Keep praying for Darien and Steve. They are teaching church planters in Kabardino-Bulkaria today through Thursday.
I really appreciated Tim Challies brief article today about technology. He uses a current commercial to get us to think about how our use of smart phones and other gadgets really effects the quality of our relationships.
Here’s an interesting phenomenon. On the one hand we have become dependent upon our mobile phones. After all, they bring us great benefits. We are not ready to give them up. But on the other hand, we must honestly face the truth that these devices are prone to draw us away from the important things in life…including the people who are closest to us.
Do you see what the phone does? There’s a great irony buried within it. The cell phone, a device meant to enhance my communication with others, can increase my ability to communicate with those who are far from me, but this often comes at the cost of communication with my own wife and children—those closest to me. Microsoft captures this (borderline inappropriately, I suppose) with the woman standing beside the bed as her husband stares at his phone and with the dad sitting on the end of the seesaw as his child is suspended in the air. Those who are closest to them are forgotten, while the men communicate with those who are far away.
The fact is, many of us buy phones in order to remain connected to the people we love. Do you remember the commercials that sold us on having unlimited calling to five friends or family members? This phone was going to let us be closer to those we want to be closest to. This is a noble thing. And yet in the end the phone demands our attention even (and perhaps especially) while we are near those people. While I sit beside my wife, my phone calls me to respond to an email from a client a thousand miles away. While I go for a walk with my son, the phone calls me to response to a text message from a friend across town.
Here is A.W. Tozer on the importance of encountering God with the heart. I mentioned this in the sermon yesterday. If our study of the Word does not produce this – then it is all in vain.
“It is not mere words that nourish the soul, but God Himself, and unless and until the hearers find God in personal experience they are not the better for having heard the truth. The Bible is not an end in itself, but a means to bring men to an intimate and satisfying knowledge of God, that they may enter into Him, that they may delight in His Presence, may taste and know the inner sweetness of the very God Himself in the core and center of their hearts.”