Untitled Sermon (2)

6/12  We Become Like What We “Like” 

BackTrack:

*We are addicted to distraction

*We ignore out flesh and blood

*We Crave immediate approval

*We Lose our literacy

*We feed on the produced

Now we are at Chapter 6 [ Say the topic]

Ask [4 persons ]: What do you think the topic means? or is saying?

Get into it:

The words and images we share on our phones influence others as was taught by Junior in the last lesson. but the words and images we consume transform us.

*Revisit The Story of Narcissist 

Truth is like Narcissist staring down into the water enchanted with himself, we bend over our phones and what most quickly capture our attention is our own reflection. Our replicated images, our tabulations of approval and our accumulated likes. Social Media has become the new PR firm of the brand “SELF”. And we check our feeds compulsively and find it nearly impossible to turn away from looking at and loving our second self..

So when we talk about smartphone addiction we are talking about the addiction of looking at ourselves

Fitting In

We cant know who we are, or know our identity by focusing alot on ourselves's. It is said that finding ourself is also about conformity. We all try to fit in somewhere. We all try to dress or act a certain way to fit in to certain groups. Our search to find ourself is always a chase to fit in.

There 's an old adage that says“we are not who we think we are, we are not even who others think we are, we are who we think others think we are”

*Ask at least 3 students what they think this means.

So what we think others think of us  profoundly shapes our sense of identity and our search for belonging. This proves that we don’t find our identity in our selves.

A quote from a pastor name Tim Keller, explained this " people in New York City like to think we are individuals…people here can decide what they want to be then do it" and he said thats incorrect “You all have your uniforms, some of you are wearing wall-street uniforms, some of you are wearing east village uniforms,…there are uniforms you have to fit in, you have to get your validation from somebody, you have to have a group of people that say “you’re one of us”. At the core of our lives we want to fit in to find our identity.

*Ask two students for two persons they want to be like

Like Mike

We all want to feel like we belong and so we try to be like others, mostly celebrities. Its almost like they define for us who we should be, what we should aim to be.

It's said that, to behold majesty is a phenomenon that begins to chip and sculpt the contours of our identity. The desire to imitate the glory we see in others is one of the most obvious and most profound psychological realities that  advertising, targets. We crave acceptance and we are always becoming like what we admire.  So in whose identity will I find  my own?

Changed by loves

We are composites of the people we want to conform to, and this conformity defines one to the most powerful uses of our smartphones. Digital technology now accelerates and particularises our  search for belonging. A Theologian Richard Lince, who has studied how we become like what we worship. He examines how our conformity, in the context of both the negative, idolatry and the positive, worship and sanctification. “ We are mirrors and so the whole metaphor of the human being reflecting its environment, reflecting its context,, reflecting its idols, reflecting its gods, is absolutely core from the beginning to the end of the canon of scripture. What we call worship, worshipping God faithfully and truly is  also a matter of our identity. That is what we are created for, that is who we are. Whether or not we see it, worship is the fundamental dynamic of our molding and this is why no matter how  fiercely independent we are, we never find our identity within ourselves. We must always look outside of ourselves for identity.  To our group fit and to our loves both dynamics reveal the truth. We are becoming like what we see, we are becoming like what we worship, or to put this in Facebook terms directly “We are becoming like what we like”.

Worship Guided and Mis-guided

We were created to worship, and the bible makes this clear. 

"...everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made."

So we always worship. But who or what do you worship is the question. And there are only two options.

 "because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen."

Either we worship what is created, idols or we worship the Creator, Christ. 

If we worship idols, we become like the idol. If our idols have no hands to embrace us, no eyes to see us, no mouths to assure us,  and no ears to hear us then we who worship idols become like them spiritually powerless, blind, mute and deaf. Our idols dehumanises us they petrify our souls and dumb and dull and deaden all of our spiritual senses. Idols can only distort us, Therefore to worship anything that is not God is to fundamentally live in identity confusion. 

Any thing that we give our admiration  to are idols. While our idols may entertain or make us feel good temporarily at times, they do not love us back. They’ll  never see us. if we worship Christ, we become like Christ. Opposite our idols, to love and to worship Christ is to become like Him, powerfully conforming to  His beautiful image the true image of God. Jesus christ is the full image of what you and i were created to express “I am made in His image” but our humanity is sinful, twisted and broken. He loved us so much he shed His blood for us in order to free us from other conformity traps. You are made spiritually alive and given eternal hope and lasting joy in Him 

The object of our worship is the object of our imitation. God designed this inseparable pattern. What we want to become we worship and what we worship  shapes our being.

Made In Gods Image

Why do i exist? 

Of course we would not find our lives purpose lurking in our social media validation. 

For the answer we turn to the bible and there we read that we were created by God to image God. To image God means many things; spiritually, rationally, emotionally. 

Pastor and Theologian, John Piper  explains it this way with marble statues; "You put up a statue of Starling because you want  people to look at Starling and think about Starling, You put up a statue of George Washington to be reminded of the  founding fathers. Images are made to image". 

What does this mean for flesh and blood? It means that we are little images of God created so that we would talk and act and feel in a way that reveals the way God is. So people would look at the way you behave, look at the way you think, look at the way you feel and say God must be great, God must be real. That is why we exist. 

God didn’t create you as an end in yourself. He is the end, you are the means. And the reason thats such good news is that because the best way to show that God is infinitely valuable, is to be supremely happy in Him. If God’s people are bored with God they are really bad images. God is not unhappy about Himself,. He is infinitely excited about His own glory. To be made in God’s image means we exist for to reasons: 

1. To be satisfied in the infinite worth of the Creator and 

2. To show the world how precious and deeply satisfying He is. 

Our fit, our loves and our belonging al converge in Him. Our identity hinges on Him and in Him we find the spirit given power to reject all identities projected on us. But if people see us bored with God absorbed with ourselves and conformed to worldly celebrities they will not see the image of Jesus reflected in us. If we fail to reflect Christ we fail to be what God created us to be. We lose our purpose. 

Device Worship

"Our worship and our idolatry are always acts of surrender” writes Peter Leithart "and our tendency to yield ourselves to our technology".We don’t literally consider our phones/technology to be divine, but we do  lower ourselves before them. Instead of wisely using them we let them rule our lives.

*Ask for some ways our phones rule our lives? [3 Students, one answer each]

it determines how we use our time, how we spend our money, our interest and values. Submission to a created thing such as a smartphone is idolatry. 

In the digital age we idolise our phones when we lose the ability to ask if they help us or hurt us in reaching our spiritual goals. We grow so fascinated with technological glitz, that we become captive to the wonderful means of our phones; there speed, organisation and efficiency and these means themselves become sufficient ends. Our destination remains foggy because we are fixated on the speed of our travel. We mistakenly submit human and spiritual goals to our technological possibilities.  Our idolatrous impulses make us easily trapped by this worldliness, the loss of our purpose. We often don’t stand over our phones and direct them, based on our calling to image God, instead we bow to our phones as worlds of digital possibilities. Never asking the questions of our ultimate aims. When the means become our aimless habits, this is techno- idolatry. 

 The Idols of Social Media

If idols shape us, unhealthy phone patterns are bound to be reflected in our relationships. Our digital interactions with one another, which are often necessarily  brief and superficial begin to pattern all our relationships. When our relationships are shallow online, our relationships become shallow offline. Douglas Groothuis, a professor of philosophy at Denver Seminary warns, “The way we interact online becomes the norm for how we interact offline. Facebook and Twitter communications are pretty short, clipped and rapid. And that is not  away to have 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 can send you a message and you can ignore it or  someone could send you a message and you could get to it two hours later. But if you are in realtime in a real place with real bodies and real voice, that is a very  different dynamic. You shouldn’t treat another person the way you interact  with Twitter. Yet our  online habits change our relational habits, both become clipped and superficial and we become more easily distracted and less patient with one another. Our relationships also suffer when our thinking becomes caught in the web and flow of online fiascos. 

*Ask students if they agree

Writer Alan Jacobs spent seven years on his iPhone, seven years engaged on Twitter and are than Ten years responding to blog comments then he stood back evaluated it and dropped it all. He ditched social media and his iPhone, “I have considered the cost and benefits” he said “and i have firmly decided that i’m not going to be held hostage to that stuff anymore” “why not? the chief reason is not that people are ill-tempered or dim-withed the Lord knows one of those descriptors is  accurate for a distressingly large number of social media communications. But that so many of them are blown about by every wind of social media doctrine their attention swamped by the  tsunamis of the moment. Their wills captive to the felt need to respond now to what every one else is responding to now. 

When Andrew Shearwood, a graduate student, decided to do the same, ditch social media and the smart phone, his wife said it was the greatest gift he ever gave her. Why? “When you had your smartphone you were a walking vending machine of whatever you ingested that day” she told him. “It was difficult to talk about deeper things that mattered, because you were constantly distracted by internet litter. You’e now able to focus and give necessary attention to deeper issues”. Most of what we talk about comes from  your heart rather than your Twitter feed”. 

*Ask students if the examples sound familiar to them.

The Warning and the Hope

As human beings we were made to image God. Which means our identity is by definition moldable and that means susceptible. We are statues of wax changed and reshaped by what we do on our phones. But this pliability also means that we can be redeemed, remade and restored by the sovereign grace of our image sculpting saviour to do what we were made to do; magnify God. As we image Him we invite the world to a welcoming Father. Where the lost can find refuge and identity. And where thirsty sinners can find the all satisfying living water. True image bearing frees us to be digitally honest about ourselves. We pray for grace to avoid the plight of narcissist, to avoid falling in love with the image of ourselves. And we pray for grace and  courage to take a more honest look at our digital reflections in the glossy screens of our phones and see where we fail to image Christ. Willing to humbly admit, repent and  change when we sometimes see the reflection of a dragon looking back.

Identity is not found in OURSELF

We were made to WORSHIP God

We were made in THE IMAGE of God

We were made to REFLECT God

Small Group Questions

*Have you ever felt a longing to belong, to fit in? How did you respond to that feeling?

*We all at some point wanted to be like someone else. Who are two persons you wanted to be like and why?

*Anything or anyone that gets our admiration, time, attention, determines how we use our time, how we spend our money, our interest and values etc. is what we worship. Ask yourself, who or what gets most of these from you? Is it Creator or created things? Be open and discuss this and also seek to encourage/help each other in staring worship to God.

*Pray for each other, that God would reveal our idols and help us to turn from them and turn to Him in and with worship.

*Scripture verse will be given to individuals before commencement to be read at appointed times.