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. In today's episode, we're looking at when gamers become pastors and who's discipling your kids. This is prompted by an article I read in The Atlantic that is featuring the rise of Twitch video game streamers and the influence they have with the younger generation.

Now if you're not familiar with Twitch as a platform, think kind of a live streaming YouTube where you're watching someone play video games. That's fairly innocuous. Big deal. You're watching someone play video games. It's like being in a friend's house, and your kid is watching their buddy play a video game except for, while playing the game, these streamers are often talking.

Sometimes about the game, sometimes about inane banalities, and sometimes they're casting a vision for a world view. That's the case of one streamer who's featured in the article, Zach Hoyt, who goes by the nickname or handle, Asmongold. The Asmongold streams about, five or six hours a day playing world of Warcraft, having other people watch him play a video game. You might think, who's watching this? Well, for Asmongold, about 2,200,000 people a day.

And my guess is maybe even your kids. I'm not sure we're aware of how big the following of watching other people play video games really is with this generation. Now what makes Asmongold a little different is not that he plays video games or that he streams himself playing them, but while he's playing them, he is actually engaging in some serious topics. He's talking about politics. He's talking about society.

He's talking about world view. And people are tuning in not just for the video game, they're tuning in for this content. Now that's troubling in and of itself that people would go looking to a video game streamer for thoughts on philosophy or society or politics. But maybe in some ways, what's even more troubling is that Asmongold isn't presenting himself as an authority. He mostly speaks from a cynical, jaded kind of view, kind of cultivating a sneering at the world.

Let's play video games while Rome burns kind of thing. And thus, influencing a generation to be cynical about the world, to, fill their mind with frivolity and to not even feel a sense of ownership for how to make things better. There's a lot going on there that we probably don't want cultivated in our children or even in our own hearts and minds. So how should we think about this as Christians? Well, for one, we need to realize that it's hardwired in each one of us to need leadership.

The Bible refers to us as sheep, and sheep need shepherds. It's something in us as humans probably because we're made in the image of God, a God whose leadership we're always longing for. And when we're not going to him, it isn't that we're leaderless, it's that we replace him with someone different. And that someone may or may not be leading us in the direction of God or in the direction towards the things that God would want us to go. And in Asmongold's place, he's not trying to do that.

He's not looking to do that. In fact, I can't help when I think about him of thinking of Proverbs ten twenty three, which tells us that mockery is pretty much the opposite of wisdom, that there's this kind of jaded, approach to to being wise that kinda steps outside of the world's problems and points the finger at everyone else. But that isn't wisdom. That's destructive, not constructive. Cynicism is often indicative of a kind of moral drift.

And I worry about this for all of us. I worry about us being jaded, about us being cynical, about believing the world's problems are about someone else or that the world's solutions are about someone else and missing out on the opportunity that the Bible puts in front of us to be salt, to be light, to be the city on a hill, to be the ones who join Jesus, who at the end of the book of Revelation says, I am making all things new. That's the great adventure of the Christian life under the leadership and for the glory of Jesus bringing restoration to the world. But I also worry about parents because I think parents just aren't aware of what their kids are doing on their devices, which means you're not aware of the voices that are actually shaping your children. The Bible makes clear that the training of our children, Proverbs twenty two six, is our responsibility and that we take the the burden of forming in our children and understanding of who they are, of who other people are, and of what God wants for the world.

Listen. The world is bombarding us all the time with voices that are seeking to lead us in a particular direction. I think we could all benefit from a little more discernment about who's worth listening to and who's not, but especially for our children and for the next generation who doesn't know the difference. We've got to be paying attention. We've got to be dialoguing, and we've gotta be helping our children find voices that are worth listening to and to turn off those that are not.

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