Wake Up, Look Up

Hello, everybody. Thanks for listening to wake up, look up, a podcast where we connect events happening in real time to the gospel of Jesus Christ. I'm Zach Weirock. And today's episode, we're talking about the decline of civilization, and we're asking the question, can reading save us? This is prompted by an article I read in the Washington post by Nicole Krause, who was lamenting the lack of reading and writing in our society and actually connecting it to other civilizations that throughout history have declined, at least according to the author, for similar reasons.

Miss Krauss point is that a lack of reading and writing shows our civilization at a crossroads, that an increasingly digital world is removing us from the things that literature, both reading it and writing it, often create. Things like empathy and imagination. The loss of modern language is leading, at least in her mind, to a kind of human diminishment. We're so consuming things so quickly and so mindlessly that we're not getting smarter. We're not getting, better at communicating.

We're not getting more empathetic. We're actually getting less and less at all of those things. And as a result, society isn't flourishing and neither are we. This article is a call to pick back up the love of reading, the love of writing, the communication and self reflection that comes from those things. And here's the thing.

I think she's right. I mean, look. My job is less societal critique and more local church leadership to help you think as a Christian, but I think you show me a church that is in decline, a Christian family that is in decline, a Christian who is in decline, and I'll show you one who isn't reading, who isn't writing, who has forgotten the very simple fact, number one, that God has communicated to us through the written word. Second Timothy three sixteen reminds us that all scripture is God breathed and profitable. In other words, you wanna feel the breath of God, hear the voice of God, you do that through the written word that is available to you in the Bible.

God presupposes we will be readers. It's the medium that he has chosen, and reading does shape our minds. In fact, the apostle Paul says in Romans 12 verse two, be transformed by the renewing of your mind. And how did Paul suppose that would happen? Through the reading of the scriptures.

And when we aren't reading, it isn't just that we're not checking a box or not fulfilling some particular duty or discipline. It's we're leaving some of the riches of our faith on the table. Think about Psalm 19. The first few verses of Psalm 19, the Psalmist is talking about nature and what it reveals to us about the power and creativity and beauty of the mind of God. But then he turns from nature to the scriptures, and he says that it's the scriptures that are even more valuable than a sunset or the ocean or a rainbow because it's the scriptures that enlighten the eyes.

It's the scriptures that bring alive the heart, that show us who God is and and what he wants from us and what he has planned for us. And when we're not reading, we're leaving that out there. And when we're not reflecting in written word, we're not processing the things that God desires, not just for us to read, but to trickle down into the nooks and crannies of our hearts and our minds and our lives. Look, engaging in the scriptures is part of how God moves us. It's it's part of how he desires to engage us personally and corporately.

Look at teaching the scriptures, the reading and the writing of the scriptures is the primary work of the local church. In Ephesians four, God tells us that he's given apostles and prophets and teachers and ministers and all different roles for people to play in the church, but all of those roles are getting their material from the bible. Listen, I know life is busy and our attention spans are getting shorter and shorter and shorter and so as a result, it might be harder than ever to sit down and create space to read and reflect and to think about the scriptures. But there is no podcast, no video series, no YouTube short, no Instagram reel that will ever replace the power of God's word. We're not just a civilization at a crossroads.

We're a church at the crossroads. And one way is reading and flourishing, and another way is not and not. Which path do you want for yourself, for your family, for your church? We must become readers to the glory of God to save our civilization and to have the rich life he desires for us to have. Hey.

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