I've been assigned this topic to talk to you on this topic, Excellent Conversation in a Digital Age. That was assigned to me. I didn't ask for it. I'm the least qualified person in the room to talk about it. I hope you're still glad you came. But we're going to need to think together tonight a little bit and perhaps challenge some of our assumptions. I don't want you to think that I'm here to tell you that every person who carries one of these things is a sinner, you know, bound for hell. Devices like these are wonderful. We'll explore that in just a moment. But there are some things about the age we live in that we desperately need to consider together. And so I've done a ton of reading, tried to pull together some resources for you that I hope will be helpful. It feels a little odd to me to To tackle this after that singing, I just rejoiced as we sang together about the power of the cross, but that will come into tonight's talk, so I hope it will be beneficial. So I'm going to ask for the Lord's help and then we'll jump in. Our Father, we again pray that Your Holy Spirit would come to bring clarity to us. We know, Lord, that Satan would cloud our vision. and He would interrupt our thoughts. And even now, as we try to think together, He would do everything He can to keep us from focusing on that which is real and good and right and true and beautiful. So, Lord, we pray that You would thwart the work of Satan tonight, that You would even put a No Trespassing sign up around this place and fence us off for a little while, that we could actually enter into the Holy of Holies, even as we talk about something, in some cases, so distasteful as this. subject tonight. We thank You for Your Word, which is a light in a dark place. Help us to walk in that light, we pray. In Jesus' name, amen. Let me ask a few questions. I'll ask you to raise your hand. Nothing embarrassing yet. Well, nothing embarrassing. How many of you are under 30? Raise your hand if you're under 30 age. Yes. Okay. How many of you are under 20, age 20? If you raise your hand. Okay. Good. All right. How many of you have a handheld device on your person or in your immediate vicinity that is yours right now? Okay. Good. All right. I love mine. I actually panicked. I haven't done this. In the last year and a half, I've had my iPhone. Just before I walked up here to set this thing up for the PowerPoint, I lost my phone. And I mean I went into a panic. So it's a frightful thing, and I hope you never have to face that. I did find it quickly, praise the Lord. I've been sweating tonight. But of those of you who answered in the affirmative, that you do indeed have a device on you or with you at the moment. How many of you are glad? Raise your hand if you're glad you have one. A little bit more courageous you have to be to raise your hand right there. Good, okay, good. A little more courageous still. How many of you play video games? Okay, all right. How many of you watch TV? I mean at all, you know, do you ever watch TV? Did you know, by the way, there was a study released just last week that correlates watching TV with bullying at school. It's not the way you think it would be. It's this way. The more you watch TV, the more likely you are to be bullied at school. Did you know that? There's actually a study telling you that now. It's true. It really, I read it online. I mean, of course. All right. One more nosy question. How many of you have a Facebook account? How many of you have a Facebook account? Okay. All right. Good. All right. So you've already revealed to me that you're more qualified to speak on this than I am because I don't have a Facebook account. I don't have it simply because I think I would like it so well I would never get anything else done. I think I would love Facebook. So I've chosen not to go there. My wife and I have made that decision not to go there. Some of you are mad at us for that. But it's just the way it is. You have to see pictures of my son Aidan in other ways besides Facebook. I don't have a Facebook account. I don't do Twitter. I don't quite understand how Twitter works. I don't usually read blogs, not very much anyway. But I frankly am blessed by the digital age in which we live. I just am blessed by it, as are you. So many wonderful conveniences that come to us because of the digital age. I grew up, you know, I'm 50 years old. I grew up, my grandparents, you may not believe this, well, you will when you find out that I grew up in West Virginia. Now, we'll start there. Growing up in West Virginia, which was the poorest state in the nation except maybe Mississippi or Arkansas sometimes. Bounced back and forth, competing for that position. So we're the poorest state in the poor, you know, the poorest state of the nation. And my grandparents did not even have indoor plumbing in their house. So I had spent summers with them. I knew what it was. I was 16 years old, older than many of you, before my grandparents moved to a house that had a bathroom. There was no shower. There was a sink in the kitchen, but it didn't have a faucet on it because there was no running water in the house. My grandpa had rigged up a sink that had a had a drain that ran down into the house and out into the yard and out into the garden. So the sink water washed out into the garden to water the plants. And the garden is really pretty ingenious. Running water at the house was, Tommy, that was me, Tommy, go get the pail of water. And it meant go out to the well outside and drop the bucket down in the well until you heard it gurgle, and then turn the handmade crank until the bucket came back up out of the well laden with the delicious cold water from the bottom of the well. You spill it into the bucket, hope you don't spill it on the ground, carry it back in, set it down. Dipper's hanging on the wall, take the dipper, take a drink of that good cold fresh water, put the dipper back for the next person. Don't worry about germs back then, you see. That was the technology that I was familiar with as a child, so it's a bit of a strange thing for me to come in and talk to people about the digital age, because I am an immigrant to a world that you are natives of. Do you understand the analogy? I'm an immigrant, you are a native. You have grown up digital, I didn't grow up digital. I'm making my way into this world, slowly and cautiously. Many of you are in it, and you've never known anything but it. So with a few of those awkwardnesses out of the way, I do want us to jump in. I have one more question, one more nosy question, which will take the most courage of all, and that is, does anyone any of you in the under 30 crowd, does anyone share my concern that digital might be taking us further than we want to go? Wow. That's impressive. I teach down at the school and I, you know, have talks like this all the time. It just doesn't happen to be on this topic. And I don't typically I don't cue anybody to say, you know, be sure to raise your hand at this point because I really need the affirmation or whatever. It's as if I cued you because that's a substantial number of you who share a concern. I want to make you both more and less concerned before this is over with. I want to make everyone both more and less concerned because I think there are valuable things, of course, that can come from the age in which we live. There's a wonderful book. I have the book. I've been intending to buy it for two years. It's called The Shallows and it's by Nicholas Carr and it's subtitled What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. I thought I might just read this quote at the top here before we get any further. The boons are real. The boon is a word for blessing, the good things. The benefits are real, he says. But they come at a price. Media aren't just channels of information. Many of us think the media is only a channel of information and the information is unaffected. That's not true. He argues the media isn't just a channel of information. Media supply the stuff of thought but they also shape the process of thought. Key expression, hold on to that, shape the process of thought. And what the net seems to be doing is chipping away my, he's speaking personally, chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. Concentration and contemplation, two things of which extremely important in the life of a Christian. He's not writing from a Christian perspective at all, but you and I are coming at this as Christians. And so, as Christians, contemplation and concentration are critical to our faith. Spending time in secret with the Lord is a critical part of your spiritual development. concentrating for an hour at a time in many of our churches on a sermon that is linear in thought, following step by step, line upon line, precept upon precept through a sermon. And sustaining that kind of attention and interest in our day and time is extremely difficult. I know I teach school. Again, I've heard of that multiple times probably. Whether I'm online or not, he says, my mind now expects to take in information the way the net distributes it. My mind expects to take in information the way the net distributes it. How is that? In a swiftly moving stream of particles. And then at the end, he gives this wonderful analogy. Once, he says, I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. A scuba diver in the sea of words. Now, I zip along the surface like a guy on a jet ski. You may look at that analogy and say, well, I'd rather be on the jet ski any day. And I am a slow reader. I'm pretty sure I have a handicap that's probably pathological and diagnosable, but I have just struggled to read for many years and still do, but I read a lot. I would like to be able to just skim along on the surface, but I find I don't get much that way. Scuba diving is where it's at, to use some bad grammar here. Let me ask you, there are things that you can get by jet skiing across, right? You can read in such a way some things and skim the surface and get something, but there are certain things you just can't get that way. Did you learn your multiplication tables by jet skiing? Did you learn the intricacies of Spanish? or French or Latin by just skimming the surface? You see, it's impossible. There are certain things that's impossible to get by only doing the jet ski thing. And Nicholas Carr is arguing that the internet has made him and arguably more of us more like jet skiers in how we acquire information than scuba divers. And he's going to argue that we need to not forget that scuba diving is important too. Are you with me so far, together so far? Okay, good. So what I'd like to, well, I'll say further in the book, he does, I'll say one more thing about this book. Further in the book, he says that when you turn on a computer, this is another great metaphor, he says, when you turn on a computer, iPad, iPhone, go, you know, your tablet, your smartphone, whatever it is, when you turn that thing on, you are plunged, he says, into an ecosystem of distraction technologies. You are plunged into an ecosystem of distraction technologies. While I was building this whole apparatus here, you know, this PowerPoint, I'm working on my research. Of course, I'm doing a great deal of it online. But you know what's over here in the right-hand corner the whole time I'm searching for stuff? Ford trucks. And you know why there were Ford trucks? Because I've been looking for a Ford truck. And that thing knew it. Did you know that Google... Did you know Google's mission is to organize the world's information in an accessible way for everyone? That's a huge mission. That is their, well, I may have missed a word or two, but that's essential. That is their mission, to organize the world's information and make it accessible to all. That's Google's plan. Google's founder has also said that the best search engine in the world would be this, and this is his goal. He says it's a 300-year goal. In 300 years, they'll get there, they think. And I'm sure they have algorithms to prove it. Their goal is to be the best search engine in the world, and here's the best search engine in the world. It understands exactly what you mean and gives you exactly what you want. That's the best search engine in the world. Well, I would agree. It understands exactly what you mean. Everybody said the frustration probably of Googling something, and it just didn't quite get it, right? It just didn't understand what you were looking for. But for Google to understand what you mean, it's got to be studying you like you haven't even studied yourself and know you like you probably don't even know yourself. And this is why, and this is a very primitive form at this point, but this is why my computer knew that I was looking, why there needed to be Ford trucks over there distracting me the whole time I'm doing my research is because they know I have this really, I stayed up late at night hoping that I would find the Ford truck I'm looking for. It knows this. because it was my tool by which I looked. And so even when I'm not looking, it's throwing forward trucks my way. There's another one. There's another one. Here's another one. Take a look. Click on me. Click on me. Click on me. You're plunged into an ecosystem of distraction technologies. Now, add to that the fact that I have two e-mail accounts, one for work, one for everything else, literally every, I mean, tons of things else. It just, it's, so, you know, you're always back and forth checking, well, is there something new on e-mail? And then you think, oh, yeah, I need to look up that word. I forgot. Oh, off to dictionary.com, one of my favorite apps on, Dictionary.com is like the best. You don't have to pay for it. You can do, you can look up any word anytime you want to and in the classroom, believe me, if you are a teacher, become a teacher. Dictionary.com is your friend. So off you go to Dictionary.com or off you go to look at Ford Trucks again. Distraction technology everywhere. So here we are in this, in this milieu of distraction. I'd like to show you, what time did I start? Do you know what, did we start like at 20 after? Okay, this is about a four-minute, three-and-a-half-minute video. That's true. Google would know. That's right. By the way, I think their little plan that's 300 years out is more like a prescription for hell than it is anything else. You think about this. To know exactly what you mean and give you exactly what you want. To me, that's an awful lot like what hell is going to be like. Because, you see, hell is not God deciding to let the devil have fun and poke you with a great big arrow all the time and go around having a party if you're, you know, an unbeliever. Hell is giving you exactly what you asked for for your entire life, a life without God, a life without restraint. This is what you've asked for, right? This is what hell will be. That with its consequences played out over the millions and millions of years. Anyway, that's just a sideline. I won't charge extra for it. This little video is called, this is an hour and a half long documentary called Digital Nation. Has anybody seen this? It was done by PBS. It's ancient. five years old. In the digital world, that's ancient, right? So you're going to see the devices look a little funny, but anyway, it's still relevant, I think. Starts here with talking to a professor at MIT, Massachusetts Institute for Technology. These are the most brilliant students in the world. They're testing these people with respect to this distraction issue. Is the internet doing something to us that causes us to be more distractible? And then it moves to Stanford in California and you get to see actually a research project unfold. And again, this is about a three and a half minute clip. So. I teach at MIT. I teach the most brilliant students in the world. But they have done themselves a disservice by drinking the Kool-Aid and believing that a multitasking learning environment will serve their best purposes. There really are important things you cannot think about unless it's still and you're only thinking about one thing at a time. There are just some things that are not amenable. to being thought about in conjunction with 15 other things. I feel like the professors here do have to accept that we can multitask very well and that we do at all times. And so if they try and, you know, restrict us from doing it, it's almost unfair because we are completely capable of moving in between lecture and other things and just keeping track of the many things that are going on in our lives. No one's actually measured whether these kids are as successful at multitasking as they claim to be. But out in California, a respected research lab is studying their counterparts on the Stanford campus in Palo Alto. You know, they understand the research, they're smart kids, but they seem utterly convinced it doesn't apply to them. We want to study what's really going on in the brain. When it comes to what parts of the brain, we know nothing. These are really the first studies of brain imaging of multitaskers versus non-multitaskers. How much money do you have in the pocket right now? Twenty more. Twenty more? With something that small, making impact on something as small as your retirement. This never happened here like 500 times. This never happened. Well, if you start putting that money towards your retirement, and let it grow over time, 20, 30 years, that retirement challenge might not seem so big after all. thing we discover here is new, because we know zero. Now, in this lab here, we're researching speaking on the cell phone while driving. Tell me about a time when you had to deal with a difficult person. You walk around the world, and you see people multitasking. They're playing games, and they're reading email, and they're on Facebook, et cetera. Yet, classic psychology says, that's impossible. No one can do that. In general, our brains can't do two things at once. And we want to ask the question, how did they do it? Did they have some secret ingredient, some special ability that psychologists had no idea about? Or what's going on? You guys were chosen because you're very high chronic multitaskers. NASA allowed us to film one of his studies conducted on a group of carefully chosen students. On a college campus, most kids are doing two things at once, maybe three things at once. These are kids who are doing five, six or more things at once all the time. The experiment looks simple. Identify numbers as odd or even, letters as vowels or consonants. But it's rife with traps in the form of distractions. NASA's testing how quickly these kids can switch between tasks without losing their focus. I'm pretty much constantly texting. And whenever I study, I have my laptop out and listening to music. I'm watching a YouTube video. I'm checking my email, nonstop refreshing the page. I'm on Facebook, Facebook chat. So that I can always stay connected. I think so. Okay. What we found was that you're actually significantly slower when you're switching than when you're doing kind of the same task consistently. Virtually all multitaskers think they are brilliant at multitasking. And one of the big discoveries is, you know what, you're really lousy at it. It turns out multitaskers are terrible at every aspect of multitasking. They get distracted constantly. Their memory is very disorganized. Recent work we've done suggests they're worse at analytic reasoning. We worry that it may be creating people who are unable to think well and clearly. When I got back to New York, I noticed how much I, too, fell prey to distractions. I kept catching myself in the act, checking my email when I should have been writing a script, Googling something to satisfy a random curiosity. This is affecting all of us. The Shakespeare quote of your Were you able to hear that well enough? Could you follow what was going on there? Well, whether you're concerned about this or not and whether you think this is overblown or not, here's what I would just say about it. We never know how bad off we are until we start trying to change. Think about it. You never know how bad off you are on some, it doesn't matter what it is, until you try to change. You say, well, I'm not addicted to smoking cigarettes. I just enjoy a cigarette occasionally. And try to change and see what happens. I'm not addicted to using foul language in my everyday talk. I just occasionally let a word fly here and there and say pardon my French and go on. But then when you try to change, you wind up realizing how bad you really were. The human heart is deceptive. You see, it's deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, the Bible says. So, of course, the Bible is not unaware, the Holy Spirit is not unaware that this is the age in which we would live. And this is the text that was assigned, and so it actually has some amazing Well, it's just a beautiful, beautiful passage. Timothy already talked about it today. He gave you a summary of the text, and I decided after that I probably wouldn't even speak tonight because he said what I needed to, and I can just close my Bible and sit down and enjoy the rest of the conference. But some of you are seconding that motion, I suppose, right now. But take a look at it and see how it's going to actually serve as strategy, I think, as we think through this issue. Dearly beloved, I beseech you. as strangers and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts which war against the soul, having your conversation honest among the Gentiles, that whereas they speak against you as evildoers, they may by your good works which they shall behold glorify God in the day of visitation. Now what I did and what I like to do and something that you can do, there's no reason you can't do this. You do not have to be called of God to preach the gospel for a lifetime to do this. Some of you will be or are, but not all of you will be or are. But you can all take the Bible and you can actually take a look at the phrases and start trying to organize them in your mind according to what is the controlling idea there. What is the basic idea that's emerging from the text? And so what I've tried to do is to break down the lines of the text and to come up with a single word as best I can that encapsulates what the line is about. So it starts out, dearly beloved, I beseech you, as strangers in pilgrims, strangers in pilgrims. And so the word that came to my mind is citizenship. You see, a stranger is a person who's away from home, right? He's not where he's a citizen. A pilgrim is one on his way home. A citizen is one who is at home. So where are you at home? Citizenship. abstain from fleshly lusts which war against the soul." Well, the key word there seems to be war. And so warfare seemed to be the nice title for this segment of the text, warfare. Having your conversation honest among the Gentiles. Well, conversation, as you probably know, is an old way of saying lifestyle or manner of living. So, I just paraphrased it as lifestyle. That whereas they speak against you as evil doers, the Gentiles are just, it's just a word for unbelievers in this instance, that whereas they speak against you as evil doers, okay, wait a minute, their opinion of me is that I'm an evil doer? This is about my reputation. That as they speak evil against you, they may by your good works which they shall behold glorify God in the day of visitation. expectation. What are we expecting? What is coming down the road? What's going to happen as we interact with the people around us? And so I summarize that as expectation. Let's take a closer look at each of these now. Dearly beloved, I beseech you as strangers in pilgrims, your citizenship question, where is home for you? Where is home for you? For me, I would say Roanoke, Virginia. And yet, that's not my home. I've lived there 25 years, but that is not my home. So, well, where you grew up in West Virginia, that place you're talking about where you, you know, had a sink with no faucet, now that's not home either. I was thinking during the panel discussion this afternoon, about sacrifice. The only thing I could even think about, about sacrifice in my life was the day I was baptized. I was 16 years old. I was baptized in a creek in West Virginia by my dad and my uncle. And a man came to me while I was on the bank afterward, and we're all shaking hands and hugging necks, and I'm soaking wet. And a man, a brother in the church, came and he said, you may lose some friends because of what you've done today. Of course, he didn't know I didn't have any friends, so that Right. He didn't have to know that. So, you may lose some friends because of what you've done today. And I remember thinking, you know, if I lose any friends because of this, it doesn't matter because I have come home. Being with the Lord and His people, being on the same side as Jesus Christ, obeying Him, and walking through this wind-blistered, lonely world with the saints of God was home. And yet it isn't. Not ultimately. The reason it feels like home, if you really feel that way, and I hope many of you do. If you don't, get in the closet with the Lord because it's the sweetest home there is. But the reason it feels like home is because it is in the church of the Lord Jesus Christ that heaven comes nearest to earth. And heaven is your home if you're born again. Where's your citizenship? Where is home for you? Paul would say in Philippians 3.20, our citizenship, our conversation, he uses the word there, means citizenship in that instance, is in heaven. Christians classically have looked at this to say, we have double citizenship. We have dual citizenship. I'm a citizen of heaven as a born again believer in Jesus Christ. I am a citizen of the United States at the same time. Therefore, I have obligations that apply to both places. heaven and earth. The real point here is if heaven is your home, then heaven's influence will be felt much like my home's influence is felt in my life no matter where I am. I have sweet thoughts of home. I have nothing but sweet thoughts of home. And those thoughts have influence on my life no matter where I am or what I'm doing. Does that make sense? Where is home for you? We'll come back to these in a minute in the context we're talking. The text says, abstain from fleshly lusts which war against the soul. Now this is an intriguing passage because an awful lot of people are lying dead or dying or gasping on the battlefield of life having no idea what hit them because they don't even know they were at war and no idea that they were in a battle. Picture with me, you're walking innocently enough along in a wooded lane and you have no idea that down the road, just down the road, just around the bend, some enemy soldiers are lying in ambush waiting for you. You're walking past a big oak tree. You have no idea that in the top of that tree, hidden up there amongst the foliage, is a sharpshooter. Here's a man trained to peck people off like you. He's got a rifle in hand, and he also has a note in his hand. Because the enemy's military intelligence has told him that you're going to be walking this way and you're a prime target and that note has your name on it. And this marksman is in the tree with your name on it and the clothes you're wearing and the height and weight of you so that he can recognize you. He has the advantage because you can't see him, he can see you. What verb would you apply right there? for you, if you were the person, what verb, what would you do right there? Does that call to mind a verb to you? Run. Absolutely run. You're going to do everything you can to get out of there, right? You're going to run. You're going to... You know, what if you found out? You're going to run. You're going to call in reinforcements. Indifference is not an option, right? You're not going to walk along and say, oh, so what? Oh, maybe they'll miss me, you know? This is war. And in war, you're always watching. You're always watching to be sure that the sniper is not after you. So I ask the question, who or what is the villain in your story? Did you know you have one or more than one? You have a villain in your story. It really puzzles me that some Christians don't get this. They do not get it. You have never read a story in your life. Literature class, I teach literature, you've never read a story in your life that didn't have a villain. Little Red Riding Hood, going off to take something to grandmother, right? Mother says, don't step off the path, stay on the path. Wile E. Wolf comes along and says, why don't you pick some berries? And she does. He races ahead. Of course, you know, the story gets really violent. There are a couple of versions of it. Some are sanitized, but it gets really, like so many of these stories we tell our kids, they're really violent. I mean, this wolf eats Grandma up, okay? And then dresses up like Grandma and impersonates her. So Goldilocks, oh, Goldilocks. Like I say, you all are better qualified to talk about this than I am. You have more recently probably read Little Red Riding Hood than I have. However, you know that there's a villain in that story, right? It wouldn't be a story if there wasn't a villain. How about your story? Abstain from fleshly lust which war against the soul. Lust is simply a word for desire. And the problem with us most of the time is not that our desires are too strong, it's that they're too weak. We desire silly stuff, stuff that only satisfies for the moment and leaves us with a conscience all soiled and stained and messed up, feeling bad and all that. That's our problem. Our problem is that we don't desire enough the real joys that there are that last forever. Well, anyway, it's stained from fleshly lust, the lust of the wrong kind, the desires that are all messed up, which actually do war against the soul. They're like the sniper. They're ready to take your life out. Now, if I were applying a verb, I would not have used the verb abstain. This could take all night, so I won't belabor this point, but it has shocked me lately as I've been thinking about this, that a lot of times the Bible uses these really lame verbs for the fight. I mean, talk to anybody who's been in the service, if anybody's been in active duty, the word abstain is not usually a word you use on the battlefield, right? All right, the enemy is going to be approaching full speed. You're on the front line. You've got your guns. Abstain. This is not what you do on the battlefield. And yet this is what we're called to do on the battlefield of life as Christians. It's what we're called to do. Abstain. I was thinking about this the other day. I was trying to figure this. Why in the world did the Holy Spirit give us a verb that's that laid back in a battle? And then I was reading Isaac or Lewis, one that had the little... Do you get those It's a wonderful use of technology. Do you get those devotionals in the morning? They just pop in about 6 a.m. Eastern time anyway in my inbox. And they had written one that referenced Hebrews chapter 12 where the Lord says, let us lay aside every weight and the sin which does so easily beset us. Lay aside. It's a very laid back verb, isn't it? lay aside, not fight, not beat the fire out of it, you know, call down fire from heaven upon their heads. Nothing like that. It's just lay aside. like you might take your shoe off at night and lay it aside. Why in the world is the Lord employing these kinds of verbs for such a vigorous and rigorous fight? And perhaps, perhaps, perhaps it has to do with the fact that the power in the fight has already been, the victory in the fight has already been won. by Jesus Christ the Lord. The power of the cross is that which breaks the power of canceled sin. Remember Charles Wesley saying that? He breaks the power of canceled sin. He sets the prisoner free. His blood can make the foulest clean. His blood availed for me. Perhaps the Lord is able to use these kind of laid-back verbs because He actually has in reality won the battle already. Your job is not to win over the devil. Your job is to abstain. It's kind of cool, actually, isn't it? Warfare. And then, lifestyle. Where do you take your cues for living life? Where do you take your cues for living life? As you know, as I said, I've defined some words there at the bottom. Having your conversation honest among the Gentiles. Conversation is a word for manner of living. It's a real interesting word. It means to turn, to turn. having your to turn honest among the Gentiles. That's what it means literally. Somebody ever seen a potter at work? A potter's wheel? Do you know what I'm talking about? A potter will take clay, a lump of clay, and throw it on the wheel. And the throw is really where a great deal of the art and the skill is. Throw that clay on the wheel and then it turns and turns and with your hands you shape that thing into a coffee cup or a iced tea pitcher or some such thing. Turning. Our life is a turning. That's what the journey is. It's turn this way, turn that way, turn this way, turn that way. That's what your life is. There is no such thing as living life in an absolutely straight line. You are always responding to what's going on around you, right? You always are. Right now, you are responding in some measure to the folks at your table, to some of the things I'm saying, maybe not many, some parts of what I'm saying make it through the fog and some things don't. And you're responding constantly, right? You're sending out some signals and you're receiving some signals and there's this turning going on all the time. It's much like what we call conversation. You ever been in conversation with somebody that really was more a monologue than a conversation? You know how it is when somebody does all the talking? I mean, they take up all the oxygen in the room, right? Okay, that's not a conversation because there isn't a turning going on. A real conversation has a turn to it. I say a few things that are syllabic and, you know, perhaps melodic in sound. And then you say a few things that are syllabic and, you know, perhaps harmonic or something like that in sound. And back and forth and back and forth. It's sort of a dance, isn't it? That's the way conversation works. We're having a bit of a conversation, a modified conversation right now because as a teacher, I cannot stand it if I don't think I have your attention or if I don't think you're getting it or if I don't see the light bulbs going off. I can't stand it. It drives me crazy if I can't get some feedback from you. And of course, that's often my fault if I don't. So you're giving me feedback. I'm giving you some information and some things to think about and questions to ask yourself. We're having a bit of a conversation even though you're not talking because there's turning going on, right? Well, our lifestyle really is that. Our lifestyle is that. So, what is it that causes you to turn? What stimuli coming your way turn you, bend you? And then the word honest. Oh my goodness, such a rich, rich word. Honest. Having your conversation, having your manner of living honest among the unbelievers. It's literally the word beautiful. And it's from the Greek word kalos from which we get the word kaleidoscope. Does your life look like a kaleidoscope before unbelievers? Ah, that's a hard one, isn't it? Does your life look like a kaleidoscope? This beautiful display of colors that turn in these ornate and lovely ways as individuals watch your life? Well, then there's this one. or as they speak against you as evildoers. Gentiles do not like you. They do not like you. They think that you are an evildoer. This is all about reputation. And the question, of course, is whose opinion of you matters most? Does the opinion of a Gentile who doesn't know God matter more than the opinion of God who has exonerated you in Jesus Christ? Whose opinion of you matters most? There's a real cheap version of this in the world. And that's not true, I should back up. Not in the world, I really wanted to say within Christianity. Within the Lord's people, across a broad swath of Christianity, You hear, not too uncommonly, God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life or something like this, right? God loves you. I love what Rich Mullins said about that. Does anybody know who Rich Mullins was? Do you know that name? Rich Mullins was this amazing singer-songwriter, contemporary Christian singer-songwriter, died a few years ago in a car wreck. But Rich Mullins, this is almost, I almost shouldn't say it because it's almost not respectful, but here's the way he put it. He says, when people told me when I was suppressed and people told me, you ought to cheer up, God loves you. Rich Mullins said, that don't mean nothing. God loves everybody. That just proves God ain't got no taste. That was Rich Mullins' response to that. and it resonated with my heart. Because look, if you slather God's love as though it's exactly the same to every person that's ever lived on the face of the earth, one, you're biblically mistaken. You cannot argue from the Bible that God loves every person on the earth in exactly the same way. You cannot do that. But if you slather God's love across the entire planet and every person ever has lived, does live, or will live, and then try to encourage yourself by the fact that God loves you, what's special about that? Let me tell you something, there are some people who are going to spend eternity in hell. Not everybody is going to be under the favor of God at the end of the judgment. Not everybody is going to be under the favor of God. If you are in the favor of God tonight, you have every, every reason to say, it doesn't matter what the world says. It doesn't matter what the world says. My reputation can go completely south with the world as long as I have the approval of God. When Elder Travis Housley was getting ready to go to the Philippines to do one of those projects over there, somebody was criticizing him. He said, look, I've heard the voice of God on this. And when you've heard the voice of God, everything else is just noise. I love it. Whose reputation, whose opinion of you, rather, is most important? Here's another book. I haven't read this one yet. It might be worth your while to look it up. The Dumbest Generation, it's called. And the subtitle is How the Digital Age Stupifies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future. This guy is serious about this thing, okay? But here's the quote that's real interesting to me about opinion. The fonts of knowledge are everywhere. That's like little cups of knowledge or, you know, tanks of knowledge are everywhere. But the rising generation is camped in the desert, passing stories, pictures, tunes, texts, back and forth, living off the thrill of pure attention. Meanwhile, their intellects refuse the cultural and civic inheritance that has made us what we are up to now. It's an incredible thought that if we're spending all our time looking for our approval from our peers, we turn out living in a very horizontal way, very horizontal way. Remember that business about citizenship earlier on I talked about? This is a vertical call. If we live only horizontally, we're missing the mark. Okay, very quickly. expectation. They may by your good works which they shall behold. Your life would be so honest, so beautiful, so kaleidoscopic. Kaleidoscopic perhaps is the way that should be said. Your life is going to be so like a kaleidoscope, so kalos, which by the way, kalos is like the Bible's answer to the cool quotient. You say, oh, this is cool. No, that's not cool. Bible people ought to say, that's callous. No, that's not callous. Well, anyway, it's your life callous, and if it is so callous, so beautiful, so honest, as it's translated in King James, if your life is so callous, they're going to see good works. They can't help it. The Gentiles are going to see what you're living like. They may not agree with anything you believe. They might not like you at all, but they have to look at your stuff and say, Who has built the most hospitals on the face of the earth in the history of the world? Who has gone after orphans like no other people group on the face of the earth? Who has cared for the poor? On and on and on and on you go, and it winds up being Christians, Christians, Christians, Christians, Christians. Well, does that automatically make someone a Christian? No, it doesn't. Just because they see your good works, But look how this works. They may buy your good works, which they shall behold. Sorry. Glorify God in the day of visitation. Glorify God in the day of visitation. It sounds all wrong. It sounds like they should turn and thank you, right? You were the one doing the good works. And then finally they change their mind. They turn around and say, you're just such a great person. After all, I love you. I'm going to glorify you, in fact. No, the true Christian isn't interested in that sorriness. We have no reward of our Father in heaven if all we're seeking is the praise of men. Jesus makes that very clear in the Sermon on the Mount. What do we have here? Individuals who see your good works and if God chooses to visit them in the way He has chosen to visit you, they will take all this data they've been collecting as they watched you and others like you over the years and glorify God. What is your expectation in your interaction with people? is your expectation in interaction even with unbelievers that God might perchance grant them repentance to acknowledging the faith of the Lord Jesus Christ. You see? Is that your expectation? Well, here it is an expectation. So what is the best thing that could happen to you in all the world? What's the best thing? And this text defines it. The best thing that could happen to you until you go to heaven, the best thing that could happen to you is to be a usable vessel for the glory of God. That's absolutely the best thing that could ever happen. Now, if I had more time, I'd unpack this, but think about how wonderful, all right, some of you are too young to get it, I know. Stretch, would you? If you're too young, just start stretching right now. Usefulness is one of the best feelings on earth. Some of you don't believe that, I know. Mom says take out the garbage. Man, it would help Mom so much if you did that, especially if you would do it without saying, Mom, it would help so much if you could manage it without the sound effects. but you haven't maybe learned that usefulness is this wonderful feeling. When I left, I was getting ready to leave, and I was in tears, Hannah was in tears, Aidan was in tears, and I was getting ready to come here, not because I was coming here, but because... Would you like to preach? I'm just about done. This is not going well. We were in tears and I don't know why I'm telling this. Let's move on. Okay. The best thing that could happen to you, I prayed as we were leaving, Lord, I don't know why I'm going. I don't know what I'm doing there. Now, I know, I mean, I could rattle my voice and, you know, read some notes in the pulpit on Sunday morning and go through the motions of preaching and do something for you guys that you would quickly forget. I know that, but I don't really know why. I don't really know why I'm here. I didn't at that point. So my prayer was, Lord, make me useful. And I hope that's your prayer, too. I know some of you feel You may feel a little awkward still. You may not know a lot of people. I don't know what you're... If you were like me at that age, you're sitting there thinking, I've got to be the stupidest person in this room. I know I am. I must be the ugliest, the stupidest, the gangliest, the most awkward, whatever else. You may be thinking all those things. A better prayer than, Lord, please help me feel better about myself. A better prayer is, Lord, help me to be useful to somebody. Maybe a single conversation. It may be a single handshake. It may be a song. I don't know what it would be. It might be a text to somebody, okay? Lord, help me to be useful. What is the best thing that could happen to you to be useful for the glory of God? That's the best thing. So there they all are, citizenship, warfare, lifestyle, reputation, expectation. citizenship, warfare, lifestyle, reputation, expectation, categories of thought to help us think about this. Now, it occurred to me, and this, again, this is opening a conversation. My talk tonight, as you can tell, this is not slick or smooth or intended to crack the whip at the end and say, okay, everybody repent and we're done. This is opening a conversation. This is starting a conversation. And so I'd like you to be thinking about these five categories and how these five categories can actually influence the way we do online or the way we do digital. Does something I'm doing on the computer or on my iPhone help me remember and become more a part of my citizenship in heaven? Does it put me more in taste with heaven or more in taste with earth? The internet is there to help you be more in taste with earth than you've ever been before, right? It's really interested in getting you in the taste of earth. What I mean by that is that you long for earth more than you do for heaven. Or the warfare. Is the internet going to make me forget that it's a sniper's bullet? That website that's blinking at you like that? That's a sniper up there, okay? He's getting ready to put a bullet in your soul. That's what the text says. And Proverbs talks about it very graphically as well, you know, the dart through the liver, that's what it calls it there. Abstain from fleshly loss, warfare. Lifestyle, is there something about what I'm doing online that has changed my lifestyle or changes my lifestyle to the point that I'm no longer effective as an honest liver before the Gentiles? Do the Gentiles look at me and see me doing everything else online and my whole digital experience is exactly like theirs? Have I gotten so into Facebook or whatever else that if I don't get a bunch of likes every time I post something, I'm utterly crushed. I'm ruined. The day is trashed. Is my reputation, my sense of well-being dependent on what other people think of me? And finally, is my expectation high enough? Am I expecting that God is going to move? Have you ever thought about the fact that if you, for instance, if you ever dabbled in pornography or something like that, God forbid, but if you ever did, have you ever thought about the fact that the people you're looking at online are real people who will stand before the judgment seat of Christ? who have eternal souls and will either spend eternity in heaven or hell? Have you ever thought about that? Those people will do that. This thing we talk about over here in this little tiny church building isn't just something that happens in this little tiny church building world. It's for the whole world. It's universal. And what if somebody who's been the object of your lust comes to know Christ in the day of visitation and loves Christ? I have to admit that's a controlling thought for me in how I handle almost everything. Getting mad at Taco Bell because they messed up my order for the five millionth time. Taco Bell is the worst. Sorry if you work there. Okay, what if that person that messed up my order is about to be visited by the Holy Spirit? Well, anyway, it's worth thinking about. Could I close with three calls? I think I have three that are not on the PowerPoint. Let me give you three things, and then I really am done. And I'm so sorry, but, Mike, this is much longer than it needed to be. Three things. One, would you consider this prize? That means value or, you know, hold in high esteem. Prize embodied human interaction over mediated human interaction. What I mean by that is while mediated interaction is a good thing, texting someone if they, you know, they can be great, emailing, whatever else, to ignore a person who is in your presence embodied in favor of a person who is not in your presence embodied but is mediated, i.e., cell phone, whatever else, is rude. It's simply rude and it is actually undercutting who we are as human beings. So I'd like to ask you to think about prizing embodied conversation even more than you prize mediated conversation. Okay, that's one. And the second one, this is getting really dicey. Seek a clean vocabulary, a vocabulary worthy of the weightiness that life is. You guys are in a place where you're still building your vocabulary. And many of my students at school have adopted what many other young Americans have, and that is that, for example, they use the word like almost every time they breathe, and more often than they breathe, actually. It's not dirty, not necessarily inappropriate, But how about working on cleaning up that word? Why does it have to be there all the time? I have a theory about why it's there. We'll talk about that later. But why does that word have to be in there? Or if we talk in these guttural kinds of ways that we might do a text in, if we start talking this way, does this limit our ability to communicate the weighty things of life? Clean up vocabulary. so that you have a vocabulary worthy and willing and able to carry the weight of life's weighty matters. And then finally, as I said, this is the start of a conversation. Launch an investigation of your own into these matters, all things digital. You don't have to wait for somebody else to do it. If you haven't already done it, you could Google, actually, you could Google an article called, is Google making us stupid? Now that's by this guy, Nicholas Carr, so you can kind of know where he's coming from. But it's a very interesting article, very worthwhile. Take a look at what's out there and what's being discovered in the research that's being done right now about what digital may be doing to us in terms of retarding human flourishing or advancing human flourishing. It can do both. It can do both. And only the Lord can help us sort all this out.