Week 7: Being Human in the Digital Age

[00:00:01] Good morning, everyone. [00:00:04] Good morning. It is great to see you all here this morning as we continue our course on being human in the digital age. [00:00:14] It's hard to believe that we are already in week seven of this course. [00:00:19] During the first ten week block, we are studying Genesis one and what it tells us about reality. [00:00:26] Over the past four weeks, we explored time, space and matter. Pretty simple, easy topics. [00:00:33] What we might say are the physical orienting structures of our world. [00:00:38] Today we will be looking at the concept of purpose. [00:00:42] Meaning just like we did not choose time, space and matter, but rather were born into a reality already shaped by them. [00:00:52] I want to suggest that purpose is the same kind of thing. It is a fundamental aspect of reality that we need to live alongside, not something that we make for ourselves. [00:01:05] We didn't have any homework last week, so rather than reporting back on homework to begin our time together, I have an opening question for all of you. [00:01:15] Think for a minute about your phone. [00:01:18] Does it impact what you believe is important in your life and what you consider to be worth prioritizing? [00:01:27] If so, what are the kinds of things that your phone is teaching you to prioritize? [00:01:34] Can you think of any ways that it changes how you think of purpose and meaning? [00:01:40] What priorities does it. Yeah. Work. Work. How does it make you prioritize? Work. More emails. They're always reaching out to you. They can always get to you. Time and space collapse. Work is always there. Other things. [00:01:54] What else does your phone make you prioritize? Yeah, Robert? Grandchildren. Grandchildren. Very good. [00:02:05] Yeah. The same way work can always reach you, you can always reach out to grandchildren. They may not answer, but you know, you have the option. [00:02:12] Other things that your phone trained you to prioritize. [00:02:17] Yeah. [00:02:32] Fascinating. Okay, so critical thinking skills. And you're saying part of it is that clarity, Claude, the AI is actually pressing you to think about how you're spending time. Very fascinating. [00:02:43] Any other thoughts? One more. Yeah. [00:02:46] Worries. Worries. How does it make you prioritize your worries more? [00:02:56] Yeah. By putting the entire world in front of you all the time. It is putting your worries right there. It's drawing it to mind. It is very difficult to not be anxious about tomorrow when all of tomorrow's anxieties are constantly being beamed into your pocket. [00:03:09] Yeah. Willa. Shopping. Shopping. Very good one. Yeah. Shopping it is. And it's also kind of the economic engine of the Internet. Right. Everything on the Internet is about advertising. People are trying to get you to shop, to buy, to purchase, to join memberships. That is what drives the Internet. [00:03:30] We will be exploring the concept of purpose today? What is life for? How do we orient ourselves towards any kind of purpose in life? [00:03:40] Earlier this week, I came home from work to find my two boys playing with a deck of cards. [00:03:46] This is not an altogether surprising experience. [00:03:50] After all, my boys love playing with all kinds of board games. [00:03:56] They play with Monopoly, Apples to Apples, and even Settlers of Catan. [00:04:01] Really anything that they can get their hands on. [00:04:04] Now, some of you might remember that my boys are quite young. I have a four year old and a one year old. And so you might be tempted to think, wow, those kids are board game geniuses. [00:04:16] After all, playing Monopoly as a one year old is very impressive. [00:04:21] However, if you thought this, you would be wrong. [00:04:24] You see, my boys, actually they don't play Monopoly, they play with Monopoly. And there is a big difference between these two things. [00:04:33] In a normal game of Monopoly, the pieces move around the board as players roll the dice and then the money is distributed by the banker upon the rules of the game. [00:04:43] When my boys play with Monopoly, they don't concern themselves with petty things like rules. [00:04:50] Why would they leave the pieces on the board when those pieces are so perfectly sized as projectiles? [00:04:58] Why would they roll the dice when they can instead toss the dice into the nearest sink? [00:05:03] To you and me, the money may seem like a great way to keep score, but my boys couldn't care less about the score. When they throw that money in the air, it looks way cooler. [00:05:15] They just make up their own rules and in the process, they create entirely new games. This past week was no exception. When I walked in on the boys playing with the cards, Bennett was testing to see just how many cards he could shove behind the bed. At the same time, this seemed like an odd game to me. And so later in the day I asked him about it. To which he laid out the following three steps to the game. [00:05:37] He said, the first part of the game is that you put all the cards in in the bathroom and then you close the door. [00:05:45] Second, you take those cards and you put as many of them as you can into a bag. [00:05:52] And third, and finally you then donate those cards to the toy room. [00:05:57] At this point I was like you a bit confused and I asked, well, bud, why were you putting cards behind the bed then? [00:06:05] What part of the game was that? [00:06:07] To which he simply laughed and said, I'm just kidding, dad. There aren't really any rules. We were just having fun. [00:06:17] As adults looking at a board game, we rightly assume that someone designed the game, that there is a purpose behind every piece. [00:06:23] We know that we aren't just supposed to throw the pieces any which way, but are instead expected to use those pieces according to their purpose, one given to them by the game's creator, often laid out in some kind of book that explains the purpose of each piece. [00:06:38] When we play board games, we almost always try to play according to their design. [00:06:43] We follow the rules because we understand that playing along with the purpose of a game is more fun than just making it up as we go. Purpose gives shape to the game. The fun of Monopoly is actually the intense feeling of trying to bankrupt your best friend before they can bankrupt you, something that only is possible because the game has a design. [00:07:06] But my son's perspective on board games actually reflects a fairly common attitude in our society towards all of life. [00:07:13] In so many subtle ways, our culture claims that there is no purpose for our lives other than the purposes that we make. [00:07:22] Throughout this course we have been exploring the concept of a meaning making story, which is an account, knowingly or tacitly believed, that tells us what reality is, why it matters, and how we relate to it. This story defines what is good, true and beautiful, and it shapes the way we live with God, each other, and the world. [00:07:43] We Christians, of course, affirm that the true meaning making story of reality is laid out for us by God in Scripture, in particular through the early chapters of Genesis. [00:07:53] This meaning making story is like the instructions for a game. [00:07:57] It tells us what we're supposed to do, what matters, and how we are meant to live. [00:08:03] However, just like the ancient world found itself twisted up in false meaning making stories, our modern world has crafted rival accounts of reality. [00:08:13] I have heard some variation of this comment countless times when talking to my friends about God. [00:08:21] I kind of believe in God. [00:08:23] At least it makes sense to me that a God made everything. [00:08:27] But I really don't think that God cares at all about who I sleep with, how I spend my money, or what I spend my time on. [00:08:38] The implications of this kind of vague view are ironically very clear. [00:08:43] God has no intentions for us. [00:08:48] The book of Genesis disagrees and it insists on the claim that God gave his creation a purpose. And I want to suggest this morning that our lives are more meaningful and full when we live alongside the purpose God designed. [00:09:00] So let's take a look at Genesis 1 together. [00:09:04] The first point you should note in the account is that God's intention precedes creation. [00:09:12] One of the most striking features of Genesis 1 is just how central God's speech is throughout the account. [00:09:17] Every day begins with God speaking other meaning making stories in the ancient world did not feature divine speech in the same way. In week one, John shared with you a rival narrative that existed in the ancient world called the Enuma Elish. [00:09:34] In that account, creation is not brought forth by divine speech, but rather things just kind of happen. In went a bit like this. [00:09:43] In the beginning, the first gods just happened to exist. [00:09:48] As these first gods interacted with one another, they gave birth to other gods. And as these new gods began to all interact together, conflict arose between them. [00:10:01] And out of that conflict, humans happened to be made as a byproduct. [00:10:06] This ancient story may sound crazy to us moderns, but the logic that drives it is quite similar to our own modern versions. [00:10:16] In the ancient myths, we might rightly say that one thing leads to another. There is cause and effect, things just happen. [00:10:24] Gods kill gods, you know, what else would you expect them to do? [00:10:28] Our modern myth is almost the exact same same thing. The gods have just been replaced with the fundamental forces of the universe. Just as uncaring and unintentional as the ancient gods. [00:10:41] Consider this quote by Stephen Hawking from his famous book the Grand Design. [00:10:46] Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. [00:10:54] The law of gravity in Hawking's rendition is a brute fact of reality. [00:10:58] And this makes his myth go a little bit like in the beginning. The fundamental forces just happen to exist. [00:11:06] As these first forces interact with one another, they give birth to other forces. And as all these new forces begin to interact together, conflict arises between them. And out of this conflict, humans happen to be made as a byproduct. [00:11:20] Our generation is not the first to claim that there is no purpose or grand design to our lives. [00:11:26] We've just updated the story to match modern terminology. [00:11:30] Consider how the framing of Genesis challenges these ancient false meaning making stories, and our modern ones as well. By looking with me at the first act of divine speech in verse three, and God said, let there be light, and there was light. [00:11:48] This phrase may seem mundane after all. We have heard it hundreds of times, but this is a profound statement. [00:11:56] Let me ask you, what if verse three only said and there was light? [00:12:03] What would we be losing from our account? [00:12:08] Any ideas? What? [00:12:12] We wouldn't know how it happened. It was just there suddenly. What else? What would that mean for us if we did? [00:12:19] There's no intention behind it. Suddenly it's just there. We have no way to understand that it's purposeful. What would that mean for us? Looking around at reality, there's no creator. Yeah, this, this light just happens to be there. And because there's no creator, we got to do everything ourselves. [00:12:39] We got to do everything ourselves. Purpose and meaning ultimately falls on us. There is nothing that we are receiving. [00:12:45] In Hawking's version of creation, the law of gravity simply exists for no reason. Everything that follows it likewise has no reason. A purposeless process simply gave birth to it. Or as we might say, one thing led to another. [00:13:01] But the Genesis version assures us that light and everything else exists because God has a purpose for it. Notice how the phrase and there was light. [00:13:11] The phrase denoting light's existence comes after God has already said let there be light. When God speaks, He is not only creating the physical thing that we call light, he's also creating the very concept of light. [00:13:27] It wasn't as if God was constructing a piece of IKEA furniture following some pre made plan laid out by smart Swedish engineers. [00:13:36] No, he was creating from nothing. Every aspect of light that now exists is something God specifically designed. [00:13:45] Why is there speed of light? Because God designed it just so. [00:13:49] Why does light not have mass? Because God wanted it that way. [00:13:54] No aspect of light could have been an accident because every aspect of it was created from nothing. [00:14:02] Instead of IKEA furniture, one of the items on my Honey to Do list is to build some custom bookshelves at our house. [00:14:10] Imagine with me that I make these bookshelves and I place every shelf three feet above the one under it. [00:14:18] When Aaron confronts me to tell me that my bookshelves look weird and I need to replace them, it would be very strange for me to say, oh, I wonder how that happened. [00:14:32] Since I designed the bookshelves custom from the ground up. Aaron can rightly conclude that I either intended something with that distance or I just wasn't thinking very clearly about it. [00:14:43] Unlike me, though, there is no such thing as God not thinking clearly enough about his creation. [00:14:51] He knows everything. [00:14:52] And so when he creates, he fully understands the implication of of every aspect of that creation. It is all on purpose. Which leads us to point 2. [00:15:03] Everything in creation is for something. [00:15:08] It serves a purpose. [00:15:10] As you read through Genesis 1, you will quickly realize that nothing just happens in this account. There is no One thing leads to another in Genesis 1. Every part of the account is driven by one figure, by God. There is no antagonist or plot line that requires God to react to someone else. [00:15:31] Creation is no compromise worked out between interacting beings or forces. [00:15:37] The account goes to great lengths to demonstrate that God intended every aspect of creation. Ten times throughout the account, we hear the refrain God said. [00:15:47] And this is followed each time By a confirmation that God's word accomplished its exact purposes. For example, let there be light receives the response. And there was light. [00:16:00] We shouldn't underestimate the significance of God choosing to illustrate his creative act through the concept of speech. [00:16:08] We know that this speech isn't our kind of speech, right? There was no air at the time. God doesn't have vocal cords like we do. [00:16:18] And God could have explained this creative act in any number of other ways. He could have pictured it as him using his hands to build the world. [00:16:28] But instead he uses speech. Basil of Caesarea, one of the church fathers said, we can rightly understand this phrase. And God said, to be something like and God willed it to be so. God intended and chose this thing. [00:16:44] This is because language. [00:16:46] Language serves a critical function for us humans. It is the way we convey meaning and intent. [00:16:53] This may be through spoken word or sign language, or even many Sunday mornings through the hot Krispy Kreme doughnut light that is turned on as we drive into church. [00:17:05] Language informs us and is loaded with purpose. [00:17:09] Krispy Kreme intends for me to buy a donut and to break my diet. [00:17:15] And back in college, I played on an ultimate frisbee team. [00:17:21] There was one game where I made the most incredible throw of the season. [00:17:27] From nearly halfway across the football field, I launched the frisbee downfield and it went right over the heads of the other team and fell perfectly into the arms of my teammate, Jake. [00:17:38] This should have also been a proud moment for me. [00:17:42] However, it really wasn't. [00:17:45] Right before I threw the frisbee to Jake, I had yelled at the very top of my lungs, anthony, heads up. [00:17:53] My seemingly great throw had been an accident entirely. My speech gave my intention away. If I had said, jake, heads up, no one would have doubted that I intended that great throw. [00:18:06] But in this case, everyone knew my great throw was a total accident. [00:18:12] By using speech as the central picture of the creative act, God is telling us how to think about his work in creation. [00:18:22] Speech, for us humans, communicates intention and meaning. [00:18:27] Likewise, God's creative act of speech loads reality with his intention and meaning. [00:18:34] Consider with me, day four. And God said, let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night. And let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years. [00:18:48] And it was so. [00:18:51] Not only does God speak the sun and moon and stars into existence, but he tasks them them with a purpose to mark out time and give us seasons, both their creation and their purpose. Then received the refrain, and it was so. If you count the purpose phrases in these two verses alone. You will find to separate for signs, for seasons, for days and years, to give light. [00:19:15] God is loading reality with a plan. [00:19:19] His speech pattern doing this is nearly identical throughout the entire story until we reach verse 26, where it changes, which leads us to point 3. [00:19:31] God creates humans with a special purpose to be his image. [00:19:37] In verse 26, we read, Then God said, let us make man in our image after our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the heavens, and over the livestock, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth. [00:19:58] The grammar here has shifted. [00:20:01] God speaks in the first person for the very first time. [00:20:05] All the refrains before were in the third person. God looking out, Let there be light, let there be an expanse, let earth sprout vegetation, and so on. [00:20:17] But here, when God creates us, His Word tells us that he reflects and considers. He speaks to Himself. [00:20:27] He sees fit to look towards Himself when He chooses to make someone who looks like Him. [00:20:35] What does the text mean here, by image. [00:20:38] We'll explore this in depth throughout the new year. But at the very minimum, this means we are meant to represent God. [00:20:46] You know, to look like him to all of creation, to make him known. [00:20:49] The statue of a king helps people know what the king looks like. [00:20:54] Likewise, humans are to be the image of God for creation. [00:20:58] After making humans, the text then tells us he gives humans a threefold blessing. To be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth, to subdue the earth and to have dominion over every living thing. [00:21:12] This threefold blessing is a set of roles, purposes given to us by our Creator. [00:21:20] Purpose and blessing are tied together at our very creation. [00:21:26] To be blessed is to live according to the purposes for which we are made, according to the design of God. [00:21:33] But of course, we know that humans did not live according to their design. And instead of stewarding creation for God, humans have attempted to take his place. [00:21:42] Adam and Eve attempted this through reaching for the fruit that they thought would make them like God. [00:21:48] The builders of Babel attempted this by reaching to the heavens. [00:21:53] Look with me at these two verses side by side and tell me, what do you notice that's striking about the comparison of these two verses? [00:22:14] Yes, they're assuming the rule that they're in charge. Yes, the builders of Babel. Let us build ourselves a city tower and let us make a name for ourselves. [00:22:27] Yeah, yeah. It's self reflective. They're looking back at themselves. [00:22:36] Yes, ourselves is major here. [00:22:39] Anything else? Any similarities between these two verses. [00:22:46] What I want to draw your attention to here is the phrase let us make the verb. Here is the same verb in Genesis 1:26 as it is in 11:4. Let us make a name for ourselves is the second time this verb shows up in Scripture. The first was let us make man in our image. [00:23:09] In fact, the specific verb we see here only shows up twice in all of Genesis. In these two verses, God made others in his image to bless them. And in a perverse twisting of this creative act, the people of Babel attempted to make a name for themselves, and they rejected their purpose and design in the process. [00:23:28] This is, of course, something we're all guilty of, which leads us to our fourth and final Genesis point. [00:23:35] God's purposes in creation are ultimately fulfilled in Christ. [00:23:41] No discussion of God's speech in Genesis 1 can be complete without first engaging John 1. Its sister passage, John 1 is, after all, a retelling of Genesis zoomed in on the person and work of Christ. [00:23:56] In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. [00:24:09] While each part of Genesis 1 shows us that God spoke reality into existence, John 1 tells us that the word that God spoke through the power of creation was Christ Himself. [00:24:24] The Greek word John uses here is logos. [00:24:28] It does mean a word, but it also means the reason behind a thing, the purpose, the logic, the explanation of that thing. [00:24:39] Paul lays out the implications of this in Colossians 1:15. [00:24:42] Jesus Christ is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him all things were made in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities. All things were created through him, and for him. [00:24:59] We were made in God's image to show him to the world, to make a name for God. [00:25:06] While humans have not done a great job at this, Christ did it perfectly for us. [00:25:13] This is why Paul summarizes the Christian life. This way we are to be conformed to the image of His Son. [00:25:21] This is not some new command, but a renewal of God's first purpose for us, to be his image and to make him known to others. [00:25:29] Purpose is something Genesis shows us receiving, like time and space. It was here before we were, and it orients everything we do. [00:25:40] Our task is to live rightly inside of purpose, and we can no more remake our purpose than we can remake time. [00:25:51] Like Bennett with the board games, we often choose to ignore the purpose given to us by our Creator. And if we aren't careful, the powerful digital technology in our pockets can make this all the worse. [00:26:04] The world of digital technology is not, as we've said many times in and of itself, a false meaning making story. [00:26:10] After all, digital technology connects us with our grandkids. It gives us wonderful blessings. [00:26:16] However, digital technology is undoubtedly changing the way we experience the world. [00:26:22] Some of these changes make us more likely to live as if a false meaning making story is true. [00:26:28] They may make it seem as if one thing just leads to another, and this has been our running thesis during the course. The digital ecosystem we are beginning to inhabit is tacitly drawing us into a new story of life, one that reshapes how we see reality. [00:26:44] It does this by offering us a path toward transcendence, a tower to the heavens that helps us make a name for ourselves. [00:26:52] It reshapes our experience of time, space and matter. [00:26:55] It feeds us a stream of data that shapes what we count as important. And it steals our attention away from God, each other, and the real world. [00:27:04] Think back to our opening question. [00:27:06] What is it that your phone is teaching you to prioritize? [00:27:11] If you sat down and thought about it, the answers to this question can probably fall in quite a few piles. [00:27:16] You have health, popularity, productivity, information, efficiency. [00:27:24] After all, the digital can endlessly multiply our purposes in life. [00:27:29] Many of these purposes can be a good thing. After all, health is great. Many of my friends I'm trying to see if Tripp is in the room. I always talk about the whoop when he is in the room because Tripp loves his whoop and it helps keep him healthy. [00:27:43] But your phone doesn't just allow these small things to exist as extra little purposes. [00:27:50] The digital is custom made to amplify every purpose and multiply the number of ways for you to think about it. Throughout the day, your phone offers measurements for each of them. It gives you a scorecard. It can measure your sleep, your fitness, your finances. [00:28:06] If you remember back in week two, we we talked about the power of a mirror. We often think of mirrors as these neutral arbiters of reality. [00:28:15] But once we have a mirror, we begin dressing for the mirror and changing our appearances. As such, the mirror only seems to just show us what is there, and then in doing so, it changes the way we relate to reality. The phone is doing the same thing as it measures our life. However we let it, we will be tempted to start living in light of that specific measurement. [00:28:41] Worse yet, much of the Internet runs on advertising and advanced Algorithms target each of us according to our interests. So if you start measuring how much you walk every day, the algorithm will find you out and it will start offering you better walking shoes, memberships to digital walking communities, whatever those are, and supplements to help you walk better. [00:29:07] The tendency within the digital world to take one interest and multiply it through advertisements and algorithmic sorting means that your small purpose walking so that you can stay healthy can rapidly be transformed into a defining feature of your life. [00:29:26] But the digital is never content. The advertisements can always offer you more. So, in addition to your interest in walking, your phone may discover that you enjoy watching videos about the current state of geopolitics. And so, when you go on your phone to look at a message about your walking, later that day, you suddenly see a notification for a video explaining that something is rapidly changing in the Strait of Hormuz. [00:29:50] You are curious what is changing all of a sudden after all of this time. And so you click on the video. [00:29:57] Forty minutes later, you have learned that nothing really changed. [00:30:03] But you did watch quite a few videos, just to make sure. [00:30:08] You might just say one thing led to another. [00:30:13] But unlike those ancient myths where things just happen for no reason, someone did intend for you to get sucked into your phone. The currency of the Internet is attention. Every click, every scroll, every second you spend on a platform, every is measured and monetized. [00:30:27] Your preferences are sold to others who also seek your attention. What may appear as a free service is actually harvesting data about human attention so that the data can be utilized for economic ends. [00:30:40] No one here is surprised by the idea that phones are distracting. They capture our attention. [00:30:46] But consider what this means for our relationship to purpose in life. [00:30:51] The philosopher Anton Barbica rightly notes that attention is the act by which we confer meaning on things and by which we discover that they are meaningful. [00:31:01] The act through which we bind facts into cares. [00:31:07] Do you get that? The act by which we bind facts into cares. You care about something when you attend to it. It is therefore the medium of our lives, the way we work out what matters to us. Attention is not neutral. [00:31:19] In Genesis, God created everything with a purpose. In fact, as we saw, the purpose came first, followed by the thing that was created. In our digital economy of distraction, countless things are thrown before our eyes. [00:31:31] And depending on what we look at, the algorithm will discover a purpose for it. After we've seen it, one thing will lead to another, and you will have no idea where your time went. [00:31:41] The digital also multiplies our purpose in another way. [00:31:44] It attaches crowds to every potential purpose and provides us with direct access to those crowds to match our specific preferences. In 1944, C.S. lewis gave a lecture to a room of young men that he entitled the Inner Ring. [00:31:59] Every school, profession and town, he said, has an inner ring. The people who are really in and popular, whether or not anyone ever says so out loud. [00:32:11] Lewis warned these young men that if they ever were to become scoundrels. Such a fun word it would probably not start with something as obvious as a bribe. It would start with a hint over a cup of coffee from someone that they wanted to be with or be in with. [00:32:27] Wanting that person's acceptance would change how they weighed their choices and they would start doing things to stay in the group that they would never have done otherwise. Lewis says that our desire to be inside the lines of the inner ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things. [00:32:46] A desire for acceptance and community can change us the digital world draws more of these lines dividing us into groups than any of our ancestors ever had to deal with. Every political or social group has specific language that they use to signal their in group status. [00:33:02] These may be words like social justice or equity in one group, woke or based in another. These words mark you as part of the in crowd and they align your purpose with the purposes of the group while you are in the process of using this shared group language. Of course the algorithm is more than happy to feed you posts that make you more convinced that your group is right and the other group is in fact evil after all that that will keep your attention just a bit longer. [00:33:30] The digital world isn't why we don't live according to our God given purpose, but it sure is good at multiplying the other options we have and it is able to fine tune those alternative options to seem ever so reasonable to us. Which leads us to the second way the digital world reshapes purpose. [00:33:48] The digital world remaps purpose to center on us. [00:33:52] Remember what it means to be made in the image of God. [00:33:55] We are called to show God to the world, to be conformed to the image of His Son. A statue of a king is there to show you what the king looks like. [00:34:05] The digital world, in contrast to this, invites us to spend our days building an image of ourselves. [00:34:11] Think about what someone does when they choose a profile picture. They may look through a dozen photos and pick the one with the best light and the kindest angle. And if it still isn't quite right, they may use their phone to smooth over their skin or remove the stranger who is standing in the background. [00:34:28] People craft their LinkedIn pages to appear so incredible that they give themselves imposter syndrome on LinkedIn. The summer you spent scooping ice cream may become the summer you were leading customer facing operations in a fast paced environment. [00:34:45] The image of yourself that you build will then be fed back to you based on your interests and desires. [00:34:51] In 2021, the Wall Street Journal built more than 100 automated TikTok accounts and they gave each bot a set of interests which they expressed only by re watching certain videos a tiny bit longer. [00:35:03] One of those bots was named Kentucky 96 and this bot was programmed to be interested in sadness and depression. [00:35:13] It watched sad videos just a bit longer than all the other videos. [00:35:18] After about 36 minutes of watching videos, Kentucky 96's feed of videos became 93% saturated with videos about being sad. [00:35:29] One video led to another Think about what this means. If you have an interest, the digital world will make that interest seem so reasonable to you, sometimes even to your detriment and harm. [00:35:41] It will show us a world that aligns with how we feel. It is in the best interest of advertisers to keep us engaged, to keep our interest on our phone. But as long as we are building our own image, as long as we're letting one thing lead to another on our phones, we are not living according to the purpose God has made. We are ignoring the rule book for the game and sang with Bennett. [00:36:05] There are no rules. [00:36:07] We're just having fun. [00:36:09] But in life, not living according to the purpose God made will not be fun. [00:36:14] It will leave us anxious, lonely and adrift in a sea of meaninglessness. [00:36:20] The digital world makes it easier for us to say let us make a name for ourselves instead of recognizing that God has already said let us make man in our image. [00:36:32] The gospel calls us to stop trying to make a name for ourselves and to stop living for our own purposes. We have not lived like the image of God we were intended to be, and we cannot repair the image by building a better one ourselves. [00:36:47] God became man and took on flesh so that we might be with God. [00:36:55] This is the gospel, and in many ways the digital world can tempt us by building life around our perspectives, around our desires. It can tempt us to see us at the center instead of God. [00:37:12] Okay, one piece of homework this week. [00:37:15] If you remember, a couple weeks ago we prayed a prayer of examen. We're going to do another one here to just note how our days are impacted and shaped around the concept of purpose in this short daily examine. It takes at most a minute or two. [00:37:35] Thank God that you were made on purpose, that you have a purpose. [00:37:41] Ask where that day. If it's the morning, ask about the day before. If it's the evening, ask about the day you just lived. [00:37:49] Ask where you lived according to this purpose throughout your day and give God thanks for it. [00:37:55] Ask where you tried to make your own purpose today and ask him for forgiveness. [00:38:01] And finally, ask him to conform you more and more to the image of His Son so that you might live according to your purpose. [00:38:11] Let's pray. Father, we love you. We thank you for making us according to your purpose. We pray that you would show us how to live lives that are centered on you. [00:38:22] We pray that we would not be so overwhelmed by the many, many, many purposes that are fed to us by our phones that we would lose sight of you as our great and chief purpose. [00:38:36] Father, we love you. We pray for these things in your precious and holy name. Amen.