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 Weihrauch. And in today's episode, we're talking about whether or not the human race is headed towards extinction and whether or not Jesus is only available off line. This is prompted by a pretty interesting opinion piece in the New York Times by conservative writer Ross Douthat, who was writing on whether or not the human race is headed towards extinction.

In fact, he said an age of extinction is coming, and he wrote a kind of survival guide. Now when he talks about extinction, he doesn't mean a meteor or dinosaurs dying off or the dodo bird or or a postapocalyptic movie where we're all hunter gatherers. Instead, what he means is is this, is that humanity as a cultural creature is at risk of dying. That's because in his mind, we are increasingly becoming digital. We are in favor of anything that is mind numbing, quick, cheap, and can be scrolled through quickly than we are in things that actually are worth listening to, reading, talking about, that take time, true actual culture.

As a result, not only are we coming, in his mind at least, dumber and desensitized to things that used to prompt a variety of feelings. We're becoming more and more isolated. People are complicated. Relationships are difficult. And so we're shrinking back from actual people in favor of AI chatbot friends or dating sites that are just merely about hooking up to have sex and then never seeing each other again instead of actual dating and courtship mechanisms.

In his mind, we are voluntarily retreating from thinking, from relationships, and from actual tradition and culture. You see this in churches, sit down restaurants, movie theaters, actual theaters, and he is issuing a warning that if we don't change, culture as we know it will be extinct. Well, listen. I'm not a cultural commentator, but I do think he's on to something here. And I wanna just challenge you a little bit with this provocative thought as we make the turn to what the Bible says.

If you are feeling spiritually stagnant, if you are feeling as though your faith, at least in terms of vibrancy, is at risk of extinction, I think he's putting his finger on exactly the cause. Digital things in the end erode our interest in God. You think human relationships are complex? Try wrestling through some of the things that the Bible calls us to, looking at our own sin, contemplating the nature and character of God. If we only think in a 40 characters or in sound bites or in fifteen second videos, gonna be tough to deal with those.

Look, the Bible tells us in places like John one, for example, that God is after actual relationship with us, that that's why Jesus came, that that is what he's cultivating. Jesus tells us in the gospel of John and in the high priestly prayer of chapters fourteen and fifteen and sixteen that he wants one ship between us and each other and between us and God, similar to what he enjoys with the father. Well, that comes through actually spending time. That comes through the slow and deliberate work of prayer, of reading scripture, of reflection, of actually having human interactions. The truth is that a digital culture is shaping us in ways we may not realize.

It's shortening our attention span. It's shortening our tolerance for being challenged or disrupted. It's making us not just isolated, but selfish. We have never needed the words of Paul in the book of Romans chapter 12 more than when he tells us we must transform through renewal of our minds. And renewal of our minds isn't swiping left or right.

It's putting the phone down altogether. It's starting to see that devices, television screens, iPad screens, phone screens, these things are helpful tools as long as we're the ones doing the creating and shaping and not the other way around. Jesus said it this way, no one can serve two masters. Now in that passage, he's talking about God and money, but the principle holds true. If God wants something different for us in terms of relationships, in terms of our relationship to him, in terms of how we think or how we don't think than technology does, we can only go with one of them.

The call in Deuteronomy 30 to choose life, to choose god's way is also pressing on us now. And not only for us, I might add, but the world is becoming only more technological. So in Joel one verse three, when we're told to pass the faith down to our kids and their them to their kids and so on and so on, the faith going from one generation to the next. If we don't begin to show the younger people in our lives what it looks like to go analog intentionally in many areas of our lives to put down the digital version and pick up the real, the real messy kind of relationship, the real messy kind of a church engagement, the real slow and difficult kind of spiritual growth the Bible calls us to, then not only will we be in trouble, but future generations will as well. Listen.

The future of a lot of things is online, but the future of actual true lasting spiritual growth is offline. And that's where you're gonna find it with real people doing the real work of following the real Jesus. This episode of Wake Up Look Up was produced by Marcus Cunningham and Hallie Andrews. Our topic researcher is Shanna Young. This episode was directed by Rima Saleh.

Our podcast coordinator is Hallie Andrews. Our production manager and audio wizard is Marcus Cunningham with tech and engineering support from Matthew Adel and Landon Hall. I'm your host, Zach Weihrauch. Join us for the next episode of Wake Up, Look Up.

Have an article you’d like Pastor Zach to discuss? Email us at wakeup@ccchapel.com!