A. One day a man whose wife was addicted to her online activities sent her this email:
1. Dear Wife,
I’m sending you this email to bring up to date on the events of our family. I tried to talk to you while you were on your computer, but you just kept telling me that you would B-R-B... whatever that means. So, I decided to send you this email.
John Jr. cut his first tooth today. He’s the one you bounce on your knee while typing and surfing the internet.
Susie had her first date Saturday night. She had a good time and said to thank you for letting them use your car. She put the keys back on the key rack underneath the cobwebs where she found them.
Tim is playing football. He looks forward to going to school now that he has a sport to play. He wants to know if you would come to one of his games if we bought you a laptop to bring along?
Let’s see, what else is new since the last time I wrote you three months ago: the refrigerator had to be replaced, the dog died from old age, the church has a new minister, and oh yes...I have a new job.
Well, I think that's about it. I’ll email you again in about three months. You take care of yourself honey. We all “miss” you very much and will see you the next time the power goes off! Love, Your Husband
2. Although this illustration was about a wife who was too absorbed with her online activities, it could just as easily have been about husbands, young adults or teens who can’t seem to turn their attention from their laptops, Ipads, cellphones or gaming systems.
B. Today, as we continue in our SPEAK LIFE sermon series, I want us to turn our attention to our “cyber talk” – what we are communicating through email, texting and social media.
1. Obviously, this is not the use of our physical tongue, but it is the use of our words and the communication of who we are and what we believe.
2. Before we get into the specifics of “cyber talk,” I want us to spend some time assessing and addressing this internet and electronic age we live in.
3. While there are many advantages to social media and everything electronic, we should ask: “Is it good for us?”
4. Or more importantly, we should ask ourselves: “How can we obey the Great Commandment to love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength while using Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Google?”
5. Some of the things I want to encourage us to think through in this sermon and afterward are these:
a. Am I seeking to glorify God through my use of the internet and social media?
b. Is my use of the internet and social media leading me into sin?
c. Has the use of the internet and social media become my master?
d. Is my use of the internet and social media wasting time and making me unproductive?
e. Do I value my use of the internet and social media more than real-life relationships?
f. Is my use of the internet and social media leading to my discontentment?
g. Is my use of the internet and social media leading to complaining, unwholesome talk, or unprofitable arguments?
h. Do people clearly see the light of Christ through what I post, tweet, text and email?
6. As I think you would agree, those are very important questions with very significant consequences and outcomes.
C. Tony Reinke made this admission in his article “Six Ways Your Phone is Changing You”: Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone at Macworld Expo 2007, and I got my first one a year later. I can’t remember life without it. For seven years an iPhone has always been within my reach, there to wake me in the morning, there to play my music library, there to keep my calendar, there to capture my life in pics and video, there for me to enjoy sling-shooting wingless birds into enemy swine, there as my ever-present portal to Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. My iPhone is such a part of my daily life, I rarely think self-reflectively about it.”
1. But that’s precisely what I want us to do to today…I want us to think about it.
2. David Wells, who is a careful thinker and has watched trends in the church for many decades, says: “What is it doing to our minds when we are living with this constant distraction? We are, in fact, now living with a parallel universe, a virtual universe that can take all of the time we have. So what happens to us when we are in constant motion, when we are addicted to constant visual stimulation? What happens to us? That is the big question.”
3. David Wells is quick to remind us we are only 20 years into this experiment called “The Internet Age” (or “The Information Age”).
4. As you know, all of our digital communications technology is relatively new.
5. Someday we will stand back and look with more precision at what our smartphones and computers and game players are doing to our brains, our hearts, and our souls, but we don’t have the leisure to postpone self-reflection for the future.
6. We need to ask ourselves questions now and that’s what I want us to do in this sermon today.
D. Dr. Douglas Groothuis is a Professor of Philosophy at Denver Seminary.
1. Groothuis has been tracking the impact of the Internet on the spiritual life since he published his book The Soul in Cyberspace in 1997.
2. I want to share with you what his research has discovered about the way that the internet, cellphones and social media are changing us.
I. The first way the internet age is changing us is: “We are becoming what we behold.”
A. At first that statement sounds abstract, but it’s one of the most simple (and profound) psychological realities we learn in Scripture: We become like what we behold.
1. To worship an idol is to become like the idol; to worship Christ is to become like Christ.
2. Look at these verses from Psalm 115:
4 But their idols are silver and gold, made by the hands of men.
5 They have mouths, but cannot speak, eyes, but they cannot see;
6 they have ears, but cannot hear, noses, but they cannot smell;
7 they have hands, but cannot feel, feet, but they cannot walk; nor can they utter a sound with their throats.
8 Those who make them will be like them, and so will all who trust in them.
3. Romans 12:2 says: Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.
4. And 2 Cor. 3:18, my favorite verse on this subject, says: And we, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord's glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.
B. We see from those verses that what we love to behold is what we worship.
1. What we spend our time beholding shapes our hearts and molds us into the people we are.
2. This spiritual truth is frightening and useful, but it raises the questions: What happens to our soul when we spend so much time beholding the glowing screens of our phones? How are we changed? How are we conformed?
C. This truth has serious implications for what happens to our minds and souls when the things we are beholding are impure and lustful.
1. Internet pornography and sensuality and temptations of all kinds bombard us from every direction.
2. We need to put all kinds of safeguards in place to help protect us from this bombardment and the resulting temptations.
3. Scripture gives us many warnings and commands about sexual purity, but 2 Cor. 7:1 is especially good: Since we have these promises, dear friends, let us purify ourselves from everything that contaminates body and spirit, perfecting holiness out of reverence for God.
4. With God’s help and the encouragement and accountability of trusted brothers and sisters, we can exercise restraint and self-discipline and avoid the damage that comes from cyber-sins – whether they are lustful addictions or improper relationships.
5. This is a very important subject, and I have addressed it numerous times in other sermons, and it is something that we must continually be aware of and be vigilant about.
D. Dr. Groothuis takes this danger of beholding in a different direction when he warns: “One way we become like what we behold shows up relationally.”
1. Our digital interactions with one another, which are often necessarily brief and superficial, begin to pattern all our relationships.
2. He says, “The way we interact online becomes the norm for how we interact offline. Facebook and Twitter communications are pretty short, clipped, and very rapid. And that is not a way to have a good conversation with someone. Moreover, a good conversation involves listening and timing and that is pretty much taken away with Internet communications, because you are not there with the person. So someone could send you a message and you could ignore it, or someone could send you a message and you get to it two hours later. But if you are in real time in a real place with real bodies and a real voice, that is a very different dynamic. You shouldn’t treat another person the way you would interact with Twitter.” But we do, if we’re not careful.
II. The second way the internet age is changing us is: “We are ignoring our finiteness.”
A. Fundamentally, every single one of us are finite individuals – meaning that we are severely limited in what we can know and what we can read and what we can engage with and (perhaps most importantly) very limited in what we can really care about.
1. Yet our computers and cellphones offer us everything — new news, new outrages, new videos, new music, new pictures, and new updates from all my Facebook friends.
B. One reason we own smartphones and are connected electronically is to avoid being left behind.
1. We don’t want to miss anything gone viral.
2. We track hashtag trends mostly out of fear of being left out.
3. And little by little we ignore our finiteness, we lose a sense of our limitations, and we begin lusting after the forbidden fruit of limitless knowledge in a subconscious desire to become infinite like God.
4. Groothuis says: “A smartphone absorbs our interest because it is so alluring. It can do so many things. And in a sense it is asking us to do so many things with it. But humans are limited. We can only think through so many things at once. We can only feel properly a limited number of things. And these technologies want to stretch us out over the entire globe with Twitter feeds, Facebook messages, and photos shared on Instagram. Instead, we need to embrace our finitude. And if we really own up to our finitude and the fact that a life well lived is a life lived carefully.”
5. Look at Paul’s instructions: Be very careful, then, how you live--not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil. (Eph. 5:15-16)
III. The third way the internet age is changing us is: “We are multitasking what should be unitasked.”
A. In an article called “A Social Media Heart Check,” Kim Cash Tate wrote: “Before social media, life seemed simpler, uncluttered. You knew what you alone were having for dinner, not twenty others. Hours in a day were more productive. Focused. No scroll-and-click distractions. No blog hopping. You hunkered down and worked — or played with your kids or read a good book — without thought as to what you might be missing.”
1. Unfortunately, many of us have embraced the multitasking myth.
2. We attempt to multitask everything, trying to think in two directions at the same time, trying to be in two places at the same time, trying to live in physical space and virtual space simultaneously.
B. This modern temptation explains why Dr. Groothuis prohibits his students from using phones and laptops in his classes.
1. He says: “I think we are a very distracted culture. We are trying to multitask things that should not be multitasked — they should be unitasked. And that is what I tell my students: ‘You can’t multitask philosophy.’ The study of philosophy cannot be distracted by tweets. And if not philosophy, how much more should we aim to unitask our study of God and our prayer life?”
2. In reality, Scripture calls us to a life of single-minded self-reflection that often gets thwarted by the hum of multitasking.
a. If it’s important, it’s worth being unitasked.
b. Which means there must be priorities that trump our iPhone push notifications.
c. This is true for our spiritual disciplines, our workplace, and certainly our relationships.
3. How sad it is to glance around a restaurant and see so many people who have their heads down using their cellphones to text, Tweet, or update their Facebook statuses – all while sharing a meal with others at their table.
IV. The fourth way the internet age is changing us is: “We are forgetting the joy of embodiment.”
A. The Apostle John closes one of his ancient handwritten letters with a line of enduring relevance for those of us who now write with our thumbs: I have much to write to you, but I do not want to use paper and ink [modern technology for John]. Instead, I hope to visit you and talk with you face to face, so that our joy may be complete. (2 John 12).
1. Dr. Groothuis says: “As Neil Postman suggested, communications technology, like email, is ghost-to-ghost more than person-to-person. There is something of us in an email, but there’s more to our personhood that doesn’t get sent. In an email we send our ghost. The same is true of a blog post. These inescapable limitations of digital communication are rooted in God’s design in creation.”
2. Dr. Groothuis goes on to say: “Christianity differs from every other religion except Judaism in claiming that the universe is created good. And God puts his blessing on it and God wants fellowship with human beings using the medium of matter. And we have the doctrine of Incarnation. It is something like Jesus turning water into wine - and the best wine - in John 2:1–12. That is embodied, that is people-fellowship, that is enjoying the fruit of the vine, and Jesus blesses that.”
B. But, why is the Apostle John’s own joy bound up with embodied “face to face” fellowship?
1. Dr. Groothuis explains: “I think it has to do with the engaging of personalities. Our personality will come through to some extent in an email message or a tweet. But we are holistic beings. We have feelings. We have thoughts. We have imagination. We have bodies. We look different. We express ourselves differently, for example in our tone of voice. How many times have we miscommunicated with someone online because there is no tone of voice? We were joking and someone took it seriously and got offended. Or we say something serious and people think we were joking. So I think the fullness of joy comes with one personality interacting with other personalities in terms of voice, touch, appearance, and timing. Sometimes it is time just to be quiet with people, or to cry with people, or to laugh with people.”
2. You have probably heard that only 7 % of communication is based on the written or verbal word and a whopping 93% is based on nonverbal body language.
3. It is only when we can hear the tone of voice or look into someone’s eyes that we’re able to know when “I’m fine” doesn’t mean they’re fine at all.
C. That was made tragically real in October of 2015 when a lady named Sharon Seline exchanged text messages with her daughter who was in college.
1. They “chatted” back and forth, mom asking how things were going and daughter answering with positive statements followed by emoticons showing smiles, b-i-g smiles and hearts.
2. Later that night, her daughter attempted suicide.
3. In the days that followed, it came to light that she’d been holed up in her dorm room, crying and showing signs of depression – a completely different reality from the one that she conveyed in texts, tweets and Facebook posts.
D. So, social media and email, what we might call disembodied communication, can be a very useful extension of our embodied relationships, but not a replacement for them.
1. We must make sure that the conveniences of disembodied communication doesn’t undermine the joy of embodied communication.
2. We must truly value the personal, face-to-face relationships in our lives over the disembodied relationships we maintain online.
3. Our face-to-face relationships with our spouse, or our kids, or our neighbors must not be allowed to suffer because our attention is on the disembodied, virtual relationships.
V. The fifth way the internet age is changing us is: “We are losing interest in the gathered church.”
A. Inevitably, this lost joy of embodiment manifests itself as empty pews on Sunday morning.
1. When God’s people come and worship in spirit and in truth there is the presence and dynamic of the Holy Spirit that can’t be experienced on Facebook, or through live steaming.
2. The Church, the body of Christ is to meet together - we are to be with each other and we are to worship together and confess our sins and share communion and embrace people and show our love for people and weep with those who weep and laugh with those who laugh.
3. So do we truly value the embodied reality of the local church?
4. And even if we show up on Sunday are we focused on each other and what is happening among us, or are we checking out, fiddling on our phones, and looking for something more promising, more entertaining, more disembodied, than the joy of God offered in embodied fellowship?
VI. Finally, The sixth way the internet age is changing us is: “We are growing careless with our words.”
A. Why are we quick to judge the motives of people, and why are we so bold to criticize them online?
1. Why do we say things online we would never say in person?
2. Why does digital communication draw our scorn so easily?
3. Dr. Groothuis points again to disembodiment - He says: “At a profound level, when we interact with people online, we are quick to forget these are souls, quick to forget ‘we are interacting with eternal beings.’ Disembodiment — distracted minds trying to multitask — makes our language especially flippant and potentially over-critical.”
4. He says: “We need to have integrity when we are online. We should do it prayerfully. We need to resist impulses. And I don’t always successfully do this. I have deleted not a few Facebook posts. But remember that we are doing this before the face of God and we are interacting with eternal beings. We are having an effect on people’s destinies, even through a Twitter message. I think if we take that kind of approach it gives us a sense of gravitas and we are less likely to become flippant. Glibness and flippancy are terrible vices in our age. So many times in Scripture we are told to be careful with our words. Proverbs says this over and over again. We are told to be careful how we speak and let our words be few (Proverbs 10:19–21; 17:27).”
5. The acronym WWJD – What Would Jesus Do? – became popular in the U.S. in the 1990s, and perhaps we need to update it to WWJT – What Would Jesus Tweet or What Would Jesus Text?
6. The admonition “Think Before You Speak” must become “Think Before You Send or Think Before You Post.”
B. In our SPEAK LIFE series, I have been emphasizing the words of Proverbs 18:21, “The tongue has the power of life and death, and those who love it will eat its fruit.”
1. In this internet age, we have seen all too clearly the truth: Words can kill.
a. How many stories have we heard about a teen who committed suicide after being bullied online?
2. Cyber-bullying has reached epidemic proportions in recent times.
a. Cyber-bullying is defined as deliberately using digital media to communicate false, embarrassing, or hostile information about or to another person.
3. The Syracuse Post-Standard Newspaper published an article a couple of weeks ago (Nov. 20, 2016) entitled “Cyberbullies reach CNY teens,” written by Julie McMahon.
a. The article reported: “One-quarter of teenagers in the Central New York region are cyberbullied, according to a recent report.”
b. Researchers surveyed a total of 1,255 teens and 1,048 parents from Upstate NY.
c. The research offers a clear picture of the digital world where teens are increasingly spending their time – 87% of parents said their child has their own smartphone and are regularly exposed to cyber bullying.
d. Between a quarter to a third of teens confessed to their own experiences with occasional or frequent cyberbullying, while many more reported witnessing others, including their friends, being bullied online.
e. Here are the reasons the teens gave for why they were bullied: physical appearance (42%), social awkwardness (35%), sexual orientation (34%), clothing (30%), being un-athletic (30%), having a disability (25%), and sexual activity (19%).
f. Let me share one more finding: A third of teens said their parents are basically clueless about what they do online.
4. As parents, we must be vigilant about what our children are experiencing in real life and in virtual life.
a. Electronic communication and social media contain some real dangers.
b. Safeguards must be put in place and close monitoring is necessary.
5. I want to challenge all of us here today to be especially careful about our cyber-talk.
a. When Paul wrote the first letter to Timothy, he challenged him, “Don't let anyone look down on you because you are young, but set an example for the believers in speech, in life, in love, in faith and in purity.” (1 Tim. 4:12)
b. I want to challenge all of us, young and old, to set an example in speech – in word.
c. Let’s be determined not to email, text, tweet or post anything unwholesome, derogatory, complaining, hurtful, or un-Christ-like.
Conclusion:
A. I hope and pray that all of us can navigate the internet age in which we live in a way that we can benefit from its usefulness, while avoiding all of its dangers.
B. I pray that we can put into practice the words that Paul wrote to the Corinthians: So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God. (1 Cor. 10:31)
C. This means we will strive to be productive and not waste time in the virtual world rather than the real world.
D. This means we will strive to be pure in all our activities online and everywhere else.
E. This means we will strive to use our tongues for good and never for evil, either in spoken words or cyber words.
Resources:
“Six Ways Your Phone Is Changing You” Article by Tony Reinke, desiringGod.org
“A Social Media Heart Check” Article by Kim Cash Tate, desiringGod.org
“Is Social Media Sabotaging Real Communication?” Article by Susan Tardanico, onforb.es
“Cyberbullies Reach CNY Teens” Article by Julie McMahon, The Post-Standard, 11.20.16
“15 Questions to Help Christians Follow Jesus on Social Media” unlockingthebible.org/blog
