[00:00:00] 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.
[00:00:37] Last week we talked a lot about attention. We talked about different types of attention, involuntary attention. So if you're sitting at a restaurant and the waiter or waitress drops a tray full of glasses and that's involuntary attention. It grabs your attention very quickly without you necessarily. It's more of a reaction, right? And then there's voluntary attention, which is the things that you choose to give your attention to. And then there's this idea of public attention.
[00:01:02] And this is something, excuse me, social attention. Social attention is something that we all need. Something that we all, from a very early age we referenced how studies now research tells us that eye contact is important in the development of infants and babies as they grow. All of us need some kind of social attention. If you are having a medical episode, you don't need people to observe you from afar. You need, you need someone to act right. You need that interaction and that social attention. But also how social media in particular has kind of hijacked this need for social attention. And as we've talked about, technology has a tendency to magnify or amplify everything. And so social attention then gets scaled up, oftentimes to a very unhealthy place.
[00:01:45] So tonight I want to continue just a little bit of that idea of attention. And as we've talked about the attention economy, that phrase that's been around now for a few decades, the idea that if you don't pay to be on a platform, then you are being bought, then you are the commodity. Your attention is what's being bought and sold. Google for years and years and years was very clean on their search page, the complete opposite of Yahoo, which has so much stuff all over it.
[00:02:13] Well, Google over the years has kind of changed the landscape because they began paying for your attention, they began using your tendencies and the trends that you have. The Patterns you've created and what you look at, how long you look at it for, how long you look at it. Not supposed to end with a preposition, I think, but that's all right. English folks in here, English teachers.
[00:02:32] Okay, good. No one will be offended, because I won't change. When you get to Google, you get a little bit of a shift in how advertisers do things. So Google again changed the game to where you pay for a click for their attention. So if someone clicks on your ad, you pay for it. If they don't click on it, you don't pay for it.
[00:02:51] So all of these little enhancements along the way, particularly from the early 2000s to the 2000 teens, is what has largely shaped where we are today.
[00:03:00] When we talk about this attention economy, it is all by design. It is by the design of those who have created these technologies and the folks that want us to listen to them, to be leveraged by them, to have that power and that influence. So this idea that we have to be very intentional with our attention, because what has our attention has our hearts. Jesus said, the eye is the lamp of the body. If your eye is full of light, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eye is full of darkness, your whole body will be full of darkness. It's important to think about what we choose to give our attention to.
[00:03:36] Last week we said, on average, the average amount of screen time for most folks these days is between six and eight hours a day.
[00:03:45] That's a lot. So eight hours is a third of 24 hours. So if you live to be 60, then 20 years of your life are spent looking at a phone. If you live to be 90, 30 years of your life are spent looking at a device.
[00:04:00] So it's important. The device itself sometimes can be helpful. If you're standing on the side of the road, you want a phone. But if you're sitting in the library trying to think deeply, and that keeps buzzing, keeps buzzing, keeps buzzing, it has an adverse effect.
[00:04:14] We are what we perceive. So we have this idea of who we are in our minds, and we have this idea, this perception of life to illustrate how technology can mess with that and can tweak that and can change that. There's an interesting example that I ran across in this image.
[00:04:33] I see what looks like a butcher block cutting board, checkerboard maybe, and then this cylinder here that casts a shadow. There are two different letters. I don't know if you can see them or not.
[00:04:45] This is going to be that really cool spotlight but it's not that one right there and that one right there. The top one is A and the bottom one is B. The top one.
[00:04:56] Who thinks. Did we talk about this last week?
[00:04:59] It's been another class. I did this since. So the top one.
[00:05:01] Who thinks the top one's the darker one.
[00:05:04] Because everyone now thinks I'm asking a leading question. Thank you. Thank you. A is darker. Thank you. I got two good two that stand strong. Who thinks B is darker? The one below it. They're the same. Stop it.
[00:05:18] For those at home. He said they're the same and he's mean. Yes, yes, they are the same. Which is crazy, because I think if this wasn't a class where the teacher was asking you. Very clearly. Leading question. At first glance, they look very different, but your brain is really clever, and your brain likes to predict the future as best it can. It likes to anticipate, but it also loves novelty. And so when we see something, our brain is already working in overdrive without us actually knowing what's going on in those processes. Well, people that design these technologies, they know this, they use that to leverage, not always against us, but always for them.
[00:05:56] And it's really important for us to understand that, because when we give eight hours of our attention a day to a device, it's not necessarily for us, it is for them.
[00:06:08] Somebody give me a definition of what is an algorithm, Particularly what is a social media algorithm? I knew Hunter Hughes would have some words to say. And Audrey, she's so excited. Go ahead, Hunter, take it away.
[00:06:20] An algorithm is a set of.
[00:06:23] Is a process by which you solve a problem. It can be ad hoc or heuristic in nature. That usually has some math involved. Okay, he said a lot of words for those online.
[00:06:34] These are some of the words specifically for social media. That is correct. An algorithm is math. It's a bunch of math. It's a big, big math problem. In social media, algorithms are basically rules, signals and data that govern the platform's operation. It's the rules by which governing how the app interacts with the user. Right. These algorithms determine how content is filtered, ranked, selected, and recommended to users. So think about it this way. If you go to YouTube and you type in anything the Earth, you're going to have a list of videos that pop up. You click on one of those videos, that video is going to play. But over on the right is going to be a column of other videos, the suggested or recommended videos. And those videos are populated based off of what the content is in that video. The Heading, the actual person who put it out, the content creator, the description.
[00:07:25] The more you get on something like YouTube or any social media platform, the more information you give it. And I don't mean you just sit in there and you give it your name. The more you interact with that platform, the more you look at something, how long you look at that image, it's being processed, it's being cataloged. Whether you swipe left or right of that, it's being processed, it's being cataloged and it creates this digital profile of what you like, what you don't like, what your tendencies are.
[00:07:50] Algorithms typically are good at processing large amounts of data very, very quickly and then trying to produce a predictable outcome.
[00:08:00] So in this landscape of social media that are powered by these, these big algorithms, they have a lot of influence, but they haven't always been as, I guess, negative in their consequence. When they first came out several years ago, the algorithms were a little bit different. We'll talk about that in just a second. Tristan Harris, I've referenced him before.
[00:08:21] He was a former Google employee. He worked at crafting ethics for Google and their policies. Felt like his voice wasn't being heard. And so he left the Google and created co founded the center for Humane Technology.
[00:08:34] He was quoted as saying, if something is a tool, it genuinely is just sitting there waiting patiently. Think of like a hammer or a shovel. If something is not a tool, it's demanding things from you, it's seducing you, it's manipulating you, it wants things from you. And we've moved away from having a tool based technology environment to an addiction and manipulation based technology environment. That's what changed. Social media isn't a tool that's just waiting to be used. It has its own goals and it has its own means of pursuing them. By using your psychology against you.
[00:09:10] There's another quote out there that says technology is not positive or negative and it's also not neutral.
[00:09:18] So there is something happening here.
[00:09:21] Whether it's used for positive or negative largely depends on the user. But in the case of social media, because of the way these algorithms work, because of the nature of these devices, they're also using us in order for us to use them.
[00:09:33] They impact our lives and our thought patterns and our behaviors. So it's very, very intertwined.
[00:09:39] Algorithms changed the game.
[00:09:43] Between 2004 and 2006, Facebook came on the scene and went from being used exclusively on college campuses as essentially an online yearbook, to growing beyond that to anyone could have an account. Around 2009, the like button was introduced.
[00:10:01] Twitter was the first one to introduce the retweet button. And then a few years later, Facebook introduced the share button. It's around this time, somewhere in the 2006-2009 ish era, when Facebook changed their algorithm. When I first got on Facebook, it was just an endless sea of just my friends, the people that I chose to follow and that I allowed to follow me, right? And then those random people that would always poke you awkwardly. No one knew what the poke button was about. I don't know why they came up with poke before they came up with like, but it ruined a generation. It was there.
[00:10:35] So that happened for several years. And then all of a sudden one day you logged on to your Facebook account and you're like, oh man, that's crazy.
[00:10:43] What was that? Who is that?
[00:10:45] It wasn't just your friends. And the things that you were looking at didn't just happen. It was in this. It started out as a.
[00:10:52] Not chronological, like a post chronic. It was in backwards, right? The most recent thing that had happened and then you would work your way backwards. But now that was all gone. It was very frustrating. I remember that of like, man, like, this is aggravating. I want to know who posted recently. I don't want all of this. It seemed light, garbledygook, right? It was just, it was chaos after what we had had this nice orderly system for a couple of years.
[00:11:16] Well, what also happened there was the algorithm. With it not being chronological, it now had weight to it.
[00:11:22] And weight in some ways that would have a huge impact because how a piece of content was interacted with determined how it would get then distributed.
[00:11:32] So the more likes and the more shares and the more comments, the more that would get to the top of everyone's feed. And so the age of virality jumped on board in 2008 or nine. I think the rear facing camera was introduced on the iPhone and that was six. Anyway, I get all the dates mixed up. Somewhere in that era we had the rear facing camera and the front facing camera. So the age of the selfie came on board. And then around that time also cameras got a little bit better with video. And so more and more video pops up on your timeline. Well, video is much more engaging than just a still image. If you're looking at a picture of something, it's finite, it's not moving, it's easy to predict. It's just going to sit there, it's just going to be that image. But if you're watching video, your brain is Processing what's going on while at the same time trying to predict what's going to happen next. That's why we don't have video billboards yet, because we'd have a lot more accidents, car accidents, because they grab our attention, they keep it. That's why the TV is a lot more popular than a magazine or book.
[00:12:33] Books with no pictures in particular. A waste of ink. Just kidding. Sort of.
[00:12:38] This is the time when things change. This is the time when, and particularly Jonathan Haidt, if you've read his book the Anxious Generation, he says between 2010 and 2015 is when we moved from a play based childhood to a phone based childhood. And particularly for adolescents, this is when the game really changed because their brains, as we've talked about, are still learning how to think.
[00:12:57] That prefrontal cortex is not developed. They don't have a lot of analog experience before they jump into this stage.
[00:13:03] We fast forward a few years and get to 2020. As David and I were talking earlier, when we went completely online during the pandemic, we couldn't be face to face in the same place. And so we went face to face online.
[00:13:16] Well, now there's a group, there's a window of time there. Young children, they were in school in that time, in those very formative years have a very different time in school now than their older peers and the adults who just went online for a zoom and we go on about our day, it impacted their brains completely different. So it's not equal in its impact across the landscape. That's a really big picture of a tube of toothpaste. And toothpaste is interesting.
[00:13:45] Have you ever squirted too much toothpaste out and gotten it on the counter? And it's like, it's too much to just wipe away. So you're like, it's. I mean, it's 2025, it ain't cheap. So you kind of shovel it back in there. You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. Right. Well, this is the illustration I use a lot of times for teenagers and for my own children of when you say something, it's out there. Used to say, sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me. It's a really clever, really cute rhyme. Completely false. Absolutely, utterly dumb saying.
[00:14:12] Words hurt a lot and when they're out there, you can't bring them back. James, the book of James talks about that quite a bit.
[00:14:19] This happened recently. This is a picture from Facebook where a friend of mine, well, I'll go into the I'll read it first. It says got out early to enjoy the beauty of Wheeler Refuge. If you know either of these folks, let them know where their Let me know where their property is. They might want it back. It's on a certain place out in Limestone county on Wheeler Refuge. What you don't see is two pictures down here of a piece of trash.
[00:14:43] One was a Chick Fil a wrapper, and one was probably an Amazon box where he had scratched out the address but left the name of someone whose trash was dumped out there.
[00:14:53] If you go through and you read 42 comments and 18 shares, most of those are I cannot believe that you need to share the address so we can go dump our trash on their yard.
[00:15:03] You know people looking for a cause.
[00:15:07] Well, I happen to know the people who own that trash.
[00:15:11] Their trash was at the street ready to be picked up, but instead of being picked up by the garbage person, it was picked up by a stranger as well as the other person who lives in their neighborhood. Someone stole their trash off their front lawn, drove to Wheeler, went through it, dumped it out, poured it out. Most likely someone on some type of drug or looking for something specific.
[00:15:35] The police got involved and eventually this post was taken down. But 18 shares that toothpaste will not go back in the tube. The people that are in this thread, 42 comments I'm sure are mostly decent people, but immediately were there with like pitchforks and torches in hand ready to absolutely obliterate these people that are good people, that are church people.
[00:15:59] It was amazing. And this happened within about an hour and a half, something like that. I think there are doxxing laws on the books. One in particular last year that was passed in the state of Alabama. If you post something like an address or personal information that someone else then uses to go and cause harm to the person at that address, you will also be prosecuted with jail time as well as a fine. I called a friend of mine who works for the Limestone County Sheriff's Department and he told me a little bit about that. We screenshotted everything and that guy is now in jail for seven years. No, I'm just kidding. He took it down.
[00:16:33] He did take it down, but after he also learned about doxxing laws. I didn't know that term. I didn't know that was a thing. I'm glad it's a thing. Because slander now is not just limited to the public square. It's now on this digital landscape and things scale up out of control, beyond our control, and oftentimes beyond our attention intentions. Because that's the way algorithms work.
[00:16:57] Because we are drawn to things that are salacious and violent and negative and interesting.
[00:17:03] A lot more so than oh yeah, this was the wrong wrong person. Sorry, somebody stole their trash. He did eventually put a post about that.
[00:17:11] 0 shares very few likes.
[00:17:15] I don't think there are any comments.
[00:17:18] When the toothpaste is out of the tube, you can't put it back. Now more than ever.
[00:17:22] And so for us as Christians to navigate this digital age as adults, we have to think not once, not twice, but three times a lady. Right? We have to think over and over again how. Sorry, that was very distracting. But the song quote is in there. We have to think about it a lot before we post. We have to think about it a lot before we comment. Particularly when we comment something that is negative. I'm at the stage of life where I'm getting all of these memories popping up from the early days. And Jason was a really weird college dude. And I apologize to anyone that knew me in college.
[00:17:54] You guys have seen me grow up here. I was a weird guy. Most of my stuff's not evil, but there's a lot of just random stuff. Why would you share that with people that you were sitting at home and you can't find a sock or you can't find just random stuff about your day. No business sharing that with the world. But that's what I did in college. And 20 years later, now I got to live with like dumb Jason out there for all the world to see. I don't share that part, but it's on a server somewhere. I had forgotten about it most of the time. The things that we post out there we will eventually forget. Sometimes we post just so we won't forget 10 years later when we get that memory to pop up. So what makes for a good post?
[00:18:28] Not always the thing that makes for a viral post.
[00:18:32] And so if we're optimized like our technology for virality that's oftentimes in conflict with scripture. CNN settles a defamation suit after being ordered to pay $5 million. This one was posted back. I think this was 2023 is when this case was.
[00:18:49] We saw this case involved a 2021 segment about a private security contractor in Afghanistan. Played out as a media organization faced more legal and political pressures.
[00:18:58] You might remember this one. Fox to pay $787 million over election claims.
[00:19:06] I don't care which one you watch, you could care less.
[00:19:09] They're entertainment based.
[00:19:13] Their existence on these platforms no matter how truthful or untruthful they are are exclusively determined by how captivating they are. That kind of pressure is not good for truth, and it's not good for true, fair information.
[00:19:28] It's optimized for entertainment, to not just grab our attention, but to keep our attention.
[00:19:36] I don't say that to convince you to jump off of one or the other. I'm saying watch them both wherever they overlap. That's probably where truth is going to end up settling if you. But most of all, watch with a critical spiritual eye.
[00:19:48] Because if we quote any of these folks, they're not optimized for the cross.
[00:19:53] We are.
[00:19:55] So we. We walk with discernment. We think deeply. Turn with me to John Chapter three. Tonight we're going to focus our thoughts on the idea of echo chambers.
[00:20:05] If these algorithms are designed to learn us and then to kind of direct us, but also to help us amplify our voice, then that's a complicated algorithm. It gives weight to certain things, right? If we find ourselves completely agreeing with everybody in our newsfeed, something's probably wrong. If the comments of our friends are contrary to our beliefs. But every single news article that pops up in our newsfeed agrees with what we say, something probably is amiss. Something's not quite right. In John chapter three, we have a fellow named Nicodemus who is a member of the Pharisees. And the Pharisees and Jesus don't tend to get along. Now, there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews. This man came to Jesus by night and said to him, rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God, for no one can do these signs that you do unless God is with them. Jesus answered him, truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God. Nicodemus said to him, how can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born? Jesus answered, truly, Truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh. That which is born of the spirit is spirit. Do not marvel that I said to you, you must be born again. The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the spirit. Nicodemus said to him, how can these things be?
[00:21:35] Jesus answered him, are you the teacher of Israel? And yet you do not understand these things. Truly, Truly, I say to you, we speak of what we know and bear witness to what we have seen, but you do not receive our testimony. If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you heavenly things?
[00:21:53] No one has ascended into heaven except he who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. Nicodemus deserves some credit.
[00:22:09] He lived in this echo chamber with this group of Pharisees that denied Jesus was the Christ and he was a high ranking member of the Pharisees. He was a man that had influence, a man that had power, but also a man here who was still curious and who still lacks some understanding. He comes at night. Why does he come at night?
[00:22:28] Why do you think he doesn't want to be seen? Because it's hard, it's difficult, it's embarrassing.
[00:22:38] It highlights our insecurities or our ignorance sometimes to step outside of that echo chamber.
[00:22:44] Give the man credit.
[00:22:46] He found Jesus, he sought Jesus, and he came to him with his questions.
[00:22:51] We can find ourselves in echo chambers, politically. Very easy to do. So from an SEC standpoint, it just means more we can get in these echo chambers, right? Certain people that we follow, certain voices that we give more weight to in our life, if they're the only voices that we're hearing and they outweigh that six to eight hours that we're not in the Word, but we are on that podcast or on that channel, and they're constantly in our mind, they're shaping how we think. It's really, really important to discern. I think Nicodemus was trying to do that. It was a struggle. It doesn't necessarily tell us a great ending in this interaction. He walks away, he leaves.
[00:23:33] He gets referenced a few chapters later. But he was willing, at least in that moment, just as Peter was willing in the midst of a storm.
[00:23:41] He had enough faith to know if it was Jesus. I can walk on water. It wasn't until he saw the storm that he began to sink. Nicodemus knew that if there was something to this, then it was worth going in the middle of the night to go in to talk to him.
[00:23:54] It's very dangerous, I think, for us to find ourselves in the midst of an echo chamber. I don't think that that's the design God has for us. In First Thessalonians 5:21, it says, but test everything, and to hold fast what is good.
[00:24:07] We've referenced Romans 12 over and over again. It's been transformed in the renewing of your mind. Why? So that you can discern what is the will of God. That good and acceptable, perfect will of God. So in order for us to be able to identify truth and untruth, we have to spend a lot of time with Jesus.
[00:24:25] Nicodemus spent a lot of time with the Old Testament to be a Pharisee. This is like rogue scholar level.
[00:24:32] This is MIT level.
[00:24:34] Mike Howell's sitting here tonight. Is he? No, but shout out to Mike, right? This is like, this is upper level stuff here. He knows the word, he knows the law, and yet he does not fully understand Jesus.
[00:24:47] Why would we ever think that we could spend less time with God's word or with God's people and come to a better conclusion?
[00:24:57] I'm afraid that we don't have to work hard to find knowledge or information about the Bible, and so we don't work hard to know Jesus, to know the gospel, to know God.
[00:25:09] We live in an age of convenience. We live in an age where we are easily.
[00:25:13] We are susceptible to being kind of tossed to and fro, chasing every wind of doctrine. And we're not grounded. We don't have a foundation.
[00:25:22] And so what sounds viral.
[00:25:24] We.
[00:25:25] We jump into that group think, right? Just like on that Facebook post. It's really easy to get caught up in the crowd of pitchforks and torches, like, yeah, let's go dump our trash on their yard. Without thinking, hey, is it odd that people who live at two different addresses drove all the way to Decatur to throw out some trash? That seems weird.
[00:25:46] Maybe meth is involved. You know, like, that's a. That's where you go with that. If you stop for just a second and look at the full picture. But we don't. We. We find that one kernel, that one thing that we latch onto, and because they're a red state or a blue state or because they have this opinion or that opinion, then we just. We pounce and we don't think biblically. It's not a matter of even just thinking slow. It's a matter of thinking with the gospel as our filter. That's the problem.
[00:26:10] So we don't do that often. And it's so easy when you're online because you don't have. You don't have the facial recognition of another person. You don't have the body language to read. You don't have their initial reaction to that. What you have is. Is you have a Zinger. And then you got a whole bunch of likes.
[00:26:29] And because some nerd somewhere wrote some code that made a like button, you now feel like a big person. Because a bunch of people liked your comment and they jump on board with it.
[00:26:38] I've seen so many articles of like, real life, things of war. And then somebody says, yeah, but I bet you they wouldn't last one week in the sec.
[00:26:48] It's funny, I laughed. But then I realized, man, this makes everything trivial instantly.
[00:26:56] It makes me less of a good person. And even worse, it makes me less like Jesus.
[00:27:01] I don't even realize it.
[00:27:03] Because it's not something that physically hurts someone in the moment. It's that victimless crime. So victimless sin? No such thing.
[00:27:11] It forms us and shapes us into something contrary to the cross.
[00:27:15] That's not what we pursue. That's not what we're after. It takes more discipline to filter those things out. It takes more time to stop and not press send. That's why the email people created the draft. So you can just put everything you need right there and get it out of your system and never actually send it to the person. Don't forget to go back and delete it.
[00:27:32] Those are real things that we have to exercise. That's discernment in the digital age.
[00:27:37] That's counting the cost, right? That's thinking about what we think about and what we say. Second Timothy, chapter two.
[00:27:44] Paul writes, so flee youthful passions and pursue righteousness, faith, love and peace, along with those who call on the Lord from a pure heart. Have nothing to do with foolish, ignorant controversies. You know that they breed quarrels. And the Lord's servant must not be quarrelsome, but kind to everyone, able to teach patiently enduring evil, correcting his opponents with gentleness.
[00:28:08] God may perhaps grant them repentance, leading to a knowledge of the truth, and they may come to their senses and escape from the snare of the devil after being captured by him to do his will. Several years ago we made these little post it notes that had 1, 2, 3, 4 on them. First Timothy, chapter 2, verses 3 and 4. It is the will of God that everyone comes to know the truth, that everyone is saved. That is God's base foundation for seeing our world.
[00:28:35] But it's not always ours.
[00:28:38] Our foundation oftentimes is, I'm right, they're wrong, us and them right.
[00:28:43] There's this combatant thing that we like. Whether it's we're the us and they're everybody else, or whether it's we're this state or this, this company or this team or this whatever, this generation. Sometimes we do that as well because we like the us part of it. As long as there's a them out there, there's an opportunity, I think, for us to feel a little bit more righteous.
[00:29:04] That's what I've seen in my own life, at least in my own heart. Yours may be a little different, but there's something that draws me to that that I have to be keenly aware of.
[00:29:12] Because what happens when we don't see that way, when we don't think about 2 Timothy 2?
[00:29:17] Well, then we start looking at other people as an interface, as pixels.
[00:29:23] They're not embodied, they're not a human.
[00:29:25] And so we treat them like the garbage that was dumped at the refuge.
[00:29:30] We don't treat them with respect and dignity.
[00:29:32] We aren't patient. We don't endure evil, we attack it.
[00:29:37] We correct our opponents, but far from gentle, righteous indignation.
[00:29:42] And we never think about the fact that God may perhaps grant them repentance.
[00:29:47] We don't care about that. We care about being right.
[00:29:50] And sometimes we don't even care about that. We just care about them being wrong.
[00:29:54] And that is wrong.
[00:29:56] This is the gospel at work here. This is the gospel in our thinking and in our perspective and perception of this world.
[00:30:05] We have to fight against all of these other things that so easily ensnare us, to use a biblical phrase, that so easily get apart and entangled in our thinking. It's actually really difficult for us to find that narrow way. I think sometimes we forget that we think that now that we're in the church, we're a part of the church, we attend church, that we're just doing all church things. That's not the case. There is a constant transformation going on in your heart. If you've been a Christian for 30 years, there should be a significant difference in you today and you 30 years and one day ago.
[00:30:32] Right?
[00:30:34] That's the change that needs to take place. If you've been a Christian for 30 days, there should be a difference in you today and you 30 days and one day ago, or 31 days ago, if you don't want to do math.
[00:30:43] Can we create unhealthy echo chambers at church?
[00:30:47] See some head nods. How so?
[00:30:49] If you're not constantly, like, vetting what people are saying and you kind of just let things keep spinning up, you know, if you're not verifying with the truth, God's word, or even just trying to evaluate other opinions that come in, try to figure out what's what's truth, and then what's not. I think it's really easy for sometimes, like tradition and things like that to sometimes, like, especially become an echo chamber. In a sense. You're saying don't trust the Bible teacher. Basically, it's excellent. Because tradition sometimes becomes that echo chamber. Because we do what we've always done. Because we've always done it, not because this is why we do it. Right. That's different. Because we've always done it simply means that at one point it was really helpful. But it also gives us freedom, because if it no longer is that kind of helpful and there's something else that's more helpful that's also in line with scriptures, then we do that. So that's a great point. Yes, sir. Wukash. Not adapting to New Age, but not to be.
[00:31:50] Sometimes when there's a decision made 40, 50 years ago and obviously things are changing, you should adapt more. Yeah, yeah. To connect in with what was said. Yeah. Not being willing to adapt. We do it one way forever, always. Because that's just the way we want to do it, right? Absolutely. When we're not open to the question why not truly. When we get offensive or we get insecure about that because maybe we don't actually know our why. I think a lot of times growing up, I felt like, especially when you become a Bible major, then all of a sudden it's like, oh, yeah, you're supposed to know all the Bible. I mean, I'm a kid too, so there's that part. So there's this responsibility to have all the answers. But sometimes you never really went the full distance of answering the why.
[00:32:35] You just eventually kind of accepted what was told to you. Kind of getting to what we're talking about. Like, that's what I did for a long time. College challenged me in some ways. But when you get out of college and you've got to answer those questions and there's no professor, there's no mom or dad, there's no youth minister, it's just you. That'll put you in a spot. I was invited to a party once that turned out to be an ambush. There was a guy that, like. I mean, it was almost a literal pounce. It was a very uncomfortable distance between the two of us. And. And he had all of these. They weren't even questions. They were just charges specifically about baptism. And at one point, one of my friends came over and she said, do you guys want a Bible? And we answered at the same time. I said, yes. He said, no. Thought that was interesting.
[00:33:14] So she brought back her like precious moments pink Bible from her childhood, which was also interesting. So we went through and we talked and that was.
[00:33:23] There are still days when I replay that conversation. There are so many different places in scripture that I should have gone that I think would have clarified a lot better. But I didn't in that moment. And that was one of those moments that I found myself inadequate. I'm like, I'm supposed to be teaching teenagers this stuff and I can't in this moment keep my composure and just walk them through the Gospel, the thing that's supposed to have changed my life.
[00:33:50] I got to do some reading. I got to spend some more time. Matthew, did you have something? Yeah, I was just basically saying something similar. But Acts 17:11, it says, when talking about the Bereans, it says that these were more fair minded than those in Thessalonica and that they searched the Scriptures daily to find out whether these things were so. So I guess that kind of indicates that there might have been this echo chamber thing going on. But he calls people who verify, like everybody's been saying, more fair minded. Exactly. That's a great phrase. Yeah. The Bereans were more fair minded because they searched the Scriptures daily. When you search the scriptures daily, when you, when you know Christ and you understand the gospel, you don't get shook in those moments. Right. It doesn't knock you off of your composure because we're not fighting for us.
[00:34:38] The gospel is what it is. I didn't write it, I didn't come up with it. God did. I'm trying to conform to that. And so in those moments it's less personal, so I don't have to get. So I can let go of the personal part and I can speak with, with calmness, with gentleness, with patience, with.
[00:34:54] What did he say? Patiently enduring evil. Even when people take cheap shots or when people try to make fun of you or they do all these other things. I don't have to meet that same vitriol.
[00:35:05] The political climate says we have to. It's the only way to fight is more firepower.
[00:35:10] Well, Jesus was in a garden with a guy that had a sword trying to defend him and he said, put it down.
[00:35:17] That's not my kingdom.
[00:35:19] We got to remember that that's not our kingdom. We don't fight the same way the world fights. Right. Submission is actually more powerful sometimes than fighting. It sounds counterintuitive. Submission to Christ will always be more powerful than taking up any kind of arm, taking up any kind of aggressive conversation, taking up any kind of yelling match. Always, always.
[00:35:41] 2nd Timothy 3 But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Jesus. All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, reproof, correction, and for training in righteousness that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.
[00:36:03] The Scriptures and the truth of the Scriptures allow us to not get in our own echo chambers, but to move freely through the Gospel.
[00:36:12] It's profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction and training in righteousness, not just this rote memorization that is faithless. It's alive.
[00:36:25] I want to move in for just a few minutes and we may pick this up again next week.
[00:36:29] AI we're going to talk about this off and on throughout this quarter. We'll go a little bit more in depth in a few weeks.
[00:36:34] This is a little bit more challenging to read than I thought it would be on a screen, but this is a graph. I was in a webinar earlier this week. For those that are in ministry and talking about the ways that AI is impacting churches. This shows the top usage of generative AI in 2024.
[00:36:53] Those top uses were generating ideas, therapy and companionship, specific search, editing, text, exploring topics of interest, fun and nonsense, troubleshooting, enhanced learning, personalized learning, and general advice. In 2025, what's interesting is therapy and companionship have moved to the top, organizing my life, finding Purpose, therapy, controlling the elements and the structure of my life, and finding purpose.
[00:37:21] Generative AI is the voice of reason, of truth, identity, community, and purpose. We talked about how those three things have been identified as the three greatest questions that adolescents are pursuing, trying to find answers to those questions. Now they're going to generative AI for that.
[00:37:40] YouTube's recommendations are responsible for more than 75% of watch time, which means an algorithm is responsible for 75% of what's consumed on YouTube.
[00:37:50] But jillions of hours of media are consumed on YouTube every year.
[00:37:56] They've only improved in the last five years by integrating contextual AI machine learning algorithms.
[00:38:03] This is an interesting podcast episode if you're looking to expand on this. Echo chambers of One Companion AI and the Future of Human Connection Some folks that are in the industry have a really good podcast called you'd Undivided Attention. Tristan Harris, as well as the guy that created the Infinite Scroll, Asa Raskin, who's the software guy that created that. This is their podcast. This is one of their episodes earlier this year.
[00:38:27] One of the dangers, particularly of companion AI is AI is used in the hope. AI is like the marketing term, if you're not familiar with. AI is a lot of things. Machine learning, deep learning used to be the terms we use more often.
[00:38:39] But a lot of folks in this room and in this building, in this town use AI all the time in their work. And there's nothing wrong with that. It's very helpful for research, it's very helpful for coding. It's very helpful in a lot of ways. We've used them here at the church to create those cards. But when it comes to relationships, there's a really big danger with these because we'll go back here.
[00:39:00] A lot of people are using AI not just as a personal assistant to file paperwork, but a lot of people are using it to cultivate relationships. A lot of people are using it to use therapy as their therapist. And so they've been trained on these models that we don't fully know everything it's been trained on, as we've Talked about, particularly ChatGPT Character AI. Character AI is actually in a lawsuit right now for the young man that took his own life last year because he cultivated a relationship with this chatbot and eventually it said, come and join me on the other side. And so he did.
[00:39:36] Particularly those that are vulnerable who are still learning how to think.
[00:39:39] This really, really powerful math is not the substance of the gospel.
[00:39:47] The people in emerging generations lives us, the adults in the room have a huge responsibility to make sure that they understand what a real human embodied relationship looks like, feels like. Sounds like if you don't have kids, that's great. You got time. If you do have kids, that's great. You have influence. You need other people to be a part of that village raising that child.
[00:40:11] Sticky Faith was a book that came out probably 15 plus years ago. Kind of rocked the youth ministry world with some data that says that teenagers, if they have I think six or seven adults, Christians that are that are part of their life in their teenage years, they're exponentially more likely to stay faithful out of high school. Which sounds earth shattering data. It's just duh, like it's in the Bible. Mentoring, discipleship, identity, community, purpose. If we don't articulate that not just from an instruction but from a living experience, then this is where they're going to find all of those experiences.
[00:40:45] They're not just going to stop asking questions.
[00:40:47] I've learned that with my own Kids, they don't ever stop asking questions. They may stop asking you those questions, but they don't stop asking questions.
[00:40:57] And the danger is no longer. They're just going to find it out from their friends at school who are just as ignorant as they are.
[00:41:04] They're not even going to find out from their friends, parents. They're not even just going to find it out from tv. They're going to find it out. They're going to find it out from some math equation that is constantly pulling back and forth all these anxious, trying to predict some things that has zero emotion. There's no embodiment in AI. And don't forget the intelligence is truly artificial. It's not real intelligence. It's high powered processing.
[00:41:28] There's no emotion there. Although it can fake emotion.
[00:41:32] When an AI bot, you ask it, why is the sky made of glue? And it says, that's a great question. No it's not. That's a dumb question. It's not made of glue.
[00:41:41] But the chatbot won't do that. It'll reinforce your positivity at all times.
[00:41:46] Having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions.
[00:41:52] It's going to try to tell us what we want to hear.
[00:41:54] And so if we exclusively use an AI chatbot for our Bible study or, or for our companionship, it's going to give us what it thinks we want.
[00:42:02] That's not what we need. Galatians 2. But when CEPHAs came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face because he stood condemned. You need people in your life that says, hey man, I appreciate you asking questions. That's a dumb question. Here's a good question.
[00:42:15] Cephas, we're in Antioch. Like this beautiful picture of what the Gospel is supposed to be. There's diversity of age, diversity of ethnicity. They're going to send missionaries out like crazy.
[00:42:26] And you're coming here and you see folks from Jerusalem come and you step away from these gentiles because you don't want to be. You're two faced man. That's obtuse. As Andy Dufresne would say. How can you be so obtuse? We need people like that in our lives. The Gospel is for instruction and for reproof. And so are we for each other when we rely on these things. Romans 12:2. Discern what is the good and acceptable will of God. This is our last verse. We'll end with for those who live according to says the flesh.
[00:42:53] But for us, for those who live according to the algorithm set Their minds on things of the algorithm.
[00:42:59] Those who live according to the spirit set their minds on things of the spirit.
[00:43:04] To what do we give our attention and our time in our relationships? It needs to be each other. It needs to be the people of this world. Because our battle, our enemy, is not them.
[00:43:17] It's spiritual in nature.
[00:43:19] It's not with an elephant or a donkey. It's spiritual in nature, specifically. Not principalities of this world. Don't get caught up in that. It's lies, fake news, fake truth. Not the truth.
[00:43:32] Spiritual. Let's pray. God, we thank you so much for loving us, for blessing us, for allowing us to gather in your name tonight. And thank you especially for giving us insight into you, giving us access to you, to your kingdom through your son. Help us to practice discernment. Help us to spend time in your word and with your people so that we can understand and we can rightly identify truth and your will for our lives. Help us to not be caught up in the thinking of this world, but help us to exercise spiritual discernment and wisdom.
[00:44:03] Help us to know you. Help us to become more like Christ every day. And help us to help each other to do that, to confront each other when we're in the wrong, to be receptive to that reproof and that correction. Father, we love you. We thank you for loving us enough to not allow us to stay where we are, but to transform us into the image of Christ. It's through his name we pray. Amen. Love you guys very much. Have a great week.
