyu, He's a published author, he's done a ton of research. He put forth four new norms that are very doable, not just from a religious standpoint. In fact, he's not religious. He's an atheist, maybe agnostic. But in his book, he makes a very strong case for the value of religion in society. It's a really interesting read to hear someone who doesn't believe in it but sees the value of it.
And he says, no smartphones before 13, no social media before 13, no smartphone before 16. More play outside unsupervised as a child, and no phones in schools. Well, over the last two years, we've seen a ripple effect, particularly from his book. More and more school systems are taking phones out of schools. Just this year in the state of Alabama, they're. The governor signed a bill that made that the case.
We now understand the landscape better than we did five, 10, 15 years ago. The playbook of big technology, particularly when it comes to social media. Zuckerberg and company is very similar to the playbook of big tobacco. The very first Surgeon General warning, a report about the dangers of cigarettes and tobacco and how they cause cancer and early death came out in 1964.
You don't see a whole lot of public response change until probably the 90s. I've mentioned before, there was a commercial of a lady that was older who was probably older than she looked, but she grabbed the little device and she put it up to her throat in the commercial and said, every morning I wake up and you know, at first as a kid, you kind of laugh and then she keeps talking like, oh, oh, that is seared in my memory.
That's when opinions changed. You didn't have to ask for smoking and non smoking anymore in a restaurant because it was all non smoking.
Well, what we had was about 30 years of big tobacco marketing that was really, really successful. Camel Cigarettes created a logo that's an animated camel. That's not for the adults in the room, that's for young people.
They also would do things like go to hospitals and they would go gather where the surgeons and where the doctors were gathered in the break room. And as they're handing out these cartons of Camel cigarettes, they would say, Dr. Joe, what's your favorite brand of cigarettes? Of course Dr. Joe would say Camel.
They'd be at these health conventions passing out free cigarettes and then quoting those medical professionals saying it's the number one preferred cigarette of this doctor.
We now laugh at that. That's ironic. That's tragic because it's also dishonest.
Well, that's kind of what we have in this age of social media, the age, the digital age that we're in. Things are not generally as they seem.
I want to look at a few, a few different quotes before we get into scripture tonight to kind of set the stage of the idea of distraction. There's a fellow by the name of Tristan Harris who was an ethicist for Google. He helped craft ethics policies for Google and several years ago he put out a really long presentation on the Google message board internally in the company. It blew up like wildfire. Basically he got to a point where he didn't feel like his voice carried weight at Google. They weren't really making the changes that he felt ethically they needed to make. And so he left Google and created, co founded the center for Humane technology. Center for Humanetech.org is their website. They're the folks that are behind the documentary back in early 2020 of the social dilemma where they got a lot of really high ranking architects and engineers from places like Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp really really powerful people to then go on camera and to talk about the harms and the dangers and the real thing that's going on behind the scenes.
When I was a kid growing up, my grandmother worked at an office. And when we would go to that office in their break room, there was this little. This little machine in their meeting room. And it was a slot machine. It was a toy, but I loved it. You know, we go in. I don't know if y' all remember that or not, but I didn't ask permission to tell this story, so I'm gonna tell it. So I would go in there as a kid, and I remember pulling the lever, and the first one would come up, second would come up, and third one come up. And when they got really close, I got two out of three. And I thought, well, now I'm getting good at this. That was the mentality was, I can get good at this game of complete chance.
And that's kind of the way the gambling industry has tried to pose that.
And it's interesting. They don't have all three numbers that stop at the same time, do they?
Okay, I've already confessed. You can confess, too. You know how a slot machine works? One number comes up and stops, and then the second one and then the third one. And there's a reason for that I never thought to think about, like, the way it actually interacts with me. It's because in my brain, which is really powerful, not because it's mine, but because that's the way God designed all of us. My brain is trying to predict what's going to happen next. The brain loves novelty. And if there's three objects in a row and we want them to be symmetrical, we want them to be the same, then our brain is trying to process at a high rate when that's going to happen. And so the one. The first one pops up, and it's a four. Oh, man, I need the next one to be a four. And the next one pops up. So I get a little, little hit of dopamine that's released in my brain.
Dopamine does not bring pleasure. Dopamine promises pleasure. It's the pursuit of pleasure, which makes it so unbelievably addictive. It's also what makes it lose that power, that excitement, that thrill, because you have to continue to chase more and more and more and more.
So when it comes up one at a time, that builds in that dopamine receptive process in your brain, and that trains you to anticipate, to get excited about the next number. We are distracted by design. When you go and you refresh your phone, what is the motion that you use to do to do that?
You pull down and you let go. Right? It's the exact same motion. You pull down and you let go on a slot machine. That's by design. That's known addictive behaviors that will. We call it addiction, they call it engagement.
Last week, we talked about the phrase the medium is the message. And how it's not just the content of our devices, but the devices themselves pose some inherent dangers that we need to be aware of.
Herbert Simon is actually the one who coined the term the.
The attention economy, which means that our attention is the commodity that's being bought and sold and traded all the time. Google Ads, you can you buy those based off of how long people look at an ad. The super bowl, you pay massive amounts of money based off of how long you want people to look at your product.
Attention is valuable.
A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, is what Herbert Simon said. He wrote this in 1971. A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.
What are some of the spiritual consequences of this idea?
Oh, you just made eye contact. Now you got to. I'll say something for you then. I appreciate that, man. Just my buddy.
[00:13:43] Speaker B: I think it's.
[00:13:45] Speaker A: Whenever I reach a question while studying the Bible, I'm immediately like, I'm gonna go Google it and let somebody tell me what the conclusion is instead of being in the word, looking at reference cross references and trying to figure it out for myself, maybe. Okay. All right. Swimweight to me, sounds a lot like postmodernism, where there is no, like, defined truth. Like, everything could be true because there's so much information, there's so many possibilities.
And so a lot of people gave up on truth.
Okay.
So many options that you have access now to hear everybody's voice spiritually. Like, you don't really focus on that anymore because of just another sound. And yeah, what he's saying is that truth gets lost in all of the voices. We talked a couple weeks ago about if everyone in this room was given a megaphone that would amplify everyone's voice, that would increase the information that could be spoken into the. Does that make it more clear to hear and understand?
No, not necessarily. The fact that we have access to more from. In fact, two years ago, I remember David Tennyson came up to me afterwards and made a comment. He said, you know, I've got access to way more information and data now than I ever did. In college, but I'm a much less capable researcher. I can't remember exactly how he worded it, but a less capable researcher. Now, because it's so easy to access so much information, it's harder to think critically. It's harder to think deeply.
Access to excess does not yield holiness inherently. The fact that we can Google anything and everything doesn't inherently by itself mean that we have access directly to the truth. We have to still be people who think and who think below the surface of this life.
There are several other consequences we get to. I want to move on to Chris Hayes. He's host of a show on msnbc, but he's got a great book called the Siren's Call.
And in this he talks about the siren's call for our attention. He says in competitive attention markets, which he would be in, amusement will outcompete information and spectacle will out compete arguments. The more easily something attracts our attention, the lower its cognitive load, the less friction there is for us to be drawn into it. Information is abundant, but attention is scarce. This is why information is cheap and attention is expensive.
Amusement will out compete information and spectacle will out compete arguments.
I would agree.
There's a fellow that wrote a couple of different books and we mentioned him last week. He's got one particular technology that he was just not a fan of at all. And so he wrote extensively and lectured extensively about it. And this is me pontificating because this. His name just slipped my mind. Anyway, what he said was the television is basically another way of saying the statement. The television is what is going to change and potentially ruin America.
Because as we move from written and spoken dialogue, we move from a written correspondence to television.
That's different from moving from written to radio. Radio you still have to listen and you still have to create images. There's still an active engagement with it. With television. There's a lot more passive experience that takes place.
And so the information that's put out there is going to have to move faster. The information that's put out there is going to have to be more engaging, more entertaining than it is informative. Look at all of the cable news networks.
You get two minute segments, you get a picture, usually get a video, you get something running across the screen. You got stimulation here and here and here and here and here.
Over and over again. They have to manufacture ways to keep our attention. Once again, look over here.
I'm trying to draw your attention to something they're trying to draw and keep. It's very easy to get someone's Attention. You can stand up half naked in a restaurant and you will get people's attention.
It will be difficult to keep that attention over time because your presence will become normalized.
We saw this actually in Fox News, in the lawsuit that happened a couple of years ago where it was found out that they did some things that weren't completely honest In a time when their ratings dipped, they went to another level of falsehood to kind of drum up viewership. CNN's guilty of the same thing. MSNBC is guilty. They're all guilty of that. Because they're not necessarily news and information.
They're entertainment based in their existence on tv.
The way the television changed thing, it made us completely visual in how we engage one another, not one and how we engage at scale.
And that inherently the actual device itself is the message. It changes how we interpret and how we understand information.
Spiritually speaking, we have to be very intentional with our attention. We have to think about what we think about. We have to think about what we give our attention to. The things that we look at, the things that we think about, the things that we listen to on a regular basis, as we said before, are constantly shaping our brains. The prefrontal cortex in our brain is the part of our brain that is most responsible for decision making, for wisdom, basically, for discerning, thinking through. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? It doesn't fully develop till our mid 20s.
So up until about 25, you're still learning how to think.
And what we've done over the last 15 years is we put these massive megaphone devices in the hands of children who are still learning how to think.
And everyone has been deputized. Everyone has been given a megaphone. We've democratized everything with the Internet. And so all of those thoughts, all of those ideas, all of those philosophies, all of the visual stimulation, all of the ways and patterns of thinking that are controlled by companies and algorithms have been the main teacher and influence in their life without most of us really knowing it. And this goes back to the 90s.
It actually started with the TV.
But the TV pales in comparison to the personal device, to a phone that now curates to my desires.
What I see on my feed is based off of what I've told it. I like to look at, how long I look at things, what I share, what I like, what I dislike, what I swipe left or right on. Everything is being cataloged. And there's this digital footprint on a server somewhere that has all of my identification and not Just my address.
Not the information about me, but my desires, what I give my attention to.
So it's very important for us to think very deeply about our attention. What grabs our attention, we're not always in control of. If you're driving down the highway and all of a sudden you hear that siren that's grabbing your attention, and that's by design as well, that's a good thing.
It's up to us what we give our attention to. You're in a restaurant and you're on a nice date with somebody and you hear a loud clang. Everybody's going to look and see what waiter just lost like a week's worth of wages because they dropped the whole tray.
But after a few seconds, you're going back to your conversation.
There are different things in life that will get our attention. We are in control of what keeps our attention. And we have to be very intentional about that. In Jonathan Haidt's book, he referenced or quoted Sherry Turkle and this line of love.
We are forever elsewhere.
We are forever elsewhere. And this is true. This is a report that came out earlier this year, a new study that examines how parental fubbing behavior fuels cell phone addiction in junior high school students. This was a study done and published in China, where parents are.
That word is a combination of phone and snubbing.
So when their kids are talking to us, there was a. It was a Will Ferrell reel that really illustrated this effectively and inappropriately. So it did not make it into the slideshow, but where he's on his phone and his kids are saying different stuff, he's, uh, huh. Oh, that's great, sweetheart. Yeah. And then one daughter says, I'm actually gonna go climb on a tall building in Antarctica. See you, dad. I'm leaving now. Okay. Good for you, sweetheart. Just not paying attention.
Well, he is, but not paying attention to her or his other kids or his wife.
How many times before bedtime do our kids see this part of our face and not our eyes? There's a lot of research out there that shows how from age 0 to 2, eye contact. Even when a child can't fully discern and see exactly what they're looking at, eye contact still matters.
There's a difference in attention and observation.
I spoke recently at a.
At a retreat for some faculty and there was a lady who had a medical situation that happened in the middle of my talk. I've never experienced that before.
At first I thought she was reacting to something I said. And so I just kind of looked around and tried not to Acknowledge and then realized quite quickly. At the same time, the folks around her realized what had happened and they reacted.
She did not need people to observe her.
She needed people to give her attention, to give her their attention and to respond, which they did so beautifully.
When it comes to spiritual things in life, we don't need a God that just observes us from afar. We need his attention.
How many people do you know that never got the right attention from their parents growing up, that as an adult, continue to seek that attention in some really unhealthy ways?
We'll go more into depth later in the quarter on this, but there are three things that sociologists have identified, three questions that every adolescent is seeking the answers to. Who am I? Where do I belong? What is my purpose? Identity, community and purpose.
Adolescence is a really difficult time for a lot of people.
And if you don't have voices, if you don't have people that love you, that are in actual proximity of you helping you to answer those questions. We used to grow up on the family farm.
We had close proximity to grandparents, aunts and uncles, neighbors whom we knew because when their cows got out, we helped them put them back in the fence and vice versa. Like, our community was smaller, our world was smaller, and there's a lot of value to that.
But now what's happened as 98% of teenagers in America have a smartphone and access to the Internet 24, 7, 2 and 3 in the morning, they're developing that strong bond.
They're answering or asking those deep, life altering questions to things like ChatGPT or at best, their friends who are also asking the same questions.
And so we've democratized the deepest answers of life to the Internet without knowing it. Because it's convenient, because it's entertaining, because it occupies us. I don't know. I'm not asking for a show of hands, but my hand would be up. How many of us struggle to sit through a stoplight without glancing at our phones, giving our attention to a little rectangular device? Because there's always something there. What color is the little notification that you get when you get a message or something?
Usually.
What's that?
It's red. What color is the stop sign?
Also red. Why is that?
Any color theory, people in the house, any graphic designers. That's a real thing. Red has a sense of urgency. If our stop signs were blue and green, we'd have a lot more accidents. Because blue and green is like, calm and like, intelligent, but not, hey, stop.
Your phone says, hey, stop. Come look at me. Hey, look at me. Hey, look at me. Has anybody ever had a friend that's kind of like that? Like, you're walking around hanging out and they're like, hey, hey, how does this look? Hey, what about me? Hey, what about me? Hey, what about me? Hey, what about me? Hey, what about me? That's obnoxious.
Paul had a girl follow him around for a little while and eventually, like, all right, get out, demon. You know, like, cast her out. Seems like a very frustrating moment. I get that. I have four children. I deeply understand that. Like, it's saying, I need your attention. I want your attention. Give me your attention. Give me your attention. Give me your attention. This device over and over. And I love my children more than my phone. Just to clarify. But. But that's what our phone is doing. It's trying to grab our attention.
I was talking with a lady today at the library, of all places, and my phone, like, seven times within just two or three minutes, man. Sometimes group chats are the worst because it's just constantly trying. And I'm studying for a class to talk about attention, and my phone is saying, hey, man, look at me. Hey, look at me. Hey, look at me.
The world in which we live is not the world in which we have to choose to mimic. We can put guardrails in.
We mentioned before. We can drive an hour and a half north and we can find a community of people that have largely shunned.
They have shown technology. William James wrote in 1890 that taking possession by the mind in clear and vivid form, one out of what seems several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought.
This is his definition of attention. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others.
Another way of saying this is that attention is a choice.
When you focus in on something. Have you ever, like, sometimes I put my headphones on. It's just like gray noise.
And there's something about that. That man. Like, there's a spotlight on whatever I look at. And that means everything else is dark.
When we give our attention to something, that's that voluntary attention. This is the way Chris Hayes would define it. He says voluntary attention is the intentional choosing of focus. The spotlight of the mind being pointed towards something while keeping everything outside its glow in relative dark. It's a prioritizing. It's saying, this has my devotion in this moment. It has my attention, my focus, my cognitive presence and my physical presence. Involuntary attention is monitoring our environment for threats and disruptions, pushing and pulling away from conscious focus, sometimes expanding to grab our mind fully. One interesting observation of this is called the cocktail party effect. And that's where imagine if you're at a party, you're talking with someone and you're interested in what they're saying, but all of a sudden you hear faintly out of this side of your ear, you hear Jason Helton. And so now you're okay. Oh, yeah, all right, that's cool.
You're dividing your attention. You're passively now listening to the person that you are right here present with while actively trying to figure out the context. Why would your name be mentioned? There's interesting studies around that, that we are always sensitive to hearing our personal name.
We are wired for social attention, which he describes as the fact that we can be the object of others attention and the inescapable truth that being the object of others attention is the foundational experience of having human bonds. Newborn babies need to be the object of another human's attention to survive.
If you think about it, that's actually very different from most animals.
Mama has a whole bunch of birds in the nest and we're talking like a week and they are booted out whether they can fly or not, right? That's a steep learning curve.
Other animals, it's like this, maybe a little bit of nourishment, but pretty soon they're out on their own. But for humans, it's years before they leave us, if ever. Right? It's a very different. Again, it's fine, it's okay. It's a very different experience.
We are wired differently. Social attention can be a very good thing. Social attention on social media, however, can be manipulated and exploited.
This is how technology takes what God has designed and it manipulates it. Joe Carter said this television's propensity to prioritize entertainment value over content depth has contributed to a cultural shift where religious ideas are increasingly judged by their ability to entertain and hold the audience's attention rather than by their spiritual truth or theological depth.
We have to discern, we have to discern through the lens of the Gospel, through the lens of the Scriptures to understand whether we're being entertained or we're being shaped and formed in the image of Jesus.
The way we interact and the way our brains work is important to understand in Genesis chapter 16. We had a great, great class on this a couple quarters ago that Andrew led in Genesis 16:13. Hagar has gone through some very traumatic events.
She has a child who was fathered by Abraham who then sent them on their way.
And she is headed back, she is downtrodden, she is absolutely broken. She sets her baby down in the shade. And she sits there and God comes to her.
He said, so she Hagar called on the name of the Lord, who then spoke to her and said, she said, you are a God of seeing.
God saw her. God took notice of her.
God knew her situation.
This was that social attention that she desperately needed. She then gives God a name, which is unusual. It's usually the other way around. Elroy, you are a God of seeing. God sees us. God gives us the attention that we need. The challenge is that we don't always think that that's enough.
The Sermon on the Mount. You can take almost every word in the Sermon on the Mount and you can look at Jesus saying, the kingdom of God is this.
You have heard this from the old law, but I'm telling you what the law was pointing to was this. God has given you everything that you need.
God is giving you attention, Israel, over and over and over again. Even though you're that child that runs away, that does the thing they're not supposed to, he gives you all of his attention. And yet in 1st Samuel 8, they still come and they say, give us a king. We want a king.
Like everybody else.
The father's attention is not enough. You can go back to the garden.
They had everything.
They literally had everything they needed to the point where they were so innocent, they didn't even know that they were naked.
The only other humans on the planet that have that kind of innocence are babies.
They don't know, nor do they care.
Which leads to some really uncomfortable, out to eat instances in our life. But in the garden, there's another uncomfortable moment where they are seen by God, but they don't want to be seen by God because they know they've sinned. They know they've done what he told them not to do.
The attention that we desire is on a spiritual level.
What our phones often convince us of, because they amplify more of the world than the word, is that we need everyone else's attention. How many childhood stars do you know that turned out just great?
Not very many.
Because having the world's attention at the age of 8 and 10 and 12 is unnatural.
I'll give you King Josiah. Outside of that, not very many.
Not very many because it's too much. We're not wired to have all of that attention on us. We can't handle it. We can't process it. God addresses attention in the very first commandment. He says, you shall have no other gods before me. I want your undivided attention.
Have you Ever, Ever had your parents look at you and say, no, no, no, look at my eyes. Right here. Eye contact. Look at me. I don't want you looking over here, looking over there. I want you to see me as well as hear me. God says, you shall have no other gods. You shall have no graven images.
We're talking, like, a matter of weeks from the time that Israel walked through dry land surrounded by the water of the Red Sea. Moses goes up on Sinai, and because he took a little longer than they anticipated, they look at Aaron and say, hey, you need to make us an idol.
Just like that, they got distracted, they lost focus. They. They let go of the fact that God had provided everything for them there. Now, instead of just taking a short trip to the promised land, which could have been made in a matter of days, now we're talking an entire generation is going to die out. And over 40 years, they will wander through the desert and God will get their attention there.
And God will then grab the attention of the next generation and say, remember the fallen.
Remember what I have done for you.
Don't allow complacency or impatience to keep you from losing your focus. What are you giving your attention to? Deuteronomy 6. Give your attention to the word of God right on the doorpost. Let it be the last thing you think about before you go to bed. And the first thing you talk about when you wake up.
Let it be as frontless between your eyes. Unfortunately, we kind of read Deuteronomy 6 instead of the word of God. You could input our devices because usually the last thing I look at every night is this. The first thing I read in the morning is this.
There's an overwhelming percentage of people who own a smartphone. The first thing they look at within the first five to ten minutes of them waking up is their phone.
That's not sinful in and of itself, but that is a giving of attention to something.
Exodus 3. We have Moses at the burning bush.
Turn with me there.
When it comes to attention, we do have a desire for it. I do think that there is a God element of that in that desire.
Exodus 3 is different from Genesis 3, if you're wondering a little bit further in very, very different story in Genesis 3, in Exodus 3. 7, then the Lord said, I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt. And I have heard their cry. Because of their taskmasters, I know they're suffering. Look down in verse nine, and now behold, the cry of the people of Israel has come to me, and I have seen also seen the oppression with which the Egyptians oppressed them. Skip down to verse 16.
Go and gather the elders of Israel together and say to them, the Lord, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, Isaac and of Jacob has appeared to me, saying, I have observed you and what has been done to you in Egypt? If you flip over to second Chronicles in chapter seven, this is where Solomon is dedicating the temple.
In verse 14, it says, if my people who are called. This is God speaking, who are called by my name, humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then what will happen? I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin. Now my eyes will be open and my ears attentive to the prayer that is made in this place. For now I have chosen and consecrated this house, that my name may be there forever. My eyes and my heart will be there for all time. You will have my attention in this place.
God freely gives us his attention.
It's up to us to keep our attention on him.
When Peter was called to step out of the boat in the middle of a storm, at what point did he sink? What does the Bible say?
When he took his eyes off Jesus, man, that's powerful.
When he took his attention away from the sustainer of life and he noticed the storms around him.
How easy that is for us to do today as well. And our devices drive that home because they want our attention, but they're not pointing us to Jesus. They're not always pointing us to evil. And I think that's the challenge here, is that Satan doesn't have to keep our sustained attention for hours on end. And he just has to continue to distract us over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.
And that's what he does. I looked it up right before class, and the average American checks their phone. I think it's. Or picks it up to check it 205 times a day.
205 times a day. Matthew 6. Jesus said, where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. What you give your attention to fills your heart.
What we think about, what we gaze upon, what we give our attention to, shapes us either into the image of something earthly and carnal, as Paul would say, or into the image of Jesus.
We have agency in that. Psalm 119:37, like the best digital age verse ever written. I mean, the whole Bible is really great. This one really, really relevant Psalm 119:37, turn my eyes from looking at worthless things and give me life. And in your ways, we'll come back to that probably next week. When it comes to giving your attention, what do you give your attention to? This chart? You may have seen this before. This is from a TED Talk by a guy named Dino with a last name.
He.
He did a really interesting presentation. And so I did what every, every normal person would do. I screenshotted it and now I'm making it my own. This chart represents the average 18 year old if they. If they had a life expectancy of 90.
So this represents 18 to 90 years of life. If you break it down according to how we spend our time, you've got 288 months. That's the purple part. About a third of your life you're going to spend asleep.
You have 126 months that you're going to spend at work or school.
18 months driving, 36 months cooking or eating, 36 months doing chores and errands. And then some of us will spend 27 months of our life in the bathroom.
Some more, some less. No judgment. So that leaves you about 334 months of life to figure out what to do with.
Based off of the average screen time two years ago, 93%. 312 months.
I think that's just shy of like right around 27 years of life you will spend giving your attention to a device.
Now, I will concede it's very possible that that's 27 straight years of looking at your Bible app and if so, good on you, Great job.
But if you're like me, even if I am on my Bible app, I'm going to get two or three notifications.
Facebook Marketplace has become my kryptonite, because there's always something to window shop. And the dopamine tells me there's always a good deal just around the corner.
There you go. Thank you. Thank you, man. Thank you. We are one.
That's what it does, though, because if I get a notification, ooh, maybe they replied back to the offer I made them. Or ooh, maybe there's an. Well, we usually don't get excited about email, but maybe there's a person. It's like spam, right? Like when you go. Not actual the food, but when you go to your mailbox and you get a actual handwritten letter from a real human someone that, you know, there's a different reaction to that than that little Huntsville Utilities symbol, right?
Because there's a connection there.
There's dopamine, there's the idea of something good.
Our phones offer that, but they also offer unbelievable scaled up abundance of everything else as well. And so discernment is difficult, but discernment is necessary. Discernment is essential to a spiritual life. For the church to be what it is supposed to be in the digital age, we have to think about what we give our attention to. 2. Let's close in prayer. Father, we thank you for the opportunity to wear your name. We thank you for the opportunity to gather tonight and to learn more about you, who you are, and specifically the life you have designed for us to live in this world. Help us, give us the strength, the courage, the discipline to give our attention to you.
Help us to make the gospel the only lens through which we see life.
Help us to be able to discern between good and godly and help us to remove the things that distract us, to lay aside every weight which hinders us, which oftentimes includes the convenient things in our life.
Help us to grow and to mature into Christ. Father, we love you. We thank you for hearing and for answering our prayer tonight. In Christ's name, Amen.
Thank you for being here. Love you guys very much. Have a great week.
