Use of Words

When our words (written or spoken) serve an idol, they try to distract us from what matters most. They encourage us to focus on quantity over quality. Our communication begins to lack substance and the constant flow of words keeps us from focusing our hearts and minds on the truth... But when our words serve God, they draw our hearts to the things that are of greatest importance. Such words are full of meaning and life. They call us out of the shallows and into the depths of knowing God. Our technological advances in communication provide us with opportunities to use words in ways that will honor God, thoughtful words that speak with substance and truth and give life to people made in God's image.

Learning through images and visual media is directly opposed to learning by reading, which requires a more sustained focus and actually generates new skills and capabilities in the brain.

Our task... is not to avoid technology but to carefully evaluate it, redeem it, and ensure that we are using it with the right motives and for the right goals.

Technology and Idolatry

There is an unmistakable connection between technology and idolatry. John Calvin once remarked that the human heart is an idol factory. The heart is the seat of our emotions, our will, and our desire, and because of human sin and rebellion, it lies in direct opposition to God. The heart is eager to raise up new gods, putting other things and people in the place reserved for the one true God. Most of our idols are not simple objects of wood and stone, the kinds of images the ancient pagans used to bow before, believing these objects controlled the weather patterns and enabled a good harvest. Instead, our modern idols reflect our inner desires for comfort, security, significance, and ultimately salvation.

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We become tools of our tools; rather than owning our gadgets, we become owned by them. We begin to structure our lives around them, and our actions and choices are motivated by our need and desire for the blessings and benefits that idol provides for us.

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The trouble with each of these is not the things themselves, but in the position we give to them in our lives. Each of these becomes an idol when we take something good and make it into something ultimate.

iPhone = evil?

That iPhone in your pocket is not an "evil" device. Yet it is prone to draw your heart away from God, to distract you and enable you to rely on your own abilities rather than trusting God.

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It is not technology itself that is good or evil; it is the human application of that technology.

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Rather than changing the technology to fit our understand of what is right and wrong, we change ourselves and our society's rules and mores, and we reshape ourselves in the image of the mobile phone.

Tim Challies

The Next Story: Life and Faith After the Digital Explosion

The upcoming book quotes will all be coming from the same book by Tim Challies. I highly recommend reading this book.

The things we create can -- and will -- try to become idols in our hearts. Though they enable us to survive and thrive in a fallen world, the very aid they provide can deceive us with a false sense of comfort and security, hiding our need for God and His grace.

Freak the Mighty by Rodman Philbrick

"First you need to invent a time machine," I say. "So you can go back there and give all the cavemen a hard time about indoor plumbing."
Freak goes, "You don't need a time machine if you know how to remember."
Which is something I'll always remember, him saying that and me trying to figure it out.

I read that out loud three times this week. Each time I read it, I wanted to stop and reread it over and over again, but I had 20+ students who would give me a hard time if I started to wax eloquent on what that quote means to me. (By the way, one of the rewards of teaching is watching 78 children read like me: gripping the book, eyes wide, hanging on every word. I also feel like the book is successful when a number of wanna-be cool middle schoolers are sniffling over one of the characters dying.)

Anyway, I love that quote. I think I like it because I often want to turn back time and go to different worlds again. Sometimes I want to go back to that water tower in Zimbabwe where we would spend many a brown-out night by watching the shooting stars, only I couldn't see the shooting stars because my eyes are too bad. Sometimes I want to go back to being behind the counter at a fast food chain, serving chicken at 80 miles an hour. Sometimes I want to go back to having 15 commentaries open on one huge table in the library as I try to write about the whole book of Hebrews. Sometimes I want to go back to that night in Busay when I stepped out of the dark house and saw a real-life planetarium in the sky above me and the next day I read a verse about the stars in the sky and I marked the date in the margin because I'll never forget that sight. Sometimes I want to go back to the times when my grandfather was still alive and well and he would call me "ReBAYcca" and swing me up on his shoulders like we were just as amazing as Barnum and Bailey's circus acrobats.

But like Freak says, we don't need that time machine. God doesn't allow us to go back in time. But He gave us a memory which is almost a time machine.