[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 spent the bulk of our time talking about community, what it looks like in person, what it looks like online, where there's overlap, where there's a disconnect oftentimes, and that was a really good conversation. I really enjoyed the time we spent on that. So I'd encourage you, as always, if you haven't heard all of the sessions this quarter, go back and listen to them. You're sort of coming in in the middle of a conversation that's been going on even though each week has been a little bit unique. But to get the full context, which is what we're going to be talking about tonight, go back and listen and hopefully it'll be something that's beneficial to you. Thank you. For those that have shared thoughts and comments, emailed or texted me, had a lot of really funny memes throughout this quarter, so thanks for those as well as some interesting headlines. One of those was an AI generated actress that's made headlines over the last few weeks. We're not going to talk about tonight, so we'll get to that here probably in the next couple of weeks. I think we have three weeks left in this quarter before we start a new set of studies on Wednesday night. So that's where we are now, and that's where we're headed. Intermittent Variable Reward Anybody remember my main man, B.F. skinner, from your high school or college psychology class? A little bit. A few head nods. That's great. I don't so I looked him up again and the Intermittent variable reward.
[00:01:51] A lot of times today you'll hear it referred to as sort of the slot machine effect. That's something we've talked about a few times in this class. Somebody give me a quick summary of that.
[00:02:01] Feel free to take a guess or nominate someone sitting beside you. That's fun too. As Long as you win every now and then, you keep flying. Yeah. So let's break it down. Intermittent. Intermittent means occasional. Right. Every time you don't win, but you will win at some point, variable means that it's not as consistent. There's not a defined pattern that you can see. Reward means that there is an actual reward. And also the hope of a reward.
[00:02:27] The hope of the reward is actually more powerful than the reward itself. The fact that you think that you can win something. This is why when you. You see someone at a slot machine, there's like a trance. It's the same trance. I think that kind of happens to my kids when they watch tv, right? They just zone out. I don't know how you were growing up, but when my parents would call dinner time and if I was watching tv, I mean, it was like I had earmuffs on. You couldn't hear anything. You just kind of. You zone out into this. This place.
[00:02:53] Particularly with a slot machine, there's a lot of variables. There's a lot of engaging visual things. They're usually very bright, colorful. They've got cartoons or different characters, different images. It's not just a bunch of text. It engages all of your senses and it gives you this hope that you're going to win. If you think you're really good at a slot machine, I'm sorry, the house will always win. You may go on a streak and have some success, but at some point, that success, determined by an algorithm or some math somewhere is going to then get all of its reward back.
[00:03:27] This is the way a lot of these apps and these devices have been designed. I want to go through a handful of quotes tonight to kind of help us understand the context of this.
[00:03:37] If you remember Tristan Harris, he was a former Google employee. He crafted ethics policies for Google and got to a point where he felt like his voice wasn't being heard. And he had big concerns about the ethics that they were not utilizing. And so he left the company and founded the center for Humane Tech.
[00:03:55] He had this to say, when we pull our phones out of our pockets, we're playing a slot machine to see what notifications we got when we swipe down. And our finger, we're playing on our finger, we're playing a slot machine to see what photo comes next. When we go to Instagram, when we tap the number of red notifications, we're playing a slot machine to see what's underneath. And we've talked about color theory before. You know what color is the little dot when you have a Notification typically red, right? Because red communicates urgency. Red says, hey, look at me. And I'm not calling you out for your red shirt tonight, man. It's a beautiful shirt. So you wear. It's not even looking at me. Perfect. All right. Stop signs. Red lights mean stop because there is an urgency here. Stop. Something is very critical. When you look at your phone and all of its grayscale, where's the urgency?
[00:04:44] It's all democratized, right? There's no longer a hierarchy of urgency. Your eye is not drawn anywhere. In fact, your eye struggles to know where to look. So if you want a surefire way to at least minimize or to take away a little bit of that addiction, you may have turn your phone into grayscale. There will be an instant dissatisfaction that comes from that. That's a good place to begin.
[00:05:04] This is not the only place that this technology has been released. But if you think about the idea of nudging people in a direction, this goes all the way back to the very beginning of the grocery store. When you walk into the grocery store, there's a design to where things are located. Kid stuff are on kid level because they hate parents. The people who run these stores, right? Because it grabs their attention and wants to keep their attention. They want them to engage with that product. The stuff that you really need. You have to walk all the way across the store to get to it. Most of the essentials, because you're more likely to say, oh, yeah, I am kind of hungry. Dunkaroos. They brought those back. I need those too. Like, it's been a while. They want to keep you in the store longer. They want to keep you on their app and on your phone longer. Because the more you're on your phone, the more likely you are to engage with their product.
[00:05:48] Nicholas Carr wrote a book called the Shallows. It was a very transformational book. It's probably 15 years old now. It's back in the early 2010s. He says the Net's interactivity turns us into lab rats, constantly pressing levers to get tiny little pellets of social media. Intellectual nourishment nod to Skinner. Research continues to show that people who read linear text comprehend more, remember more, and learn more than those who read text peppered with links. I don't know anyone who feels as much vitriol towards the hyperlink as Nicholas Carr. The man hates it. And he hates it because, again, as he's writing this in the early 2010s, it's largely the Internet he's talking about.
[00:06:33] He started to notice that he just kind of jumps from one to the next. As you're reading an article, you click a link. It doesn't just usually pop up with just a reference there in a book. It aggravates me when they. When they have a footnote, but they put all the footnotes in the back. Drives me nuts. I just want it at the bottom of the page because I don't like going all the way to the back, reading that, then coming back, it breaks my concentration, breaks the flow of the reading. When you're online and you click a link and it takes you to a whole other page, that whole other page has the article referenced. But what's usually on the column of that page?
[00:07:02] A whole bunch of more ads, a whole lot more content that's trying to say, hey, look at me. Hey, look at me. All the red shirts sitting right here on the screen. Right. Trying to grab my attention so I don't ever get back to the article or it takes me longer to get back to the article to finish that original. Excuse me, that original train of thought.
[00:07:18] There is a consequence to constant disruptions. What are some of the consequences to constant disruptions just in your workplace? What is the consequence of perpetual disruption?
[00:07:31] Okay. You never complete the task you started out to. Yep. What else? Okay. Why is lack of concentration a negative?
[00:07:39] It makes it harder to do things that are more involved, that require more thought.
[00:07:44] Okay. Certain things take more time.
[00:07:47] And when you don't have the time or when you have shorter time, it's hard to do. Deep task. Right.
[00:07:54] Several years ago, back before kids, I used to watch Meet the Press on Sundays because I wanted to identify as an older person. And so there was one particular episode. Where was her name? Just Condoleezza Rice. Sorry, Secretary of State at the time, Condoleezza Rice. Well, she actually was out of office. She was asked about how she would help mentor or how she would address Donald Trump. This is the very beginning of his first term. And her comment was, I would instruct or I would encourage the president that 120 characters or less is not the best place to express deep, complex ideas.
[00:08:32] It's not the best place to discuss things that go beyond just short, quippy statements that stuck with me. This was, you know, eight plus years ago, I guess now. And that quote was, you know, it was surprisingly impactful because it makes sense that because we have these online platforms, these online spaces where we can have this new public square to exchange ideas, there are also going to be limitations to those platforms. One of Those is that it's really, really challenging to take really deep, thoughtful tasks. And there's a hierarchy of tasks in your day. Some things don't take much thought, some things take all of your mental faculties.
[00:09:11] Those don't necessarily need to have a place online.
[00:09:14] Deeper discussions oftentimes can be started online.
[00:09:18] But when we lose each other, I'm talking specifically now in the context of the local church or in Christians relationships, when we begin to lose each other because of some of these short, quippy content we put out there, we allow Satan to be very effective at what he does. He takes not just fragmented time, but now he's fragmenting relationships.
[00:09:39] And the more we see each other online than we see each other in person, the more likely we are to sort of dehumanize and to just, well, to become a little bit more, I think, bigoted, actually. In the book of James, we read a lot about not judging a person based off of appearance. The rich person comes in and you treat them differently than the person that comes in that's not dressed as well. And James says that's not right. That undermines the gospel.
[00:10:05] But I think sometimes because of things like our athletic affiliation, and we do it jokingly, but maybe it creeps in. Sometimes it is Alabama, Tennessee week. Oftentimes we judge people maybe not based off of the clothes they're wearing, but based off of what news outlet they share.
[00:10:24] Not based off of the color of their skin, but based off the color of their ballot.
[00:10:28] Oftentimes we judge based off of. We've talked about this at the beginning. Based off of just how they look, how many wrinkles they have on their face, versus not because of their age. Like we make these preconceived judgments and a lot of those are just. They're just kind of natural. There are certain folks that when I'm out in public, I'm a little bit more aware of their presence. Right. If someone looks like they don't make eye contact a lot, they look a little edgy. Especially these days, it feels like there are people that are on edge everywhere. I kind of want to be aware of that when I have my kids. That is a judgment.
[00:10:57] When I allow that alone to subscribe all the value in my mind to that person, they are no longer valuable in my life. I'm not saying this clearly. When we allow appearance exclusively, whether that be appearance in person or online, what a person appears to us to be, as opposed to who they appear to be, then we allow appearance to guide us and not the gospel. That's something we have to be very aware of.
[00:11:24] Internet life and social media in particular does not lend itself to a biblical pace of life.
[00:11:33] This is ultimately where we're going tonight. When you see a fast statement or you or the page refreshes without you fully reading the context of what somebody posts. That happens to me all the time. Drives me nuts on Facebook. I'll be reading something all of a sudden. It just refreshes on its own from time to time.
[00:11:48] Well, that's not healthy when it comes to seeing people as Christ sees them. And that's. That's our motive, right?
[00:11:56] God's will is that all people come to know him. 1, 2, 3, 4. We made those post it notes a couple of years ago.
[00:12:02] First Timothy, 2, 3, 4.
[00:12:04] God's will is for everyone to come to know a knowledge of him, a knowledge of the truth. He wants all men to be saved.
[00:12:11] That's not always my default setting. That's a me challenge. That's a me issue that I have to be very much aware of. Another way to put this, the great theologian me once said, the samples at Costco aren't designed to be a meal that sustains you, although you can try and get real close on a regular basis, week in and week out. It's gross, like grossly inadequate, right? It's a sample.
[00:12:37] We would take the kids rafting, the teenagers when I was a youth minister here, and we'd stop at the mall up in Chattanooga and I'd make like four rounds around all the Chinese restaurants because they would always have like Sarcoo in particular, the lady adventure. Be like, no, okay, I know that that's the limit. That's good. I know, because if you did that enough, you weren't as hungry.
[00:12:55] I think sometimes we just take these, like little appetizer bites, these sample size and we feel like that's the right amount of spiritual nourishment. Perhaps even Bible class on a Sunday or Wednesday.
[00:13:06] If you hear Sunday morning, Sunday night and Wednesday night, that's still woefully inadequate when it comes to the spiritual nourishment that we are supposed to have in our lives.
[00:13:14] We've looked multiple times at Deuteronomy chapter 6 written on doorposts. The last thing you look at at night, the first thing you look at in the morning.
[00:13:23] Too often it's our devices and not the word of God.
[00:13:26] If you go through the Old Testament, there are multiple river crossings in particular, where God has Israel create these memorials, these monuments, these stacks of stones.
[00:13:35] Most often it's because the next line is, when your children ask what happened here? You can then tell them there's a visual element here that's tied directly to God. The visual part of these devices most often is just candy.
[00:13:53] Sora 2 was just released recently, which is now its own app.
[00:13:58] Just of slop. That's going to be the new word, digital slop.
[00:14:02] And what that means is that everything on Sora is AI generated. Some of it's really funny. I watched Michael Jackson steal somebody's KFC the other day like that. I say funny. I was having a rough day, so it was funny. It helped me, right?
[00:14:16] You can go to these places and just kind of veg out. It's not that different from television and just being entertained or just being occupied.
[00:14:25] But now that it's all artificial, but it looks remarkably accurate and real, you can scan. When you first get on soar, you scan your face and then you put yourself into these videos and you can make some really interesting content.
[00:14:43] You can interact with Abraham Lincoln. I saw one video where I didn't spend a lot of time, but enough time where Abraham Lincoln was playing PlayStation with Martin Luther King Jr. And somebody else. I can't remember. You've probably seen it as well. Just random historical figures.
[00:14:58] Those that have, that are deceased now are sort of open source because anybody can use their likeness. Celebrities, some of them are trying to leverage that. Others are suing.
[00:15:11] You can create almost any kind of scenario and you can immediately imagine how awful that would be if you're an 8th grader and someone else from school takes your photo and puts your face on a body that does something sexually explicit or really dumb.
[00:15:30] It's very much a TikTok style interface.
[00:15:34] TikTok is wildly popular, right? I mean, the government has been involved in legislation because of its influence.
[00:15:43] All tools, as we've said, technology is a tool. A tool must be stewarded. But not all tools are created equal.
[00:15:51] When it comes to our attention and giving our attention to things, we've got to be extremely careful. And we have to build in a pace in our life that is very much counter to Silicon Valley.
[00:16:02] They want to go fast and break things.
[00:16:05] They want everybody to be a part of the group project, whether you want to be or not.
[00:16:10] We have some agency in this. We get to choose how we implement it. Some of these things are going to be increasingly outside of our control. So we have to find the things that are within our control and then we have to control those things.
[00:16:22] How does this approach, this sample size approach to maybe 60? Well, okay. Let's go to the, the average screen time, generally speaking, among teenagers up through probably early 30s, it's going to be somewhere in the seven hour a day range.
[00:16:39] 24 hours in a day, let's go six hours. That's easier math. So 25% of your day, you spend 25% of your day on a device, you're going to spend another 25 to 30% asleep. You got 50% of your day that you're not necessarily looking at something, looking at a device. How does that 25% as it's remapping your brain to go short little bites here. How does that then carry over to how you approach the Bible? How does that impact your Bible study?
[00:17:08] Life is lived in the deep end. How can we expect to swim when all of our attention is spent splashing in the shallow end of cheap entertainment?
[00:17:17] If we give our attention to our devices for a significant amount of our day, it's not an easy flip of the switch to then just go, now I'm going to open my Bible and I'm going to think deeply for hours.
[00:17:26] Right.
[00:17:29] How is the Bible written?
[00:17:31] What are some of the ways in which the Bible pieces of the Bible were written?
[00:17:36] Letters to a correspondence from individual to individual or individual to a group.
[00:17:41] Okay, what else?
[00:17:44] Okay, we'll stay there for a second. How do you read letters typically?
[00:17:48] Do you read them? Go ahead, start to finish, Start to finish. Why full picture? Because there's also most likely a connection of some sort. How do we typically read the Bible or verse even at a time? Right. I mean we got a 13 plus week sermon series on the book of Matthew.
[00:18:08] We got a whole quarter on Galatians a couple quarters ago. Right? Galatians, I mean that's like six chapters. It's a relatively short letter. We spent weeks taking little fractions of that. That's not wrong or sinful. I hope not because that's the way I approach it a lot of times. But what are some of the consequences of that? What's something that we might lose, approaching it exclusively in that manner? Right. You could take one verse that's written and go, man, it's. He must have meant this or that. Without any context. You don't know if you're right or wrong.
[00:18:39] I love the imagery of the old reel to reel film strips. I think we've used this analogy a few times in here. But when you go walk into a movie, in the middle of the movie, you just got like a two minute window and you base all of your opinions about that movie. Based off of the middle of the story.
[00:18:53] It makes no sense to you, right? Like, nah, this doesn't connect to anything. That's kind of how we can approach Bible study sometimes is because we find that verse. How does social media factor into that?
[00:19:05] It shortens our attention span. It also, we get a nice little verse that fits into a little square. Right. And so we do get one verse or so at a time. Growing up, we were always told in the youth group, like, you read context, you got to read the verse before and the verse after, which is a decent place to start.
[00:19:23] But most books of the Bible aren't three verses long, so there's a need to read the whole letter.
[00:19:31] What do you think happens? What's the consequence of only reading the headings in your Bible?
[00:19:36] What's that?
[00:19:37] You lack introduction. Lack introduction? Yep. You lack introduction. What else?
[00:19:42] Those are man made. Yeah. Just like reading all the words in red. The words are not man made. The red is the man made part, right? No. Never make a colors and words in red joke. Got it.
[00:19:53] When men summarize, sometimes it's really helpful, but it's always going to be inadequate. Right.
[00:20:01] It's not the actual text.
[00:20:03] And you can go and learn all of the Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic.
[00:20:07] You can also read the Bible as a whole picture and say, is this a letter? Is this a piece of history? Is this a book of poetry?
[00:20:16] Should that impact how I read it? Probably because the Bible was not written to us. I believe the Bible was written for us. I think there's a difference there. If it's written to you, everything is immediately personally applicable.
[00:20:31] Everything in the Bible is not immediately personally applicable. Not every single sentence in there. If you just take that one out and say, well, this is how this impacts my life. Well, it's written to someone else. Right.
[00:20:43] New Testament is written a big portion of that to Jews, Gentiles, in a Jewish context, and vice versa. So we have to then kind of take a step back. This was written from this person to this person.
[00:20:54] What I'm getting at here is that this is one of those, as Hunter alluded to, more complex things. It deserves more time and attention than the way we approach skimming through social media.
[00:21:07] Just moving on to the next is going to come up inadequate when it comes to understanding the whole picture. One of the things I wish that had been incorporated a lot more in my college education was a holistic picture of the Bible, like the big picture of it, because we kind of did that. We studied books at a time, but we studied this Book at a time and then this book at a time. And then we went and studied this book from over here.
[00:21:32] I think the way I learned it a lot of times made it more difficult for me to see some of the bigger pictures because I just kind of learned it in these fragmented bites. It's a lot like trying to join an actual conversation with friends. If you just jump in and out, if you're on your phone and they're talking and you hear this, but then you go back over here, you're getting an incomplete product, and then you're basing all of your perspective off of incomplete information.
[00:21:57] And that's really dangerous because then we start trying to represent the Bible with an incomplete understanding of the Bible.
[00:22:06] So Christians are called, I believe in the digital age to live a different pace to than the world around us. God told Israel to go into Babylon in Jeremiah, build houses, plant gardens, pray for the city in which you dwell, because in its welfare will be your welfare. But he didn't say go into that city and become them and be like them.
[00:22:27] I think there's a reason that this city set upon a hill analogy is used the way that we do. Life should be distinctively different, not so much that we have to be monks. Because he didn't call us out of the world, Jesus had that opportunity in the garden. When he prayed, he said, God, Father, I pray not that you take them out of this world, but essentially that you would strengthen them spiritually.
[00:22:51] Without the church, the world has no hope of having a teacher.
[00:22:55] Right?
[00:22:57] You can understand God's presence, I think, by seeing the creation around you. Romans 1 alludes to that.
[00:23:03] But you don't understand the Gospel without someone discipling you and teaching you and walking with you and helping you to understand.
[00:23:10] We have to understand.
[00:23:11] We have to think deeper and slower when it comes to scriptures.
[00:23:16] Thanks a lot. Johann Gutenberg. When he came out with the printing press in the 16th century, that kind of changed. Bible study before the 1500s, how was.
[00:23:28] How was the Bible read?
[00:23:30] A lot of oral. Right. Oral communication.
[00:23:33] Council of Nicaea. That's in the three hundreds. From there, we kind of start getting the canonization of what we have today.
[00:23:40] But a very limited group of people who had access to the actual manuscripts and scrolls would read them aloud. There was a very communal reading of Scripture. That was how the Bible was read and understood and passed along was in a communal setting.
[00:23:56] When it comes to communal readings today, we limit it to a couple of verses here and there when the printing press came around. So now we're talking just what's 20, 25 minus 1,500 ish for the last thousand years or so of having this printing. Access to the printing press, not thousand hundreds of years. Don't do math publicly. It's always embarrassing.
[00:24:20] Things change. We have our own personal copy, which is very helpful. But I think we also lose some of the community part of that. We have to come to a place now where we have to find an app where we can communicate with people to have that communal reading of scripture and discerning the text together.
[00:24:35] That came a little bit more by default in previous generations.
[00:24:40] It's not a good thing, bad thing. It's a put more effort into it. That's one of the reasons why I think assembling together and gathering together on the first day of the week and in the middle of the week and other days of the week, whenever you get together with people to have regular in person Bible study is really, really powerful. It's the same thing. As we've said before, praying for someone is really good. Praying with someone is transformative. Like, it's moving. If you've ever been at the hospital and talked with a stranger, talk about, you know, they're there to visit a loved one, a terrible accident, you say, well, I'm here for similar circumstances. I'll pray for you. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. I'll pray for you as well.
[00:25:16] That's very different than you say, can we pray together?
[00:25:19] Usually there's an awkward, oh, like right now. Okay, yeah, yeah.
[00:25:25] And then I would say like three times out of four, it ends with at least one, if not both, in tears because there's something about that connection. And this has been kind of an underwriting theme of the last few weeks in here, is that in person, the embodied presence of another person, specifically in Christian fellowship, different.
[00:25:45] It should have a different impact than just being in the same room as someone else. Sitting at your cubicle at the office is good. Engaging with the people in that area, that community, whether you want to be there or not. But engaging with a spiritual purpose, with the gospel in mind, can change their life forever.
[00:26:04] When we spend all of our time on devices that fragment our thinking, then what usually happens is when we're in those environments, we're just going from one task to the next. We're working the list. And we're not really looking up to see opportunities or depending on what we spend all our time eating, those samples. We're looking up for opportunities to have a gotcha moment with somebody.
[00:26:26] The echo Chamber then gets cultivated really quickly and really easily because you move from one video to the next. It just keeps that like steady dopamine of hatred and division.
[00:26:37] It's a really hard thing to fight against if that's where we're spending our time. If sitting at a stoplight, our attention is drawn to our device. If standing in line, our attention is drawn to our device. If putting my kids down for bedtime, my attention is drawn to the device.
[00:26:50] My device rarely will draw me into sustained, deeper spiritual thinking.
[00:26:57] And so I have to be aware of that.
[00:26:59] I'm not saying having any of those things is inherently or sinful. I'm just saying that they're not really optimized for our spiritual well being.
[00:27:07] And when we decided to put Christ on in baptism, we decided to die to self. We also inherently in that now the fine writing, I don't know if you knew this, but it also says you died to your algorithm.
[00:27:18] It should, right?
[00:27:20] Because that's not what is supposed to form and shape us. What's supposed to form and shape us is the word of God, his Holy Spirit, the fellowship of the saints, communing with Christ through the Lord's Supper, blessed. I love it. It's not as in vogue as it once was, but that was everybody's hashtag for a long time, right?
[00:27:41] We've asked some of these questions already.
[00:27:43] What is the result of only reading headings in our Bibles? Or what some of the challenges we might face with social media Bible posting? Oftentimes it's context, oftentimes it's a deeper understanding and. But more often than not it's just kind of a touch and go.
[00:27:59] A lot of times if I'm adjacent to good things and I feel like I'm a part of that. Great illustration in my mind of this goes back several years. We did like an impersonal survey in each of the connect groups and the survey asked how evangelistic do you feel the Madison congregation is? Most connect groups on average were like an 8 or a 9 or above.
[00:28:20] The follow up question was how evangelistic are you?
[00:28:24] And pretty consistently the average was like three, maybe a four.
[00:28:30] As the kids say that don't math because if the church is the people and we're all a three and a four, how does the Madison Church of Christ become all of a sudden magically this eight or nine? Well, I think part of that is because in our minds we give money that a huge chunk of our budget goes overseas to other churches or other places to other churches. And so financially we're very evangelistic, we're very benevolent with our funds. But when it comes to having a personal conversation with an individual face to face, we're a lot more hesitant to do that.
[00:29:04] I'm not saying giving money is a bad thing. That's great. We are a blessed church with a lot of resources. And we have to think in terms of stewardship, not in terms of consumer there. But we also have to understand that the part of the Great Commission that was spoken to the people that were present there, I do think that part does carry over directly to us. Because the consistent pattern throughout the New Testament is that a new disciple goes on to make a new disciple who goes on to make a new disciple who goes on to make a new disciple.
[00:29:34] We are in the planting and the watering business, which means that when we have the opportunity to talk to someone, the other things in our life, we have to find a way to make them secondary.
[00:29:46] The gospel and the growth of the kingdom of God is primary because it's directly tied to our growth, our spiritual growth as well.
[00:29:54] The more you understand Christ, the more you understand what his death has done and what it means for you, then the deeper the gratitude goes. It's just like in a marriage. Ideally, if you've been married for 30 years, your relationship is stronger than it was when you first got married.
[00:30:10] Definitely stronger than when you were dating.
[00:30:13] Ideally, there's a pattern of growth in a relationship between parents and kids, between friends. We've been friends for any amount of time. There should be more experiences together. There should be a deeper appreciation if we're both actively investing in that relationship. God has made Himself known here, I think, in multiple ways, specifically through the Word of God. I view Scripture as God's journal.
[00:30:36] It's his diary to us, right? This gives us all insight into who God is, what he. Also, every now and then, a letter from your daughter. It gives us insight into who he is, what he wants for his people, the life that he has designed them to live and to be a part of. Ephesians tells us that we are created in him for good works.
[00:30:57] We have a purpose, and that purpose is not tied to our stuff. That purpose is not tied to our anything else in this life other than to glorify him and to grow his kingdom. And I think you see that in the lives of his early disciples. We're going through the Book of Acts this quarter, the early church.
[00:31:16] And when you see a change in someone's mind, you see a change in their action as well, right? All of the conversions in the Book of Acts, there's a sense of urgency that accompanies them and then there's a sense of multiplicity afterwards.
[00:31:31] Sometimes these little bite sized echo chambers we get ourselves into, they don't lead to that for whatever reason. So we have to dig deeper. Another excerpt from Nicholas Carr. He says what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away at my capacity for concentration and not contemplation. Whether I'm online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it. I meant to bold that line there. Let me read it one more time. Whether I'm online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it.
[00:32:02] Once I was a scuba diver. Excuse me, scuba diver. Cough added for emphasis. Once I was a scuba diver in the seas of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a jet ski.
[00:32:14] Whether I'm online or not, I think like I'm online. The way the Net has shaped me to think, this is the danger, right?
[00:32:27] This is Israel wanting to be like the kingdoms around them, looking all around and being shaped and formed by what other people had, as opposed to the words of God, the direction of God, the community that God had provided for them, the sustenance that God had provided for them.
[00:32:42] These other things that are in our world cultivate something other than the image of Christ. And if we're casual about it, if we don't think deeply about it, and if we don't ever slow down long enough to truly examine, then we will find ourselves looking in the mirror and not seeing the image of Jesus.
[00:32:58] That's the danger.
[00:33:00] The good news is there are ways to guard against that one. Just see how long you can go with a digital fast.
[00:33:07] It's not condemning anyone that's on a phone. But can you go 24 hours without your phone or downgrade your phone? Get an app. Get the. Oh man, I can't remember. Anyway, there's an app that just. It dumbs your phone. There are probably multiple out there now actually, but there's one that I've used in the past and I meant to bring it back up. You can lock down all of your apps. You can do that natively on an iPhone or on an Android as well. You can set time parameters on your phones. You can put in all of the necessary speed bumps to make it difficult for you to get to the thing that you want.
[00:33:38] We don't generally like to think of ourselves in terms of an addict.
[00:33:42] I can go without it. I Can quit whenever I want. I just don't ever want to. What? Well, that's the part we're working on, right? I could quit chocolate cookies, chocolate chip cookies, whenever I wanted.
[00:33:52] I don't ever want to not have a chocolate chip cookie, Right? That's the part that I have to work on. Is my desire. Is it in the right place?
[00:34:00] Is it in the place of the Gospel? I love the imagery there of zipping along the surface like a guy on a jet ski. Listen to a few of these passages.
[00:34:08] Philippians, chapter 4 and verse 8. Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable, if anything is excellent or praiseworthy, think on such things.
[00:34:22] Psalm 1:2. Their delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law they meditate day and night. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are of the earth.
[00:34:35] When you go through the Book of Psalms in particular, I meant to go through and highlight all of these, but we'll touch on a few of them like we're on a jet ski, shall we? All right. In Psalm 119, verse 105, your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path. If you're walking through the woods and you've got a lamp or you've got the lantern, you're focused on that. You're focused on what it shines a light on, because everything else is dark.
[00:34:58] It doesn't just light your path, it also focuses your vision. Right? It directs you where to go.
[00:35:05] Let's see, in verse 129. Your testimonies are powerful, therefore my soul keeps them. The unfolding of your words gives light, and it imparts understanding to the simple, I open my mouth and pant because I long for your commandments.
[00:35:22] I mean, just go all through the book of Psalms. Maybe that should be our homework. Go over and over again and find where the psalmist, whether it be David or someone else, talks about all of the different ways in which they love the commands of God, they think on, they dwell upon, they meditate day and night. And we have kind of. We've created meditation. We've allowed that to become this, like, weird yoga thing that apparently only bendy, flexible people can do, right? They meditate. Or it's this weird, mystical, like from the 70s carryover of meditation, om. And it's its own weird monastery community. No, meditation is a deeply biblical concept. It means to think longly and deeply about something.
[00:36:09] Our salvation is worth thinking deeply about if you rely on the 60 seconds, roughly, that we give ourselves on Sundays to truly observe the sacrifice of Christ.
[00:36:24] And I'm not trying to criticize what we do on Sunday, I'm saying that if that's what we lean into exclusively, then you're going to probably get about 60 seconds of faithfulness throughout the week. Right? You're going to get what 60 seconds of deep thinking produces, which is a sample size.
[00:36:41] I love the samples at Costco. Make multiple trips, but I have to make multiple trips because one trip doesn't fill me up. It doesn't provide the sustenance that I need. It definitely won't carry me through the day.
[00:36:51] We can't rely on little. We can't rely on hobby lobby quotes and, you know, and posters and pictures or the cheap candy of social media and think that that's going to sustain. Yeah, I read my verse for the day. That's great. Keep going. It's a great start.
[00:37:06] What are your Bible study goals for this year?
[00:37:09] Do you have Bible study goals this year? If you do, have you met them? Are you, are you meeting them?
[00:37:14] How are those going to increase next year?
[00:37:17] One of the challenges that we have here just kind of give you a little peek behind the curtain from a minister standpoint, is we try to think, how do we help the congregation grow year in and year out? Like we tend to think in 12 month periods. And there's some limitations to that sometimes. But I kind of keep coming back to this idea that this is a building full of disciples of Christ.
[00:37:39] We had a whole emphasis on hospitality and fellowship because we felt like most of us aren't doing that. By most of us, I mean, we don't do that regularly.
[00:37:48] And I know that I need to.
[00:37:50] I think part of my job specifically in my role now is I've got to help produce resources that encourage and equip.
[00:37:58] That's the line of thinking. Because as we get bigger, what if we had 1400, we got a lot of kids. So what if we had 700 adults here that were truly equipped to discern the word of God, to boldly proclaim the word of God, and then also had some resources that help people walk through the Word of God, not to shortcut, but to actually go deeper?
[00:38:21] I feel like that's my purpose in this role. That's the purpose of this role is to increase our touch to one another, to increase our depth.
[00:38:28] But if it's just to put out a series of posts on Instagram, that's not worth it.
[00:38:34] There's not eternal value in that in isolation.
[00:38:38] We've got to point people to the bigger context. We had a couple more. Yeah. Think about each. How should we read it? Think about each book, think about the context, think about the purpose, think about the style that it's written in. Think about context is more than just the verse before and the verse after.
[00:38:51] Turn your phone into grayscale. If you keep your phone on, you put it in grayscale.
[00:38:56] Erase everything off of your home screen except for your Bible app.
[00:39:00] Set reminders to read the Bible at a certain time. A.m. and p.m. 8:00am 8:00pm if you've got kids, what habits, what kind of rhythms are you putting into your life? It's really hard.
[00:39:11] We've got four young kids, we've got extracurriculars, we've got all these other things that are good that we also enjoy.
[00:39:20] There's a constant conversation that we don't always get to enough that says, hey, what's the most important?
[00:39:26] What do we want the result to be of our kids lives? And let's work back from that. What's going to actually produce that result? The same question goes for me. What do I want? What do I want my life to look like when I'm 80 years old?
[00:39:37] I want to know a lot more of the Bible than I know now. I want to be like Uli Ross Brannan, who I never saw read the Bible. He always quoted it.
[00:39:46] I would look it up. There's no way he got two Chronicles. No, there it is. Okay, well done. Yeah. Every time. Because he had spent time and because he had, he had invested depth to understanding it, to learning it. Because reading scripture was communing with God for him.
[00:40:02] It was on equal plane with being with God's people.
[00:40:05] We tend to have our own little hierarchy sometimes of what's, what's more important. We've got to see spiritual things. Those the spiritual priority in our life must be always the priority in our life. There's no such thing as a plural priorities. It's singular by nature.
[00:40:21] How does what you're reading fit into the whole picture? When you post, do you point people to the bigger context? There's some things sometimes that we unwittingly contribute to and some of that is just snippets. It's not a bad thing. But can you go one step further and encourage, hey, for the full message go here or for the full context, read here.
[00:40:41] I contemplated us just reading the book of Philemon and we probably still have time. Actually, guess not.
[00:40:48] Thank you. Kevin.
[00:40:50] Understood my point. Is you can read one book of the Bible in less than two minutes. And I'm not a fast reader.
[00:40:57] Only 65 more to go.
[00:40:59] You want to get a little bit of momentum. Start with the short books, read those. You want to really get a bigger picture. Read a chronological book that you read the books in order that they were written.
[00:41:10] Read the Old Testament accompanied by the New Testament and start seeing all of these connections that we oftentimes don't pick up on when we read each one in isolation. Again, sample size is great, travel size is great, but it's not meant to sustain you. It's not meant to be the whole of the picture. Let's bow.
[00:41:29] God, we love you and we thank you so very much for the various ways that we can engage with your scriptures. Thank you for the opportunity to have Bible apps that give us access to scholars thoughts and their research.
[00:41:40] But Father, help us to never be satisfied or to just compromise and stay with things that are meant to be a supplement as opposed to what you have given to us, which is supposed to be the sustenance. Help us, Father, to long for a deeper relationship with you. Help us to go to Scripture not looking for singular answers here and there, but to understand who youo are and then to understand what yout plan and you'd will is for us.
[00:42:06] Help us to not be conformed to this world, but be transformed in the renewing of our minds so that we can then discern what yout will is for us. We love you and we thank you. In Christ's name. Amen.
[00:42:16] Love you guys. Have a great week.
