Applying What We Know About Our Internet Usage to Our Spiritual Lives

Just had a few thoughts from yesterday's piece that covered the Atlantic Monthly article, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" The article is, I think, a good wake-up call for those of us who frequently browse the Internet. In particular, I think that it encourages us not to compartmentalize our lives. By this I mean that we should not think that our Internet usage is cordoned off from our spiritual lives. What does this mean on a practical level? Let me share.

Yesterday's post touched on a number of other concerns that I have regarding constant Web use by Christians. Today, though, I want to zero in on the problematic question of how our devotional life is affected by the Internet. Put simply, if in our usage of the Web we are training ourselves to concentrate in ten-second bursts, we're going to struggle, I think, to sustain a meaningful devotional life. Devotions are not essential to being a Christian. That is, you don't have to have a thirty-minute time set aside each day for prayer and Bible study to be a Christian. However, most Christians throughout the ages have found that in order to walk closely with God on a daily basis, it is quite helpful to set aside time for these things. In our devotional time, we seek to focus for a period of time on God and His influence on our spiritual lives. Contemplation and thoughtfulness are thus at a premium when it comes to devotions.

Every Christian who has ever tried to do devotions knows that it's hard to do them. Your attention wanders, your concentration drifts, and sooner than you can know it, you're miles away from your church's weekly prayer requests, or Jeremiah's lamentations. How important, then, that in all of our lives, we cultivate mental habits that train us to focus, and not to flit. If you are constantly surfing the web, nibbling on content, I am guessing that you will find it challenging to dig into the Word. If you check email every ten minutes, I would venture that your concentration will easily shift from prayer to distracted thought. Why should it be otherwise? You're training yourself to do just that--to shift.

In seeking to be wise, discerning, disciplined Christians, then, we've got to think hard not just about what we take in, but how we take it in. Most Christians are quite aware of the need to avoid bad Internet content. Few of us, I would guess, are aware of the need to avoid a bad approach to the Internet. As in many areas of life, we simply consume it like the masses around us, thinking little about its effect on our lives.

We should not allow the Internet to shred our devotional lives. If we do surf the Web and check email, we should do so carefully, such that we are capable of deep reflection and sustained attention. Our devotional lives can only be rich if we develop such abilities. Also, though, how can we expect ourselves and others to pay attention to sermons and hymns if we're constantly trafficking in information? If our personal devotional life will suffer from overexposure to the Internet, so too will our congregational participation as members of churches. We'll check in and out of sermons, tune out of the very songs we're singing, and generally regard church with a glazed-over boredom, all the while unaware that it is not church and its offerings that are the problem--it is us and the attention spans we have trained to flit and flicker and fade in and out that are the problem. Shame on us for so often blaming the church and the pastor when it is almost solely we who are to blame.

Do you exhibit these symptoms? I know I do at times. If so, train your senses. Re-think your Internet consumption. Carve out within yourself the ability to focus and think deeply. Your spiritual life--and your church life--can only benefit as a result, and God can only be glorified as another area of one's life opens up to the transforming power of God's Word.

The Spirituality of Sin: Greed

A greedy man stirs up strife, but the one who trusts in the LORD will be enriched.

--Proverbs 28:25

If the root of flattery is a lack of trust in God, I think that the root of greed is also a lack of trust in God. Why do we hoard our possessions and store them up selfishly? Greed. Why would we act in such a way? Because we don't trust God to provide for us in the future. We somehow convince ourselves that God is not going to bless us in the future, and so we hoard what we have. Greed produces parsimony, or a lack of generosity. At the root of stinginess, then, is greed; at the root of greed is a lack of trust in God.

You can tell whether you trust God by measuring how generous you are. No one would define generosity by foolishness, of course, that is, by a level of giving that is heedless of the future. It's biblically wise to invest what you have, to save for a rainy day, as the saying goes (or to save for a rainy day in which your children go to college). However, there's wise saving, and there's parsimonious saving. Those who give very little show that they don't fundamentally trust God to provide. The combination of inherent sin and Satan's temptation causes them to come to the illogical conclusion that though God has richly provided in the past, for some inexplicable and sudden reason, His provision has now dried up, and there is subsequently no reason to trust Him for the future. This is a sad and unbiblical way to live.

The center of our lives is God, and trust in Him. If we remember that faith in God is the great gift of this life, then we will avoid idolizing the blessings He has given us. By this I mean that if our understanding of God is small, the things we have will grow large, and we'll try to hang onto them by whatever means we can. If, however, our picture of God is large, and if Christ is our chief treasure in life, and we define happiness by the gift of faith in Christ given us by the Holy Spirit, then we'll hold our possessions and our finances lightly. We won't do so, as I said above, by foolishly pious, thinking that we have no need of planning or saving. But we will balance our wise living with a robust faith in God that trusts Him to provide for us in the future. Armed with such a robust trust, we'll free ourselves from the clutches of greed and allow ourselves to give generously to our churches, our families, our missionaries, our parachurch ministries, and others who can benefit from the blessings God has given us.

How much do you and I trust God? Well, how much do we give? We say that we have strong faith in God. But what shape does that faith take? Does it purport to be faith but end up looking and smelling like anxiety and, in the end, greed? To what ends does the sin of our hearts drive us? These are hard questions, and we will all see sin in how we answer them, but we can all work toward a position of trusting faith that frees us from greed to give generously. If God is our chief prize, and not the things of this earth, how can we not find great joy in generosity, knowing that whatever may come, we have a gift we cannot lose?

The Spirituality of Sin: Flattery

Save, O LORD, for the godly one is gone; for the faithful have vanished from among the children of man. Everyone utters lies to his neighbor; with flattering lips and a double heart they speak.

--Psalms 12:1-2

Recent days have prompted thought on the nature of sin. What is it, exactly, that induces us to obey our sin nature and to commit transgression against the Lord? I've attempted to think about this in relation to sins that plague my own heart.

Before I go any further, let me first say this: I am a flatterer. The language we choose to describe our sin shapes the way we understand that sin. Instead of saying, "Sometimes I flatter" or "I can sometimes be a flatterer", I have found that I best target the sin of my heart by identifying myself by my sin. Sometimes I commit the sin of flattery; therefore, I am a flatterer. That's it. That's all there is to it. Labeling myself in this way helps me to avoid compartmentalizing my sin (though I still fall prey to compartmentalizing--ergo, I'm a compartmentalizer, too!). I'm not this pristine person who occasionally slips into flattery. I'm a sinner through and through whose sin takes shape in the form of flattery.

I find that admitting this to myself is helpful in turning away from my sin. I can't simply jump to consideration of the wonder of Christ's atoning work when I am justly shamed for my sin. No, I need to allow myself to feel the weight of my sin, to offer confession whenever possible to the Lord. In seeking humility and restoration, it is of course best to give the fullest, most heartfelt confession possible. This necessarily involves me calling myself what I am--a sinner whose sin takes definitive shapes and forms. I'm not merely a sinner, after all; I'm a sinner with certain predilections and weaknesses. If all we ever own up to is "being a sinner", then we're not going to get very far in the way of honesty and humility and true confession and gospel restoration.

With all that said, let me say that I think that I flatter people because I don't trust God's providential power. In other words, I flatter people because I think that in order for good things to happen in my life, I've got to make them happen. One of the best ways to make things happen and to get ahead in the world is to heap praise on people who are in positions to help you. It's not a real complicated matter, and it's as old as stone. Smooth things out with the tongue so you walk an easy path. This is a common practice among sinful man, to disingenuously push himself forward by the power of his "flattering lips" and "double tongue" as the Psalmist so evocatively puts it in the above quotation. Sadly, even when people become Christians, they still sin against God by heaping unnecessary praise on others for the purpose of saving their own skin and beating others at their own game.

This is especially true in today's Christian celebrity culture, replete with famous authors and speakers and professors and presidents. For the smooth-tongued among us, it's easy to lie--however gently--to get ahead, to cozy up to people in order to jump off of their backs. Instead of trusting God to direct our paths and bestow what blessings he would give us, many of us talking types drop praise every chance we can get in order to make good and get ahead. It's sad to see others do this, and I have seen a good bit of it in my young years. It's even sadder to catch oneself doing it, and to realize, "I am a flatterer." Those are harsh words. Harsh because they're true.

So what do you do if you're a flatterer? Well, it's pretty simple. You trust God. You live a godly, assertive life but you live it without constantly keeping an eye on yourself and your peers. You try to discern as best you can from Scripture, prayer, counsel, and your intuition what it is that you should do in life for God's glory, and then you do it. But you do so without fretting over all the blessings your friends and fellow workers are getting. You do so without constantly taking stock of your life and then allowing yourself to slip into anxiety because you're not where your ambition tells you you should be. You live assertively and wisely, attempting to take what dominion you can in the world, but you do so with your foot on the brake, staying ready to stop yourself if you sense anxiety and a lack of trust in God to take you where He wants you to go.

The funny thing about all this is that it seems to me that God often lets us flatter and sin to get what we want. Just because you don't do things the right way doesn't mean God doesn't still bless your life. But this kind of achievement pales in comparison to that which is had through trust and faith. If you live aggressively, with sinful ambition fueling your flattery and other trustless acts, you may still get a lot. You might "win" in the game of life, and you might do so as a Christian. But you'll do it in your own strength, on your own time, and at the end, you'll celebrate with your own self. In your planning, God was left behind a while ago. The rewards of the works of your hands didn't come through steady trust and persevering, patient faith. They came through flattery and ambition, the same tools the faithless man of Psalm 12 uses to get ahead in this alien world.

I'm not writing to get anyone specifically, except myself. I know by the grace of God that I'm a flatterer. I know that I often don't trust God to bless and lead me and my family. I can see these things, and increasingly, I can see their ugliness. I'm not backing away a hair from godly assertiveness and kingdom ambition, but I want to distance myself by a thousand miles from my double tongue and the double-minded heart that engineers it. Perhaps you're like me. Perhaps you can see this sin in yourself and the lack of trust that propels it. If you are, pray for yourself and your fellow Christian flatterers. At every chance you get, trust God to lead you. We'll all struggle sometimes to balance godly assertiveness and ungodly ambition, and that's okay. That's how life is--decisions don't come gift-wrapped with five-step directions.

Be accountable to your church, pray for growth, and wherever you can, flex the muscle of faith. Let that double tongue go limp. Maybe then you and I will bring back the faithful to the land--the faithful, of course, being not someone else, some other sinner, but ourselves.

Reflections on the Movie "Castaway"

Here's one movie that I don't have to qualify as being a chick flick and therefore being worthy of my attention primarily because of my marriage. No, Castaway is a manly flick, a movie that depicts a man (Tom Hanks) struggling against the elements to survive on a remote desert island following a horrific plane crash. For more than four years, Hanks's character fashions a life for himself on this little island. He eventually sets sail in hope of finding a shipping lane and with it a ship that will take him back to his home and, more importantly, his fiancee.

The movie is thoroughly of this age. In the past, a survivor film of this sort would show the character engaged in some sort of religious devotion to a deity who controlled his fate. In this film, Hanks's character seems to have no idea that God even exists. He prays to noone and nothing and never directs his thoughts or words upwards. Instead, he makes a companion for himself out of a volleyball that washes to shore, and he directs his conversation to this imaginary friend, which he names "Wilson." In Castaway, our protagonist is a man of his age, a thoroughly secular man who survives for years by the strength of his will and the ingenuity of his mind. A modern man, he becomes the noble savage, only to become the modern man once more.

This point notwithstanding, it is entertaining and inspiring to watch Hanks's character struggle for survival. His will is strong and his instincts sharp. This is a man of action, a man of courage, one who is not content to sit back and weep over his fate. Indeed, love inspires his action, and reminds us of the need for a transcendental purpose for life. Of course, love of a human is not itself transcendent. Rather, it becomes transcendent in the life of Hanks's character. We who are Christians, those who have been possessed by the transcendent one, know that we cannot find our ultimate purpose in this life. We must find it in One who has given us this life and who gives us the means and motive by which to live this life. Hanks's character has no sense of such higher philosophy. At the end of his life, he has naught to do but ponder where to go next. When his purpose is fulfilled, or, more accurately, cancelled, there is nothing more for him to do but drift through his world. I am not sure that the movie is making my point, but it succeeds in doing so, for we are left with a man who is homeless, rootless, aimless. We are reminded of the need to find the transcendent being while we have time. We are shown that it is natural that we should seek for Him though we do so by pursuing lesser things. When the lesser things fail, when loves dries up, when a social cause dies down, when tragedy strikes, to what--more importantly, to Whom--will we turn? If we fail to pursue the One who created us, we will end up as lost as Hanks's character in Castaway, whether we live on a tropical island by ourselves or amidst a million city faces.