If Christians confess that God is personal, both capable and desirous of real relationship with his creatures, then to talk to him should be as natural as it is necessary.
What exactly is prayer? The simplest and most straightforward way to define prayer is as a person talking to God. The English Reformer Thomas Becon (1512–1567), whom scholars have identified as having authored the very first English Protestant treatise devoted exclusively to prayer, published a catechism in 1548 in which he defined prayer as “an earnest talk with God.”1 If Christians confess that God is personal, both capable and desirous of real relationship with his creatures, then to talk to him should be as natural as it is necessary.
As Campegius Vitringa helpfully noted, “It is a characteristic of God to ‘hear prayer’ (Ps. 65:2).2 We read in Genesis 4:26 that shortly after the fall, “people began to call upon the name of the Lord,” and throughout Scripture the faithful are described as both hearing from God and speaking to him in return. The Psalms overflow with cries to God such as “Give ear to the words of my mouth” (Ps. 54:2) and corresponding praises such as “On the day I called, you answered me” (Ps. 138:3). Scripture assures us that “when the righteous cry for help, the Lord hears” (Ps. 34:17). The connection between inclusion among God’s people and confidence that God will hear one’s prayers is very tight: it is precisely because “the Lord has set apart the godly for himself” that David can immediately conclude, “The Lord hears when I call to him” (Ps. 4:3). Indeed, the entire Christian life itself begins with hearing God’s word and responding back with words of repentance and faith: “When they heard this they were cut to the heart, and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, ‘Brothers, what shall we do?’ And Peter said to them, ‘Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ’” (Acts 2:37–38).
God has addressed us through his word, and we respond to him through our prayers. Or as William Ames put it, “In hearing the word we receive the Will of God, but in Prayer we offer our will to God, that it may be received by him.”3 Scripture and prayer thus work together to create a conversational, or “dialogical,” dynamic that lends structure to our communion with God and growth in grace.4
As with our ordinary conversations, our conversations with God in prayer will vary in length and intensity as our changing circumstances dictate. The English Puritans thus distinguished between “two kindes of prayer”: there were times of set and focused, or “solemne,” prayer—what happens, say, during our quiet time—and then there were also short, spontaneous prayers uttered throughout the day, “the secret and sudden lifting up of the heart to God, upon the present occasion.”5 The latter sort of spontaneous praying was understood to be a necessary part of a Christian’s spiritual life and often understood as both a means to and a mark of a more general spirit of prayerfulness that would begin to permeate one’s entire life and outlook. Indeed, it is spontaneous prayer, as the Puritan John Downame (1571–1652) explained, that helps the believer “pray without ceasing” (1 Thess. 5:17):
It is not enough that we use daily these set solemn, and ordinary prayers, but we must, as our Saviour injoyneth us, Pray always, and as the Apostle speaketh, continually, and without ceasing. That is, we must be ready to pray, so often as God shall give us any occasion, . . . craving God’s blessing when we undertake any businesse, and praysing his name for his gracious assistance, . . . craving his protection at the approaching of any danger, and his helpe and strength for the overcoming of any difficulty which affronteth us in our way.6
Moreover, these two kinds of prayer were understood as mutually reinforcing. They went together, and either one would quickly wither in the absence of its counterpart. Spontaneous prayer, it was said, should supplement and enhance our settled prayer “as salt with meat.”7
God has addressed us through his word, and we respond to him through our prayers.
As we read the various definitions of prayer scattered throughout the Reformed tradition, we find elaborations on the idea of prayer as talking to God, even as we don’t find anything fundamentally at odds with it. Thus, William Bridge defined prayer as “that act and work of the soul, whereby a man doth converse with God.”8 Likewise, according to John Calvin, to enter into prayer is to “enter conversation with God,” a conversation “whereby we expound to him our desires, our joys, our sighs, in a word, all the thoughts of our hearts.”9 Such communication is not overly formal and impersonal, but rather, it is an “intimate conversation” in which believers find the living God “gently summoning us to unburden our cares into his bosom” and inviting us “to pour out our hearts before him.”10 Sometimes the metaphor was slightly tweaked, as when Matthew Henry (1662–1714) described the Bible as “a letter God has sent to us” and prayer as “a letter we send to him,” but the emphasis was always on prayer as a way for the believer to communicate and dialogue with the living, personal, and ever-present triune God.11
Such prayer, by its very nature, encompasses the entirety of the Christian life, shaping and being shaped in turn by the breadth and depth of redeemed experience. “I understand prayer in a broad way,” wrote Campegius Vitringa. “It refers to everything we communicate to God.”12 Such communication includes our praises, our petitions, and our thanksgivings. It includes expressions of joy, lament, and anger. As we communicate to God in prayer, we confess our sins, intercede on behalf of others, and cry out to God for his miraculous intervention amid trial and storm. In response to the question “For what things are we to pray?” the Westminster Larger Catechism (1647) suggests that the scope of our prayer should be as wide and deep as life itself: “We are to pray for all things tending to the glory of God, the welfare of the church, our own or others’ good.”13
Sometimes our communication with God is eloquent and profound, as when we take the lofty expressions of the Psalter as our own; at other moments we “do not know what to pray for as we ought” and must lean on those Spirit-wrought “groanings too deep for words” (Rom. 8:26). Yet in all moments, our prayers communicate the full range of our Christian experience and represent an ongoing conversation with the God in whom “we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).
Notes:
Alec Ryrie, Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 99.
Campegius Vitringa, The Spiritual Life, trans. Charles K. Telfer (Grand Rapids, MI: Reformation Heritage Books, 2018),
116.
William Ames, The Marrow of Sacred Divinity (London, 1639), 244.
This dynamic also characterizes corporate worship. For a discussion of the “dialogical principle” in worship, see D. G. Hart and John R. Muether, With Reverence and Awe: Returning to the Basics of Reformed Worship (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2002), 95–97.
William Perkins, The Whole Treatise of the Cases of Conscience (Cambridge, 1606), 282.
John Downame, A Guide to Godlynesse(London, 1629), 209–10.
William Gouge, quoted in Ryrie, Reformation Britain, 147.
William Bridge, The Works of the Rev. William Bridge (London: Thomas Tegg, 1845),
2:102.
Calvin, Institutes, 2:853 (3.20.4); John Calvin, Instruction in Faith, trans. and ed. Paul T. Fuhrmann (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1949), 57.
Calvin, Institutes, 2:854–55 (3.20.5).
Matthew Henry, Directions for Daily Communion with God (London: William Tegg, 1866), 12.
Vitringa, Spiritual Life, 115
“Westminster Larger Catechism,” in Van Dixhoorn, Creeds, Confessions, and Catechisms, 402 (q. 184).
Matthew C. Bingham (PhD, Queen’s University Belfast) is vice president of academic affairs and associate professor of church history at Phoenix Seminary in Scottsdale, Arizona. He is the author of Orthodox Radicals: Baptist Identity in the English Revolution and has served as a pastor in the United States and Northern Ireland. Matthew is married to Shelley, and they have four children.
Those who pray in Christ’s name truly hear back from God in their most pressing need and are strengthened in hope that they will continue to hear in days to come.
A good quiet time is when the Lord is speaking to us by his word and his Spirit, and we are speaking back to him what we are hearing in his word by the Spirit.
Doug O’Donnell discusses the new Daily Liturgy Devotional, sharing how he really wrote the book for himself first and foremost, and how it has impacted his devotional life recently.
The Bible’s most potent depiction of the truth that there’s more than one way to be lost is crystallized in Luke 15:11–32. The broad outline of the parable is familiar: a father has two sons, the younger of whom demands his share of the inheritance and then moves to a far country, where he squanders it on wild living. Eventually, after coming to his senses, the prodigal returns home empty-handed and broken; he simply hopes his father will take him back as a hired servant. But seeing his wayward son from a long way off, the father runs to meet him and requests a party thrown in his honor.
Many people tend to stop there, at least in terms of emphasis, which is why it’s known to history as the parable of the prodigal son—singular. But the returning son isn’t the only prodigal. That’s actually the whole point. Jesus is not addressing the wayward but is aiming the story, like a heatseeking missile, at the religiously devout. Note the context of the chapter:
Now the tax collectors and sinners were all drawing near to hear [Jesus]. And the Pharisees and the scribes grumbled, saying, “This man receives sinners and eats with them.” So he told them this parable. . . . (Luke 15:1–3)
In light of the audience, then, we dare not overlook the dramatic final scene:
Now [the father’s] older son was in the field, and as he came and drew near to the house, he heard music and dancing. And he called one of the servants and asked what these things meant. And he said to him, “Your brother has come, and your father has killed the fattened calf, because he has received him back safe and sound.” But he was angry and refused to go in. His father came out and entreated him, but he answered his father, “Look, these many years I have served you, and I never disobeyed your command, yet you never gave me a young goat, that I might celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours came, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fattened calf for him!” And he said to him, “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. It was fitting to celebrate and be glad, for this your brother was dead, and is alive; he was lost, and is found.” (Luke 15:25–32)
On September 11, 2005, Keller preached a sermon titled “The Prodigal Sons”—plural—which became the genesis of his 2008 bestseller The Prodigal God: Recovering the Heart of the Christian Faith. This book captures the most distilled essence of Keller’s teaching regarding the heart. Near the beginning he credits a sermon on Luke 15 by his mentor, Ed Clowney, that altered his understanding:
Listening to that sermon changed the way I understood Christianity. I almost felt I had discovered the secret heart of Christianity. Over the years I have often returned to teach and counsel from the parable. I have seen more people encouraged, enlightened, and helped by this passage, when I explained the true meaning of it, than by any other text.1
That last sentence is a remarkable statement. What about the parable is so powerful? If you compare the teaching of Jesus to a lake, Keller says, this parable is “one of the clearest spots where we can see all the way to the bottom.”2 And that’s because what Jesus says about the elder brother is one of Scripture’s most vital teachings.3 We impoverish ourselves, therefore, when we fixate on the younger brother:
The first time I heard the parable, I imagined Jesus’s original listeners’ eyes welling with tears as they heard how God will always love and welcome them, no matter what they’ve done. We sentimentalize this parable if we do that. The targets of this story are not “wayward sinners” but religious people who [think they] do everything the Bible requires. Jesus is pleading not so much with immoral outsiders as with moral insiders. He wants to show them their blindness, narrowness, and self-righteousness, and how these things are destroying both their own souls and the lives of the people around them. It is a mistake, then, to think that Jesus tells this story primarily to assure younger brothers of his unconditional love.4
Apart from Jesus Christ, flagrant lawbreaking and fastidious rule keeping are dead ends. In Keller’s words: “Jesus’s purpose is not to warm our hearts but to shatter our categories.”5
Each brother in the parable represents “a different way to be alienated from God”6—and both ways are strikingly resonant with the latemodern West. Keller dubs the approaches “the way of moral conformity and the way of self-discovery.”7 In fact, he observes, Western culture is “so deeply divided between these two approaches”8 that it’s difficult to imagine an alternative option:
If you criticize or distance yourself from one, everyone assumes you have chosen to follow the other, because each of these approaches tends to divide the whole world into two basic groups. The moral conformists say: “The immoral people—the people who ‘do their own thing’—are the problem with the world, and moral people are the solution.” The advocates of self-discovery say: “The bigoted people—the people who say, ‘We have the Truth’—are the problem with the world, and progressive people are the solution.” Each side says: “Our way is the way the world
will be put to rights, and if you are not with us, you are against us.”9
But King Jesus is not kind to false dichotomies. Nor is he beholden to natural expectations:
So we have two sons, one “bad” by conventional standards and one “good,” yet both are alienated from the father. The father has to go out and invite each of them to come into the feast of his love. . . .
But Act 2 comes to an unthinkable conclusion. Jesus the storyteller deliberately leaves the elder brother in his alienated state. The bad son enters the father’s feast but the good son will not. The lover of prostitutes is saved, but the man of moral rectitude is still lost. We can almost hear the Pharisees gasp as the story ends. It was the complete reversal of everything they had ever been taught.10
Both sons are lost, but only one knows it. You are lost, Jesus is saying, but you refuse to know it.
Self-Salvation Projects
It’s sobering to notice that when the older son protests, “Look, these many years I have served you, and I never disobeyed your command” (Luke 15:29), the father doesn’t disagree! His firstborn has been obedient; he has done everything “right.” And ironically, it’s keeping him fromthe feast. His outward goodness—and resultant pride—has erected a barrier between him and the father’s love.
An elder-brother mindset can haunt us all. Keller offers an example:
I knew a woman who had worked for many years in Christian ministry. When chronic illness overtook her in middle age, it threw her into despair. Eventually she realized that deep in her heart she felt that God owed her a better life, after all she had done for him. That assumption made it extremely difficult for her to climb out of her pit, though climb she did. The key to her improvement, however,was to recognize the elder-brother mindset within.
Elder brothers obey God to get things. They don’t obey God to get God himself—in order to resemble him, love him, know him, and delight him. So religious and moral people can be avoiding Jesus as Savior and Lord as much as the younger brothers who say they don’t believe in God and define right and wrong for themselves.11
The stakes are that high. If you think God should accept you because you’re good, “then Jesus may be your helper, your example, even your inspiration, but he is not your Savior.” How could he be? You are occupying that role.11 Keller concludes,
So there are two ways, not one, to be your own Savior and Lord: you can break all the moral rules and chart your own course, or you can try keeping all the external moral rules and seek to earn heaven’s favor. Both are strategies for avoiding God. Apart from Jesus Christ, every person is “dedicated to a project of self-salvation, to using God and others in order to get power and control for themselves. We are just going about it in different ways.”12
King Jesus is not kind to false dichotomies. Nor is he beholden to natural expectations.
Equally Wrong, Not Equally Dangerous
By the end of Jesus’s parable, only one son has been reconciled to his father. Why conclude like this? Why not show us a redemptive arc for Tim both brothers? The reason certainly isn’t that elder brothers are hopeless; if they were, the father wouldn’t have gone into the field and pleaded at all. We can’t know for sure, of course, but perhaps Jesus is conveying that while “both forms of the self-salvation project are equally wrong,” they are not “equally dangerous.”13 The younger brother’s rebellion is obvious; the elder brother’s is not. And therein lies the danger:
He would have been horribly offended by the suggestion that he was rebelling against the father’s authority and love, but he was, deeply. Because the elder brother is more blind to what is going on, being an elder-brother Pharisee is a more spiritually desperate condition. “How dare you say that?” is how religious people respond if you suggest their relationship with God isn’t right. “I’m there every time the church doors are open.” Jesus says, in effect, “That doesn’t matter.”14
The takeaway, Keller says, is shocking: “Careful obedience to God’s law may serve as a strategy for rebelling against God.”15 He often returned to an image of two people sitting side by side in the same pew—hearing the same sermons, singing the same songs, engaging in the same spiritual activities—but for utterly different reasons. One does it all to please God; the other does it to justify self.
And yet on the outside, they look exactly the same.16
The True Elder Brother
When it comes to pleasing God, both the rebellious path and the religious path are dead ends. But Jesus shows us a more excellent way. It is not a comfortable middle option between earthly extremes, for his gospel occupies a transcendent plane.17
In the parable, the older son should have gone into the far country in pursuit of his wayward brother. He should have rejoiced at his return. He should have gladly relinquished part of his inheritance in order to reinstate his brother’s. He should have joined the party. But, as Keller observes, “By putting a flawed elder brother in the story, Jesus is inviting us to imagine and yearn for a true one.”18
Jesus Christ is the ultimate elder brother who didn’t just travel to a far country; he descended from heaven to earth to seek and save the lost. “Who is the true elder brother?” Keller asked in a funeral sermon for his own younger brother Billy. “Who is the one who truly obeyed the Father completely? Who truly has lost his robe so he [could] put it on us? Jesus!”19 He is the “God of Great Expenditure,”20 who, at infinite cost to himself, paid our debt and now binds our wounds and brings us home to the Father.
This message is true, but it’s not tame. The process of reckoning with it is disruptive to idol-ridden hearts. Keller recounts a time when a woman coming to Redeemer was hearing, for the first time, that she could be accepted not on the basis of her behavior but by God’s sheer grace. Keller was intrigued by her response: “That is a scary idea! Oh, it’s good scary, but still scary.” When he asked what was so scary about unmerited free grace, she replied,
If I was saved by my good works—then there would be a limit to what God could ask of me or put me through. I would be like a taxpayer with rights. I would have done my duty and now I would deserve a certain quality of life. But if it is really true that I am a sinner saved by sheer grace—at God’s infinite cost—then there’s nothing he cannot ask of me.
Keller comments,
She could see . . . the wonderful-beyond-belief teaching of salvation by sheer grace had two edges to it. On the one hand it cut away slavish fear. God loves us freely, despite our flaws and failures. Yet she also knew that if Jesus really had done this for her—she was not nher own. She was bought with a price.21
As we wait in hope for the ultimate feast and eternal party, may we never get over what it cost to bring us home. In December 1662, a Scottish minister named David Dickson lay dying when a close friend of over fifty years arrived to inquire how he was. The eighty-year-old man replied, “I have taken all my good deeds, and all my bad deeds, and have cast them together in a heap before the Lord, and have fled from both to Jesus Christ, and in him I have sweet peace.”22
That is the message of the gospel, and it is the message Tim Keller loved to communicate. Don’t just flee your bad works. Flee your “good” works, too. Flee them both and collapse into the open arms of Jesus Christ.
Notes:
Timothy Keller, The Prodigal God: Recovering the Heart of the Christian Faith (New York: Penguin, 2008), xvii. Clowney’s sermon, “Sharing the Father’s Welcome,” is available in Edmund P. Clowney, Preaching Christ in All of Scripture (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2003).
Keller, Prodigal God, xvii.
Keller, Prodigal God, xix.
Keller, Prodigal God 12.
Keller, Prodigal God, 13.
Keller, Prodigal God, 9.
Keller, Prodigal God, 34. See also Tim Keller, “The Prodigal Sons,” preached on September 11, 2005, and “The Lord of the Sabbath,” preached on February 19, 2006. He writes, “Each acts as a lens coloring how you see all of life, or as a paradigm shaping your understanding of everything. Each is a way of finding personal significance and worth, of addressing the ills of the world, and of determining right from wrong,” Keller, Prodigal God, 34.
Keller, Prodigal God, 37.
Keller, Prodigal God, 37. As Keller explains in a sermon, “Jesus says, ‘You’re both wrong. You’re both lost. You’re both making the world a terrible place in different ways.’ The elder brothers of the world divide the world in two. They say, ‘The good people are in, and the bad people (you) are out.’ The younger brothers do as well—the self-discovery people also divide the world in two. They say, ‘The open-minded, progressive-minded people are in, and the bigoted and judgmental people (you) are out.’ Jesus says neither. He says, ‘It’s the humble who are in and the proud who are out.’ ” Keller, “The Prodigal Sons.”
Keller, Prodigal God, 40.
Keller, Prodigal God, 48. In a 1992 sermon, Keller remarked, “I’ve seen plenty of people—who have been non-Christians and skeptical and under the influence of the flesh—come on into the Christian faith, and their flesh continues to dominate them, because now they find religious ways of avoiding God, whereas before they were finding irreligious ways.” Tim Keller, “Alive with Christ: Part 2,” preached
on November 8, 1992.
Keller, Prodigal God, 44.
Keller, Prodigal God, 45.
Keller, Prodigal God, 51.
Keller, Prodigal God, 53.
Keller, Prodigal God, 54. Keller explains further, “The younger brother knew he was= alienated from the father, but the elder brother did not. That’s why elder-brother lostness is so dangerous. Elder brothers don’t go to God and beg for healing from their condition. They see nothing wrong with their condition, and that can be fatal. If you know you are sick you may go to a doctor; if you don’t know you’re sick you won’t—you’ll just die.” Keller, 75.
Keller, Prodigal God, 43.
See, for example, “Preaching the Gospel,” 2009 Newfrontiers Conference at Westminster Chapel in London, available at https:// vimeo .com /3484464. Elsewhere was a gardener who grew an enormous carrot. He took it to his king and said, ‘My lord, this is the greatest carrot I’ve ever grown or ever will grow; therefore, I want to present it to you as a token of my love and respect for you.’ The king was touched and discerned the man’s heart, so as he turned to go, the king said, ‘Wait! You are clearly a good steward of the earth. I own a plot of land right next to yours. I want to give it to you freely as a gift, so you can garden it all.’ The gardener was amazed and delighted and went home rejoicing. But there was a nobleman at the king’s court who overheard all this, and he said, ‘My! If that is what you get for a carrot, what if you gave the king something better?’ The next day the nobleman came before the king, and he was leading a handsome black stallion. He bowed low and said, ‘My lord, I breed horses, and this is the greatest horse I’ve ever bred or ever will; therefore, I want to present it to you as a token of my love and respect for you.’ But the king discerned his heart and said, ‘Thank you,’ and took the horse and simply dismissed him. The nobleman was perplexed, so the king said, ‘Let me explain. That gardener was giving me the carrot, but you were giving yourself the horse.’ ” Timothy Keller, The Gospel in Life Study Guide: How Grace Changes Everything (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2010), 17. Keller first shared this illustration at Redeemer on May 5,
1996. Though he attributes it to Charles Spurgeon, I cannot find the original source.
Keller states, “It’s off the scales. It’s not halfway in the middle. It’s something else [entirely].” Keller, “The Prodigal Sons.”
Keller, Prodigal God, 94.
Hansen, Timothy Keller, 218 (emphasis original). As a young man, Keller had, in a sense, embodied both younger-brother and elder-brother tendencies: “Tim was the oldest child who always did the right thing, and yet at the same time when he went off to college he really did rebel, and he rebelled in large part against his [overbearing] mother. He was torn between the dynamics of wanting to do the right thing, but also the pressures of falling far short. . . . Once I saw that [he had demonstrated the proclivities of both sons], all of a sudden Tim’s core message of the transforming power of grace—this gift from God that changes everything about our lives—made a lot more sense.” Hansen, “Collin Hansen on The Making of Tim Keller, Overcoming Loneliness, Tim’s Teenage Rebellion, How He Finished Well, and Why He Wanted People to Know About His Weaknesses,” The Carey Nieuwhof Leadership Podcast, July 11, 2023, https:// care ynieuwh of .com/. In his book, Hansen also shares a poignant story about Tim’s literal younger (and only) brother Billy, a gay man who died of complications from AIDS in 1998: “[Over the years] when they visited [Billy and his partner], Tim and Kathy talked to him about the gospel. . . . Tim tried to emphasize the difference between grace and the legalism of their childhood. . . . [Eventually] when Billy entered hospice in December [1997], he said to Tim, ‘My Christian family isn’t going to come with me when I enter eternity, and neither are my gay friends. So I have to figure out what is on the other side of this life.’ . . . [Billy] had thought being a Christian meant cleaning up his life and making himself righteous. But Tim pointed to 2 Corinthians 5:21: ‘For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.’ Finally, Billy felt God’s love. The transformation was immediately evident. He even called his lawyer and told him to give his money [marked for donation to gay causes] to [a local] ministry instead. . . . When all hope seemed lost, God welcomed this prodigal son home.” Hansen, Timothy Keller, 218–20.
Matt Smethurst is lead pastor of River City Baptist Church in Richmond, Virginia. He is the author of several books, including Tim Keller on the Christian Life; Before You Open Your Bible; Before You Share Your Faith; and Deacons. He also cohosts, with Ligon Duncan, The Everyday Pastor podcast from the Gospel Coalition. Matt and his wife, Maghan, have five children.
Does Monday morning excite you? If so, that’s great, but that’s not how many of us feel. Our jobs challenge us, exhaust us, and sometimes threaten to consume us.
If you’re a parent, you’ve likely seen that natural tendency in your children to wander (or run!) from what God says is best—even if the nature of it looks different with each child.
Read the parable of the prodigal son in Luke 15 and reflect on the magnificence of this story from Jesus along with commentary notes from gifted teachers throughout church history.
Heads down. Phones out. Fingers scrolling. This is the humanoid posture of our age. We see it everywhere. Sit in a coffee shop and look around you. All eyes on devices.
Heads down. Phones out. Fingers scrolling. This is the humanoid posture of our age.
We see it everywhere. Sit in a coffee shop and look around you. All eyes on devices. Wait in line at the post office or grocery store. All eyes on devices. Sit at a red light and look at the drivers in the cars around you. Same story. More disturbing still, look at the drivers on the highway going full speed. Even some of them have their eyes darting between the windshields and their smartphones.
We see it in ourselves too. Sit down to read a physical book with your phone nearby. Observe how long you can go without scrolling, texting, or checking some notification. When you’re standing in line at a coffee shop and have forty-five seconds to spare, notice how hard it is to resist the urge to pull out your phone to do something— anything—to fill that blank space. More disturbing still, monitor how much time elapses between the moment you wake in the morning until the moment you unlock your phone and start scrolling.
For many of us, it’s only a matter of seconds.
From the rising of the sun to its going down, we scroll our way through the day. We scroll our way through life. And we are scrolling ourselves to death.
The death march of our scrolling society is not just a metaphor. In many ways, the smartphone is literally killing us (and not just in distracted-driving automobile accidents). Researchers have made compelling correlations between smartphone (especially social media) usage and rising mental unhealth (depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, loneliness), especially among teens and young adults.1 Consider the staggering rise in suicide rates among US youth and young adults since the dawn of the smartphone age. Between 2001 and 2007, the suicide rate for kids ages ten to twenty-four was fairly stable, but since 2007 (the year the iPhone debuted), it has skyrocketed, rising 62 percent between 2007 and 2021.2
Technology has also helped accelerate a “loneliness epidemic” with demonstrable, wide-ranging negative effects on overall health.3
The ominous term “deaths of despair” has become part of contemporary vernacular. And after steadily climbing for most of the last century, average life expectancies in the United States have, since 2021, started to decline.
Certainly more than technology is at play in these trends. But not less. When we consider the variables that have most changed in society in the last two decades, any answer we come up with will center around digital technology. We didn’t know what “social media” was twenty-five years ago. The term smartphone was first coined in 1997. The World Wide Web is barely three decades old. Each of these things has utterly reshaped the world in the last quarter century. And things continue to move fast—so fast that we rarely pause long enough to ask questions or ponder unintended side effects. As Antón Barba-Kay put it in A Web of Our Own Making, digital technology has so vastly transformed human life over just a few decades that “there is now arguably a greater chasm between someone age twelve and someone age fifty (or forty, or thirty) than there ever was between people separated by a millennium of pharaonic rule in ancient Egypt.”4
Our critical faculties struggle to keep pace with the scope and speed of the digital revolution. As a result, we’re often blind to the ways we’re being transformed. If we could jump forward in time a few decades, we could see more clearly. But since we can’t do that, our best path to wisdom is often in the other direction: looking back in time, learning from bygone eras and voices. What we can’t see now can be illuminated, at least in part, by the insights of generations past.
One book I return to again and again is Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. The book was prophetic when it released in 1985, and it’s even more prophetic now, four decades later.
Which Dystopia?
Just as today we look back to Postman’s book to help make sense of our cultural moment, so too did Postman look to the past from his vantage point in 1985, at the peak of what he called the “Age of Show Business.” The old books Postman looked to for insight were a pair of dystopian novels: George Orwell’s 1984 (published in 1949) and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). Working on his book in 1984, Postman pondered: Had Orwell’s vision of that year come to fruition? Or was Huxley’s dark vision of the future more accurate?
What we can’t see now can be illuminated, at least in part, by the insights of generations past.
Postman concluded that Huxley’s dystopia, not Orwell’s, better predicted the shape Western society took in the latter half of the twentieth century. As he explained,
Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure.5
If Postman was astute in 1985 to observe the Huxleyan shape of our “trivial culture”—where opted-in distractions and diversions kept us numb and dumb—how much more accurate does his prophetic vision describe life in 2025?
When Postman wrote Amusing Ourselves, he had television mostly in view as the chief purveyor of trivial information that swept us away in a “sea of irrelevance.” Forty years later, we still have TV—albeit hundreds more channels and a growing number of streaming TV platforms. But we also have YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, and other always-on pipelines of content, algorithmically designed to grab our attention and keep us watching and scrolling, eyes glued to screens.
“Amusing ourselves to death” is still a highly accurate descriptor of what mass media does to us. But now the dominant form it takes is scrolling. And while Postman, who died in 2003, never lived to see the way smartphones, streaming, and social media would transform the world, his wisdom and warnings ring out with potent relevance.
Just as Huxley helped Postman make sense of his world in 1985, Postman can help us make sense of ours.
Notes:
See especially Jean Twenge, iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy—and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood (New York: Atria Books, 2017) and Generations: The Real Differences between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America’s Future (New York: Atria Books, 2023); and Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (New York: Penguin, 2024).
Sally C. Curtin and Matthew F. Garnett, “Suicide and Homicide Death Rates among Youth and Young Adults Aged 10–24: United States, 2001–2021,” NCHS Data Brief, no. 471, June 2023, https://www.cdc.gov.
Tatum Hunter, “Technology’s Role in the ‘Loneliness Epidemic,’ ” Washington Post, April 11, 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com/.
Antón Barba-Kay, A Web of Our Own Making: The Nature of Digital Formation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 15.
Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, 20th anniversary ed. (1985; repr., New York: Penguin Books, 2005), xxi–xxii.
Brett McCracken is a senior editor for the Gospel Coalition and the author of The Wisdom Pyramid: Feeding Your Soul in a Post-Truth World and Uncomfortable: The Awkward and Essential Challenge of Christian Community. He lives with his family in Southern California.
All of Scripture calls us to sing. Many of the psalms actually talk about singing. Here are three verses, from a few of my favorite psalms, that teach us about singing to the Lord.
All of Scripture calls us to sing. There is a hymnbook in the middle of the Bible, a songbook that every family can use. It’s called the Psalms. Each psalm gives us words to sing, words to pray, words to share. The very first psalm is a wonderful place to start. It describes the one who worships and listens and follows the Lord:
He is like a tree
planted by streams of water
that yields its fruit in its season,
and its leaf does not wither.
In all that he does, he prospers. (Psalm 1:3)
Like the tree in this book we become a blossoming tree, full of life, as we learn to love and follow and trust the Lord. As we listen to and obey his word, it becomes like a stream of water in us. It blossoms good and lasting fruit in our hearts and minds. One way to always keep his word near us is to sing it.
Many of the psalms actually talk about singing. Here are three verses, from a few of my favorite psalms, that teach us about singing to the Lord.
Singing Is Praise to Our Savior
Oh come, let us sing to the Lord;
let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation! (Psalm 95:1)
Psalm 95:1 gives us the reason we can sing to the Lord. It describes the Lord as the rock of our salvation. We sing not because our voices are strong or are actions are good but because he is our strong and good Savior! The cross of Jesus has taken away our sin. Everyone may come and be forgiven and free to sing praise to him.
Singing Is a Good Fit for Us
Praise the Lord!
For it is good to sing praises to our God;
for it is pleasant, and a song of praise is fitting. (Psalm 147:1)
Psalm 147:1 tells us that singing to the Lord fits us. Just as two puzzle pieces fit together, so do our voices and a song of praise to God. That means we can sing every day, and it’s always good for us. God designed singing to help our memories. When we sing, we’re reminded of all the things we know to be true about the Lord—truths we don’t want to forget and truths we want to share with others!
Singing Is for Today and Forever
I will sing to the Lord as long as I live;
I will sing praise to my God while I have being. (Psalm 104:33)
Psalm 104:33 reminds us that singing is for all of life. Day after day these songs travel with us. Year after year we sing them as they remind us of God’s faithfulness. Then one day we will be together with all God’s family in heaven. We will sing forever as we live and breathe and work and play in that perfect place.
So with all of creation and all of God’s people and all the angels of heaven:
Oh, magnify the Lord with me,
and let us exalt his name together! (Psalm 34:3)
Kristyn Getty is an author and Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter. Her voice is synonymous with hymns, having founded, along with her husband, Keith, the Getty Music Organization, which helps people learn the Bible through hymns to carry for life. She is particularly passionate about helping children and families learn their faith through song. Kristyn is the author of Sing! How Worship Transforms Your Life, Family, and Church. The Gettys are originally from Northern Ireland and now live in Nashville, Tennessee, with their four daughters.
Again and again I have seen a psalm come into focus when I relate it to Christ, similar to a fuzzy scene through a camera viewfinder coming into sharp focus when the lens is properly adjusted.
Christopher Ash discusses how we should understand the psalms in light of Christ and what role they should play in our lives today, both personally and corporately in the church.
After Jesus “set his face to go to Jerusalem” (Luke 9:51) and began to count the days to His arrest and crucifixion, the Gospel of Luke tells us of three men that He and His disciples encountered “as they were going along the road” (9:57). We don’t know who these men were, nor do we know what their history with Jesus was. But we know that they were at a moment of decision: Would they follow Jesus, or would they go home again?
After Jesus “set his face to go to Jerusalem” (Luke 9:51) and began to count the days to His arrest and crucifixion, the Gospel of Luke tells us of three men that He and His disciples encountered “as they were going along the road” (9:57). We don’t know who these men were, nor do we know what their history with Jesus was. But we know that they were at a moment of decision: Would they follow Jesus, or would they go home again?
Each of these three men received a striking word from the Lord, and it quickly became apparent that to follow Jesus involves cost. The discipleship that Jesus demands is neither a kind of loose affiliation nor a marginal interest from the periphery. It means the sacrifice of our comforts, our pleasures, and even our most precious relationships for the sake of God’s kingdom.
The Eager Would-Be Disciple
The first man Jesus encountered was eager: “As they were going along the road, someone said to him, ‘I will follow you wherever you go.’ And Jesus said to him, ‘Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head’” (Luke 9:57–58).
When people see a crowd, it’s easy to get caught up in the action. Our emotions can run away with us, leading us to make commitments we don’t fully understand. Of course, Jesus deserves such a commitment.That in itself is not wrong. But a spur-of-the-moment promise is not the same thing as Christian faith.
To follow Jesus involves cost.
Jesus says to this man, in effect, “If you think you’re going to follow Me wherever I go, you should know where I’m going.” There is a cost to following Jesus. It is not a pleasure cruise. In fact, it means giving up many of life’s “fleeting pleasures” (Heb. 11:25).
When Jesus said this, did He forbid home ownership (or pillows) for all of His followers—or, as His answer to the next man will suggest, funerals? Does His answer to the third man contradict Paul’s teaching about caring for family members (1 Tim. 5:8) or remaining faithful to unbelieving spouses (1 Cor. 7:12–13)? Absolutely not! Jesus often gave answers tailored to the individual and the situation, and this is no exception. His days were numbered, and He was on His path to the cross. The events to come would quickly turn back the would-be disciple.
Yet these words are recorded in Scripture for the benefit of all Christians, and they have something important to teach us: We do not walk in the footsteps of Christ expecting worldly comforts to be the result. In fact, we ought to expect the opposite. Given that, will we follow the one who has “nowhere to lay his head”?
The Responsible Would-Be Disciple
The first man had been a volunteer. The second was a conscript. As with Peter and Andrew, James and John, and the rest, Jesus extended His personal invitation: “Follow me” (Luke 9:59). Those earlier disciples had “immediately left … their father and followed him” (Matt. 4:22). But this man said, “Lord, let me first go and bury my father” (Luke 9:59).
The man’s father may not have been dead. He may have been forty-five and expecting to live another thirty years, so that the man was saying, “I have a life to live with my family first. I have a responsibility to care for my father.” In modern parlance, one might say to Jesus, “If I follow You now, my father would go right through the roof. My wife will go completely nuts. My children won’t make it to their soccer practice.”
To such a sentiment Jesus replies, “Leave the dead to bury their own dead” (v. 60), telling the man that he should not let the fact that his family won’t follow Jesus prevent him from becoming a disciple himself.
Perhaps more likely, though, the father really was dead. The delay would be only a few days, and the matter was of extreme urgency. If that is the case, then Jesus, in a dramatic and chilling call, made it perfectly clear that following Christ is even more urgent. When the call comes, even the most pressing and intimate family responsibilities must take second place.
The Sentimental Would-Be Disciple
The third man said, “I will follow you, Lord, but let me first say farewell to those at my home” (Luke 9:61). This is not so momentous a need as a family funeral, nor does it constitute much of a delay. It seems to be a reasonable request—and Jesus’ answer again seems harsh by contrast: “No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God” (v. 62).
In other words, neither something as momentous as the death of a loved one nor something as quick as a simple goodbye must be allowed to interfere with what it means to follow the Lord Jesus Christ. What matters most is not the nature of the excuse but the fact of it. The offending words in this case were “but … first ….”
Genuine Christian discipleship leaves no room for excuse, no room for compromise, and no room for half-heartedness.
Jesus tells the man that no one ever plowed a straight furrow while looking back over his shoulder. In the flight from Sodom, Lot’s wife failed by looking back (Gen. 19:26). In the flight from Egypt, Israel failed by looking back (Ex. 16:3). So, too, if we have decided to follow Jesus, we must be ready to say, “No turning back, no turning back.”1 Genuine Christian discipleship leaves no room for excuse, no room for compromise, and no room for half-heartedness . We must guard against feeling a surge of emotion and supposing that to be as good as actually setting out on the path of obedience.
Pilgrim’s Flight
John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress begins with a memorable scene that may help us to understand Jesus’ answers to the three men. In the allegory, the man who will be called Pilgrim, and later Christian, hears that he may be free of his burden of sin and death by setting out on a journey. His response is dramatic:
The man began to run. Now he had not run far from his own door, but his wife and children, perceiving it, began to cry after him to return; but the man put his fingers in his ears, and ran on crying, Life! life! eternal life! So he looked not behind him, but fled towards the middle of the plain.
Did he not love his wife and children? Of course he did! Yet the salvation of his soul was of greater urgency than any family tie. (Indeed, in the course of the story, it will mean the salvation of his family too.) It is this sense of urgency that confronts a man or woman when the call comes from Jesus: “Follow me.”
Jesus Christ died on the cross as a sacrifice for sin, and God raised Him from the dead as a pledge of new life for all who believe in Him. He calls on everyone to turn from sin and honor Him as Lord. Do you believe? Will you follow? Or will you say, “But first…” This very night, your soul may be required of you (Luke 12:20). Do not delay!
This article was adapted from the sermon “Following Jesus” by Alistair Begg.
Simon K. Marak, “I Have Decided to Follow Jesus.” ↩︎
The kingdom of God is reality. It’s what is real. We often walk around as though we are the sovereign ones and as if we have the crowns on our heads. Life is self-referential. But we understand there’s one true King of heaven and earth—and it is Jesus.
When I was at seminary at Gordon-Conwell, I went on a retreat to the White Mountains in New Hampshire. You know how it goes. I was in a cabin with a bunch of guys, there was someone who snored, and I thought he was going to have a hernia. So at about five o’clock in the morning, I decided to go for a walk. I went down to the lake where we had been the night before, and I remembered the s’mores that we enjoyed eating and the worship songs. I was trying to read my Bible in the moonlight, waiting for the sun to rise—which always seems to take longer than you anticipate.
As I was mulling around and praying, at one point I looked at the mountain behind me and noticed on the treetops way up high that the sun was shining. It occurred to me that while it was still dark down below where I was standing, the sun had already risen up there.
That’s the good news. The Son has risen. Jesus is King. He’s advancing his kingdom in this world, and we have the privilege every day of bowing the knee to him, of surrendering our lives, and submitting and proclaiming his message so that others would give their lives to his reign and his rule. And that’s what Jesus means when he says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
Chris Castaldo (PhD, London School of Theology) is the lead pastor at New Covenant Church in Naperville, Illinois. He is the author of Talking with Catholics about the Gospel and coauthor of The Unfinished Reformation.
We often think of God's blessing as an achievement or an experience, but it actually goes far deeper. Chris Castaldo started learning this lesson at age nineteen in a hospital.
Timothy Paul Jones discusses the historical eyewitness evidence for Jesus’s resurrection and the details that distinguish it from other religious myths.
In 1 Corinthians 13:12, referencing what awaits us in eternity, the apostle Paul wrote that “now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face.” What would it be like to speak face-to-face with Jesus? The Roman governor Pontius Pilate had just such an encounter as Christ stood on trial before him—an encounter that, as Alistair Begg explains in his sermon “‘What Shall I Do with Jesus?,’” revealed the Son of Man’s majesty even as it brought Pilate to a crucial crossroads:
In 1 Corinthians 13:12, referencing what awaits us in eternity, the apostle Paul wrote that “now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face.” What would it be like to speak face-to-face with Jesus? The Roman governor Pontius Pilate had just such an encounter as Christ stood on trial before him—an encounter that, as Alistair Begg explains in his sermon “‘What Shall I Do with Jesus?,’” revealed the Son of Man’s majesty even as it brought Pilate to a crucial crossroads:
Governor Pilate finds himself face-to-face with the King of Kings. He’s asking, “Are you the King of the Jews?” (John 18:33). He doesn’t say, “Well, I’m the King of the Jews,” because after all, he was the King of the Jews, but he was far more than the King of the Jews. Pilate is brought face-to-face with the Lord of the universe. Pilate could have no concept of a kingdom that would “stretch from shore to shore.”1 He could have no concept of a kingdom that would transcend the bounds of geography and history and ethnicity and sweep around the world. How could he ever? He’s so fixated on this.
Perhaps we should pause and remind ourselves of Psalm 2:
Why do the nations rage and the peoples imagine a vain thing? The kings of the earth set themselves and the rulers take counsel together to set themselves against the Lord. (Psalm 2:1–2, paraphrased)
You can go back two thousand years and find Pilate doing what you can find today throughout the world in those who are in positions of authority. You don’t find that men and women are by and large calling upon the nations of the world to bow down before he who is the King of Kings, to bow down before the one who was anticipated when we studied 2 Samuel: “And his kingdom will be an everlasting kingdom” (2 Samuel 7:16, paraphrased). It’s amazing, isn’t it?
“Well,” says Pilate, “so you are a king.” Jesus says, “Yeah, right first time. You’re correct. You’ve said it out of your own mouth.” I think that’s what he’s saying. He said, “Well, you say so.” He’s not denying it. He’s just playing him in some ways. Surely Pilate in this encounter must have been aware of the fact that he was dealing, and he surely knew he was dealing, with someone like no one else he had ever met—that in actual fact, although he was the governor of a province, although he was significant in his own little world, when he came face-to-face with Jesus, this was an encounter such as he had never had. The majesty of Jesus surely must have been pervasive. It could not be swallowed up. It could not be concealed behind bruises and a bloody eye and spittle on his face. There’s no way out for Pilate, as we’re about to see.
It's Not Whether You're Addicted but What You Can Do About It
In this podcast, Brett McCracken and Ivan Mesa discuss the changing world of technology, how it competes for our attention, and how Christians should engage with something that has proven to be so addictive. They address how who we are is formed by what we give our attention to and how we should think about our capacity as humans in a world of AI and overwhelming technology.
Matt Tully
Today I’m speaking with Brett McCracken and Ivan Mesa. Brett serves as a senior editor, and Ivan Mesa as editorial director for the Gospel Coalition. They co-edited the new book Scrolling Ourselves to Death: Reclaiming Life in a Digital Age from Crossway. Brett, Ivan, thanks so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.
Brett McCracken
Thanks for having us.
Ivan Mesa
Good to see you.
Matt Tully
In 1985 Neil Postman famously published a book called Amusing Ourselves to Death. And that book is pretty foundational to the book that you two served as editors on (you worked with a number of contributors on different chapters), and it even was the inspiration for the title of your books, Scrolling Ourselves to Death. So I wonder, Brett, could you summarize what Postman was saying? What was his main thesis in that book, and how did some of his ideas influence what you two are trying to do with this new book?
Brett McCracken
Neil Postman was, broadly, just a critic of media and technology, kind of one of the leading voices in that genre in the twentieth century. In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman is really sounding the alarm in terms of what he was observing as some pretty significant changes in the way that we were talking to one another, the way that we were thinking, about ideas, the way discourse was happening because of changes in technology. Primarily, he had television in view, so he was basically saying we had shifted from being a print-based culture or literate culture—reading things in newspapers and talking about that—to being a TV-centric culture. And the medium of TV does certain things and prioritizes certain things, namely, entertainment—keeping people amused and hooked to their TVs by any means necessary.
Matt Tully
He was already seeing this back in the mid-eighties.
Brett McCracken
He was writing in the mid-eighties, yes. He published in 1985, so long before anything we have today—the internet, etc. or smartphones—were even a thing. So he was very prophetic at that time, in the eighties, in terms of calling out how the technologies of that time were changing the way we were communicating, the way we were thinking, the way discourse was structured. And that book has really stood the test of time and proved to be prescient and prophetic in terms of where we are today. Because if we were “amusing ourselves to death” in the eighties, how much more so are we scrolling ourselves to death today in similar ways to what he was talking about, but obviously with slightly different technologies. So we wanted to put together a book that took some of his best insights from that book forty years ago and apply that wisdom to the changing technologies of today.
Matt Tully
Ivan, I’d imagine some people could hear this and hear that his focus was on television, and it almost sounds a little quaint. We think of television as, compared to the internet and compared to the media landscape that we live in today, as just so much more tame and so much less compulsive or addicting. Do you resonate with that? Is there something just categorically different about even the nature of the issue that we’re facing today than what Postman was referring to?
Ivan Mesa
Yeah. He was speaking prophetically about something. He was sounding the alarm for the culture at large. In these kind of conversations, figures like that tend to be viewed as Puddleglums, a voice in the wilderness sounding an alarm, maybe overreacting to something.
And so in a sense, he was speaking really prophetically about something that would only get worse in the coming years. So you fast forward forty years later and of course you see that in contrast, yeah, it seems quaint, what was happening in 1985 versus what’s happening in 2025. A sea change has happened even in the last decade or two in terms of the acceleration of some of these trends that were happening over decades in Postman’s time. Now it’s every year or every few months. The pace of change is happening a lot more quickly. And so you’re just having to catch up with what’s going on to think critically about that.
Matt Tully
Do you think he understood the extent to which these new media technologies, not just television, but maybe things that would come after television, the power that they would really have? Because, again, we look at some of the newer technologies that are in our smartphones today and the way that even some of these have been gamified by companies to make them more addictive. Is that something that he predicted too? Did he have a sense that we might be heading in that kind of a direction?
Ivan Mesa
Brett might know a bit more about that, but I would say the fundamental things that have not changed is in Neil Postman’s day, you have TV, you have commercials, you have these advertisers who are paying for spots on TVs in the middle of a news broadcast. So his whole argument is saying you have here a news report, that 100,000 people have died in some sort of battlefield out there, and then you cut to a break with a commercial for jeans. And so the contrast there, again, companies are trying to make money. You are the product. Your attention is being devoted. You want to make the news entertaining to get your eyes glued to that so that you can watch the commercial. So the business model there in Postman’s day, there’s a perverse incentive. And so in similar ways, fast forward forty years later, you’re seeing the same dynamics. So I don’t know if Postman would’ve predicted the exact nature of a TikTok generation and six second videos, but I think the fundamental thing that has not changed is companies that want to use you to advertise and to make money off of you with your attention.
Brett McCracken
Just to add to that, I think central to his argument in Amusing Ourselves to Death was the profit motive and the commercial structure of media. And he talked about television as the point of television is not to get people to think critically. The point of television is to gather an audience for corporations. When you have an audience gathered, you can earn more money with advertisements. So the more eyeballs that are there, the more money there is to be made. And the way that you get eyeballs is a different thing than the way you get people to think critically. So amusements and diversions and trivial things, that’s what gathers an audience. And that’s what he was bemoaning. So that aspect hasn’t changed and it’s only gotten worse, as Ivan was saying. The profit incentives are still very strong in terms of the name of the game in media is gathering an audience. It’s a more crowded atmosphere than ever before. There are more people vying for limited attention, and so the incentives to have lurid, extreme, heightened rhetoric and all these wild clickbaity things are greater incentives than ever, because the attention economy is so fiercely competitive. And so I think what he was onto in the eighties, his thesis is proving to be vindicated and correct forty years later.
Matt Tully
It’s like this arms race of vying for our attention. And you’re right, as these technologies have evolved and as just even our own consumption habits as humans have changed over time, it takes more and more strategic thinking on the part of these advertisers or companies to hold our attention and get us stuck on it. Brett, another question on this. Postman had this concept that you talk about in the book of the technopoly. And that was a really helpful way to think about the ways that these technologies change and the ways that they affect us and can lead to certain undesirable outcomes. What did he mean by technopoly, and how does that relate to this conversation?
Brett McCracken Technopoly is actually the name of another one of Postman’s most famous and influential books, and actually, I think it was the first Postman book I read before I read Amusing Ourselves to Death. And his idea with Technopoly is that the tools of technology that we initially use as tools end up using us. They become a more powerful thing in terms of we lose our agency and our power over time, and we become unable to resist their power. We don’t have the power anymore to just use them on and off, turn them off, put them in the right place. Our lives are now subservient to the technopoly, the authority of technology. And if you’re not careful with technology, he argues that always happens with technology. Something that initially starts as this practical tool that we think we’ll be able to control as we need it ends up becoming this all-consuming thing in society where you can’t live without it. We can see how that’s happening with so much of digital technology. Something like Wi-Fi. If you’re in a place without Wi-Fi, you might as well not have oxygen. We can’t live without Wi-Fi anymore. If you go somewhere and you forget your smartphone, think about the panic that you have in your mind. For ten minutes I went on an errand and I don’t have my phone! That shows you the extent to which these aren’t just optional tools anymore. They’re these all-important apparatuses that are extensions of our very being that we feel like we’ve had a appendage severed if we are separated from it. So that’s the technopoly idea.
Matt Tully
So someone could hear that and maybe their response would be, “Well, is it really that different from other technologies that we’re used to that we’ve built our lives or built our society around?” I think of electricity in our homes or running water or a car. Those don’t strike us as it being a problem to rely on those things or to even have fundamentally assumed those things being present for the operation of our lives. So maybe the question is, Is the situation actually different today when it comes to digital technologies like smartphones? Or is this really just the same thing that’s always happened with new technologies?
Brett McCracken
I would say that one difference is certain technologies are addictive. You get to a point where you have addictive behavior, in terms of you can’t not use it. So with something like electricity, I wouldn’t characterize our relationship to electricity as one of addiction. If the lights go out, that’s unfortunate, but I’m not going to go into withdrawal. Whereas with smartphones and certain digital technologies, I think you’re starting to see some like legitimate addict-like behavior being on display throughout culture. So I think that’s one thing that’s changed. There’s psychological dynamics at work with certain digital technologies that are unique among other technologies. And in fact, they were designed that way. If you look into the history of social media platforms and smartphone interfaces and whatnot, a lot of times they hired behavioral psychologists to help tweak the interfaces and the dings and the lights and the sounds so that they could be as addictive as possible. So they’re intentionally created to create addicts, and it’s connected to the profit motive, again, because the more time people spend on these platforms and the more unable they are to resist grabbing for their phone all day, every day, that is more money for these companies. That’s more advertising revenue. So there’s a lot that’s working against us in terms of our ability to resist these technologies, because there are so many incentives to make us as hooked as possible.
Matt Tully
Ivan, in one of the chapters in the book, Patrick Miller, one of the contributors, describes our phones as “digital syringes.” He likens this compulsive use of our phones to a drug addiction, and he uses that kind of language. In keeping with that metaphor, Ivan, how did we get so hooked on these devices? What’s the mechanism in our brains that’s leading to that? And to keep with that metaphor of drug addiction, what might a detox look like for us as we think about our lives as Christians?
Ivan Mesa
I picked up the iPhone a little late. I was a little late to the party. I think it might have been 2010 or 2011. And at that point, I mean it was just amazing. It’s hard to think about this in this manner, but back when we were younger, we had SMS texts and you had to click on certain buttons to get certain letters to appear on your phone.
Matt Tully
And you only had so many you could send a month. You had to pay for each message.
Ivan Mesa
Limitations.
Brett McCracken
Oh my goodness. I forgot about that.
Matt Tully
You could run up that bill real quick.
Ivan Mesa
And so in the beginning, you start seeing these new features of texting and calling and then listen to your music. And none of us are Luddites in the sense that we don’t benefit. We both have iPhones. We both are on social media. So we’re not saying here that this is all bad, but there is a point where you start seeing, like the proverbial frog in the kettle, you’re just getting warmed up over time, and then you realize you’re checking your phone every six seconds. You pick up your phone, you feel the sensation of notifications when there’s none on your phone—that that’s an actual thing.
Bret McCracken:
Ghost notifications.
Ivan Mesa
Yes, exactly.
Matt Tully
It feels like it’s buzzing in your pocket, but it didn’t.
Ivan Mesa
I feel like it’s buzzing right now, and I don’t even have it on me. So I think over time you start seeing—back to the profit motive here with companies—just the way that these are created to be addictive. And you asked about ways to detox from that. Addiction, personally, I’ve had seasons where I just take a break from all social media, take a break from different notifications. I turn that all that off. I think Cal Newport, his whole stuff on deep work, has been so helpful for me, and his book Digital Minimalism. He’s a productivity guru, and I just appreciate that so much, and he advocates for that pulling back on media. Another thing is just, personally, one thing that I do is on Sundays I just take a break from all things on my phone. And that’s just a weekly thing, where it’s not this emergency situation where you’re just over your head with social media or technology in general, and it’s a good way to just hit the reset button on a weekly basis.
Matt Tully
So you’re just not using your phone all day long? Is that how it works?
Ivan Mesa
Yeah. My job requires me to be on my phone, be present, making phone calls.
Brett McCracken
I can attest to that as his colleague at TGC. He doesn’t text or bug me. As my supervisor at TGC, it’s nice to know I’m never going to be bugged on a Sunday, because Ivan doesn’t use his phone.
Ivan Mesa
And some people just maybe should not be on social media, or have a dumb phone. And this is all a matter of prudent and wisdom. There’s not a one right way approach to doing this, but I think what we’re trying to do in this book is bring these people together to have words of wisdom for this generation that are so addicted that we are scrolling ourselves to death. And when you think about just attention, we have limited attention in our lifetime. Our lives are finite. We have a certain amount of time. And when you think about just over the course of a day, a week, a month, years, a decade, when you think of that attention being given over to some other company to make money off of you (for a company) it just puts things in perspective. And so Tony Reinke’s book on technology has been so helpful here—12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You—even non-Christians are talking about this. There’s a book called Attention Merchants by Tim Wu, and it’s just super helpful. Attention is the currency of our age, and we want, as Christians, we think our attention matters. Where are we putting the main focus of our attention? Is it ultimate things? Is it the Lord? Is it the church? Is it God’s word? Is it people? And sometimes I think some of these technologies distract us from what ultimately we should be putting our attention on.
Matt Tully
Brett, in Christian circles, it’s not uncommon to speak of the finite resources that God has given us and wanting to use those resources wisely, whether that’s our money or our time. But why attention? Why is attention distinct from just time? And why would you want to focus on that right now?
Brett McCracken
I think because attention has a spiritual formation component. Where you give your attention, it matters for how you’re being formed. What you attend to in life is what is feeding your soul. That’s what my book The Wisdom Pyramid was all about. We need to be careful about what is feeding our souls, where we are giving our attention, our limited amounts of attention. Because if you give your attention mostly to TikTok and mostly to Netflix and mostly to this kind of digital junk food out there, you are going to be formed in a certain way. But if you give your attention to the more transcendental sources of wisdom and truth, if you give your attention chiefly, of course, to God. And that’s one of the things that’s so critical for Christians in this whole conversation is what we’re really talking about here is a world where there is less and less attention being given to our creator, to God. One of the major side effects, practically, for Christian life in the digital age is that we just have less and less time in our lives to be quiet, to be still, and know that he is God, to be devotionally quiet with the Lord, with Scripture, just in prayer. I feel like we probably don’t pray much anymore because we fill all the gaps in our day which we might have used to use those opportunities to pray or just to be still and reflect with gratitude on the gifts of God. Now we just fill all those gaps with something on our phone, anything on our phone—text messages, notifications, social media. And so I think the degradation of our attention, the depletion of our attention, has huge spiritual consequences, because you are not going to have a vibrant spiritual life without that relationship with God. And any relationship, whether you’re talking about a marriage relationship or a friendship, you need time. Time is an essential ingredient. Time together is an essential ingredient to a healthy relationship. And that’s true of our spiritual relationship with God. We need time with him, and we need to give our attention to him and to listen to his word and to pray and to seek him. And that’s why in an attention economy, it’s a spiritual economy as well.
Ivan Mesa
I would also add that’s the vertical dynamic at play; there’s also the horizontal. And so my worst moments as a father is when I am on my phone and not paying attention to my kids. I care about far-flung issues and the outrage of the day on social media or what’s going on in this part of the world, and the ironic part is that I cannot affect change in some of these areas that are way above my pay grade. But when it comes to the children right in front of me—diapers to change, a book to read, a discipline conversation, like all these things—I am tempted to care more about things that I cannot change than the things that are staring me right in the face. And those are moments that I’ve had to repent. So, yes, the vertical dynamic of attention toward the Lord, but also at the horizontal level—just attention to where the Lord has placed me and called me as a father, husband, church member, as a neighbor—what are the things there in front of me that I can do by God’s grace? And I think that conversation on attention has immediate implications for our day-to-day experience.
Matt Tully
Ivan, keeping with that horizontal dimension that you just brought up, another thing that is highlighted throughout the book is just the effect of these disembodied interactions and relationships that we tend to have online, mostly in social media, but there are probably other forms of that disembodied dynamic that we experience. Ivan, how would you describe the effect that the very common experience that we have of doing a FaceTime call with somebody, or even worse, just sending someone messages online without ever even seeing the person, how does that affect us and how we think about each other, for both other Christians and other believers but even non-Christians? How would you boil that down?
Ivan Mesa
All these tools are great. With my parents and our children seeing their grandfather, it is great to FaceTime when you are separated by distance. So I think these technologies are great in insofar as it allows you to see people that you wouldn’t see otherwise. I have coworkers at TGC that I get to text with, Zoom with, be on the phone with. With my children, for seeing their grandfather, it’s great to FaceTime. So those are all good things. At the same time, these technologies can give you an illusion of intimacy when it’s not there. So much of our day-to-day experience with friendships with people that we know, like neighbors, there are things that can happen only when you see someone face to face. And so sometimes, like I was just saying earlier, you can be tempted to think these digital friendships, these connections you have, are the most important things in your life when they’re not. Those are good to have, those are blessings, you wanna steward them well. But at times they can pull you away from the embodied relationships that we were created for by the Lord himself. So I think it is just growing in the awareness of that and allowing you to be focused in on what the Lord has called you to right there in front of you.
Matt Tully
Brett, let’s talk about another big issue, a very hot-button issue in the digital world today. That would have to be AI, artificial intelligence. It’s one of these things that over the last couple of years has just been thrust into the forefront of the public consciousness in a way that maybe wasn’t the case before. Obviously, there have been especially filmmakers thinking about AI and the effect of AI on our culture on society for many, many decades. But it’s only recently that we’ve begun to see the fulfillment of some of these fantasies actually coming to fruition right in front of us. And I think it’s been a shocking but also exciting, exhilarating, confusing kind of thing for many Christians. And I think in particular for Christians, we can sometimes have a little bit of a sense of unease, because we have a certain view of humanity and what it means to be a human. We have a view of life and what the good life is in God’s economy. But we also don’t know of any Bible verses that talk about AI. And maybe it feels like very few even come close to addressing something as novel as artificial intelligence. So help us start to think about that. What would be some basic principles that Christians should hold onto when it comes to trying to engage this AI conversation?
Brett McCracken
This is the new frontier of technology. I think we’re just beginning the discourse and the critical evaluation of AI, and I think in another decade it’ll be interesting to see how the conversation shifts and how culture is changed. I think it’s probably going to be the next internet in terms of think about how radically our world has been reshaped in the last thirty years by the internet. That’s what AI is going to do for every aspect of society and culture. So it’s definitely good for Christians to start thinking about it. To go back to Postman and just this whole conversation about how every technology is not innocuous and neutral. There are things that it allows us to do that we couldn’t do before that are maybe good and helpful, and there are ways that it changes things in perhaps negative ways that we need to be alert to and on guard to. So obviously with AI we can already see some very helpful, practical ways that it can help, just with efficiency in every industry. Even as a writer, sometimes I’m writing an email now, and the AI finishes my sentence and I’m like, That’s actually what I was going to say. Thank you for saving me two seconds. And that sort of thing is happening in every industry, the way that AI can kind of supplement in an administrative assistance sort of way. And that’s helpful. At the same time, I think we have to start asking questions about where is the line in terms of what we’re going to be okay with robots and AI replacing in terms of human capacities? When it starts getting into mimicking human creativity—like, I’m a writer, and I’m a little disturbed by how good AI writing already is, and we’re in kind of the dial-up era of AI technology. It’s a very rudimentary.
Matt Tully
Yeah. We’re still just at the very beginning.
Brett McCracken
We’re still at the beginning. So if it’s this good already, we’re going to have a William Faulkner AI soon and a Shakespeare in terms of quality of writing.
Matt Tully
I just actually saw some talking about Shakespeare and poetry. I just saw some study that was done recently where they actually showed different, I think to college students, different poetry samples, and they didn’t tell them where they were from. And consistently, the AI-generated poetry scored better among these students than the actual real poetry by a human.
Brett McCracken
That’s disturbing. So that’s the sort of thing that I think we have to think about carefully. What is it going to mean for culture when some of the most beautiful written, visually created things are no longer the product of humans? How do we then think about our capacity as humans who have the image of a Creator God? We are creators by our nature, but AI doesn’t bear the image of God, and yet they are creating in a way that kind of glorifies a Creator God. And so it’s just weird to think about that, and I think there’s a lot of theological questions that we’re going to have to wrestle with when it comes to anthropology and the nature of humanity and the image of God. And precisely how does AI mimic certain human capacities that we used to think were the unique domain of humans? One thing that I’ve been thinking about recently that I find problematic about AI has to do with the instancy of results with AI. Like on ChatGPT, you can ask a fairly complex question, and you get an instant, fairly good in-depth answer. You can give it a prompt, like compose a symphony in the style of Beethoven about this theme. And in like in five seconds it will produce something. There’s something obviously really cool about that in a shiny-new-object-toy sort of sense, but there’s something disturbing about that, because patience and time and creation is part of the joy of it. As a writer and as a creator myself, the way that I glorify God as a writer—or as a painter glorifies God, if you’re a Christian painter, or whatever your vocation—is not just the result; it’s the process. It’s the painstaking work and consideration and attention. To go back to the precious value of our attention, when you attend to your task, it takes time. So it demeans that when you can snap your fingers in two seconds and AI produces something that would take you a year to produce.
Matt Tully
It seems to cheapen it in some way.
Brett McCracken
It cheapens it. And so I think that that’s a question that we’re going to have to wrestle with is just the cheapening of content and ideas and art and culture. I could go on with that because this is, as someone who cares about the arts and beauty, this is pretty concerning to me, but that’s a conversation probably for another day. But there’s a lot that we need to be thinking about with AI.
Matt Tully
Ivan, when it comes to AI and the future, as Brett said, there’s a good chance, probably very likely, that we are still just in the very early stages and that there are developments to come and applications to come that we’ve maybe not even imagined yet. Would you say you’re more on the optimistic side about all the good that it’s going to do, that on balance it’s going to be a really positive development? Or would you be more pessimistic about the effects of AI on our culture?
Ivan Mesa
I’m naturally pessimistic, as Brett knows, and so even hearing debates with Elon Musk and OpenAI controversy, I tend to be more on the Elon Musk side of I think this presents potentially an existential threat to humanity. But take it with a grain of salt. I’m naturally a Puddleglum. But I think on the whole, my contrarian take on AI stuff at times is not building new stuff per se; it’s building off a pool of data that humanity has created. So, yes, in some ways it’s new content—derivations of what we’ve created—but it’s based on what humanity has created.
Matt Tully
So it’s fundamentally not possible of being original, truly original.
Ivan Mesa
Yeah, I think so.
Brett McCracken
Just to push back on that, though, because I’ve thought about that. Every human created work of art is the same thing. Every human creation is building off of what has come before. And every artist will say so. The most original musician who created the most original sounding music came from the influences that they heard growing up with music. The Beatles were not wholly original. Elvis was not wholly original. He was building on all these influences of music. So that’s what human creation already is. It’s a remixing of existing raw materials of culture. So it isn’t clear to me how what AI is doing is all that different from what humans actually do as artists.
Ivan Mesa
And we’re still in the beginning of this conversation. So I think while this book is not specifically on AI, we might need a book ten years from now called AI’ing ourselves to death. We just need more wisdom.
Brett McCracken
Just five years from now.
Ivan Mesa
Yeah, the acceleration of change and the pace here is just so quickly happening that Christians tend to be a few steps behind the culture and new technologies. And so we’re just trying to catch up with where the culture is at right now and bring the best thinkers, the ethicists, to really wrestle with this. And so I think this conversation is, in microcosm, what a lot of Christians are discussing and debating about—the role of AI within art, creating, even spiritual wisdom. That’s a whole different category, but AI cannot create wisdom. It can create content, but there are certain things about the church, about God’s word, about the Christian experience, the Holy Spirit in dwelling believers that AI cannot replicate. And we’re just going to have to wrestle through a lot of those things in the future.
Matt Tully
And that’s one of the things I love about this book and what you guys are doing is assembling this team of thinkers to help us process this. As you said, things are changing so quickly. It can feel so hard to keep up, as a normal Christian. I think of people listening right now. Maybe it’s a pastor who’s just working away on his sermon every week, or there’s a stay-at-home mom who’s just enmeshed in the life of diapers and lunches and taking kids to different events, and it can be really hard to keep up with the constant stream of developments that we read about. And so having a resource like this book just helps to distill some of that down and help us to think very carefully along with others who have spent more time than we can spend on some of these things. Another quick question. Digital platforms, in general, whether it’s a streaming video or podcasts or social media sites, they have been such a powerful vehicle for ministry over the past twenty years or so. And there’s probably no better example of that than the organization that you two work for, the Gospel Coalition, which arguably wouldn’t really be what it is today without the advent of the internet and digital technologies and digital content that we all can get on our phone anytime we want. How should we think about this as individual Christians, as people in leadership in a local church, or even as Christian organizations, just balancing the incredible ministry potential of these tools versus the dangers and the pitfalls that can also come with these tools? Brett, let’s start with you.
Brett McCracken
This is a question that I’ve thought about and wrestled with a lot, because I tend to be a techno-skeptical borderline Luddite when it comes to these things, and yet I work for an online digital ministry known as the Gospel Coalition. And so even in my own vocation, I sometimes wrestle with this question of am I just adding to the problem, or am I just contributing to the glut of content that people are just consuming and scrolling through on their phones? And what I say and where I’ve come to is just this idea that technology can be redeemed. Even technologies which in the sum total are probably a net negative for culture, there are still ways that they can be deployed for redemptive ends. And that you see that with almost any technology in history. And so I think the key for Christians is first to go slow when it comes to adopting and deploying technologies, to not just rush and whatever new technology comes along, you’re just like instantly, “How can we use this for our ministry and our mission?” But you just think carefully about it and consider the costs and consider not only the things that it affords for you to do but also the things that it changes for the worse. So go slow in how you do it, but also be hopeful that the Holy Spirit can use even deeply broken platforms and compromised spaces like the internet. And of course, if you think more broadly about Christian mission throughout time, it’s always been true that Christians don’t shy away from the places in the world geographically that are hostile or dangerous or disease ridden. You still go there as Christians, because you have to bring the gospel there. You have to bring the redemption of Jesus to these lost spaces. And so we might look at the internet like we look at Ebola-stricken West Africa. Christians still go there. Christians are still present. We are faithfully present in the spaces of the internet and social media, because we believe that there are people dying. There’s a spiritual sickness that is endemic on the internet, and if we’re not there, if Christians aren’t there, if for our own piety and the purity of our spiritual lives we run for the analog hills, so to speak, and live offline, then we’re just abandoning this space. We’re abandoning these people that we really believe are being malformed in powerful ways. And so I view what we do at the Gospel Coalition as trying to be a light in the darkness, bringing health to a generally unhealthy space. And hopefully, if people are scrolling through their devices anyway and maybe consuming a lot of junk food, they come across some healthy items from places like the Gospel Coalition and many other Christians who are providing healthy things online.
Ivan Mesa
That’s a great missionary perspective. I would also add a discipleship component here. The reality is Christians are going to be engaged online. They’re going to be on platforms. They’re going to be on social media accounts. Some may not, and that’s fine, but we want to create a culture in which we use and leverage these tools to get people back in their context in their churches, in their small groups. We want to use content online to help encourage Christians to be faithful in their lives. So the end goal was never to create content so that they can live on that content. We create and leverage the content to turn around and say, “This is how you be a faithful husband, as a church member, as a faithful member serving the needs in your community.” So we want to create content in that way to basically be faithful to God’s word so the church can be the church. That’s really our goal at the end of the day.
Brett McCracken
We often talk at the Gospel Coalition internally about how we never want to be a replacement for the local church. Nothing on your phone can ever be a replacement for the local church. So if you pay attention to our output in terms of our resources, they’re mostly actually sending people to offline realities, whether it’s the local church or Christian community or their families or various things. So I think that’s one redemptive use of technology is to remind people of the health and the beauty and the wonder of the physical world that God created.
Matt Tully
So maybe that’s the main application after someone finishes listening to this conversation is put your phone down, stop listening to podcasts for a little while, and go do something outside.
Matt Tully
Maybe a couple of lightning round questions for you both. I’d love to hear both of your answers to each of these. If you had to delete all of your social media apps on your phone, Ivan, except for one, which one would you keep and why?
Ivan Mesa
Well, I have none on my phone right now. So I’m living my best Neil Postman life. I would say I think X, formerly Twitter, would probably be it. I like a text-based app with words mostly. I know it has other things, but the short-form conversations, little chatter conversations and updates, I enjoy that.
Matt Tully
But you’ve chosen not to have that on your phone?
Ivan Mesa
Nope.
Matt Tully
Is that just because you didn’t find it helpful? Was it becoming too all consuming for you? What was behind that decision?
Ivan Mesa
I’m an editor of a book called Scrolling Ourselves to Death, so I think I would be living hypocritically if I was just endlessly notified, scrolling everything. I mentioned Cal Newport earlier. I’ve been so helped by Cal Newport in terms of just productivity, and If I’m trying to be faithful in my calling and my nine to five job at TGC, as a husband, as a church member, creating curriculum for teaching on a Sunday morning, if I am continually bombarded by this platform and that platform, it would just make my life really difficult to be faithful in all those areas. So it’s one practical way that I just try to be faithfully present in what the Lord has called me to in my life.
Matt Tully
Brett, how about you? If you had to delete all of them except for one, what would you keep?
Ivan Mesa
Instagram.
Brett McCracken
Yeah, you’re right. I probably would keep Instagram, and it’s because I think as much as there’s lots of problems with Instagram, I actually like seeing photos of my friends and family who live in other places of the world and just getting little glimpses of their lives and their kids. As a parent of three cute little kids, I’m biased, but I think they’re really cute. There’s something that’s not terrible about our impulse to want to share photos of children. Children are gifts from God, and they’re precious, and it blesses people. I know it blesses my parents, who live far away from me, to see photos of them. And I like to text people directly more photos than I post publicly on Instagram, but it’s still a way that you can keep in touch with people. And I find it to be a generally more edifying social media platform than some of the other ones.
Matt Tully
Brett, my next question for you: Do you use ChatGPT? And if so, how do you use it?
Brett McCracken
No, I don’t use it. So that’s my answer. I’ve played with it here and there, but yeah ’m a little bit just scared, honestly, about the potential, as a creative, connecting to what I was saying earlier about just creativity and the threat that AI poses.
Matt Tully
Are you scared that it would sap you of your creativity? Like you would become too dependent on it, or something else?
Brett McCracken
No, I can’t see myself ever relying on it for my own process, but just something about it weirds me out in terms of that idea that a complex question or a fairly complex human prompt that I take years to process and think through can be so rapidly mimicked in a decent way. So just for my own mental health, I’ve avoided even being aware of those potentials.
Matt Tully
How about you, Ivan?
Ivan Mesa
I taught a Sunday school, and I created an outline for a passage. I think it was 1 Samuel 18 or 19. I love alliteration, and I could not find the one word that had alliteration with the two other points. I put it in ChatGPT, and it gave me the right word. I forget the outline now.
Brett McCracken
That’s a practical usage of ChatGPT.
Ivan Mesa
Desperation, deception, deliverance. I had my three points for my class.
Matt Tully
You just needed one more D word.
Ivan Mesa
Exactly. It was like every word was "de," and ChatGPT gave me the one word that I was missing. One other time I helped my wife. She has a business that she runs, and it was a complex mathematical formulation for a product—how much it cost her to buy that product, how much she was selling it for, what she needs to sell it for to make a margin. So I just put that in ChatGPT, and it gave me the correct answer. And you can probably Google that maybe, but ChatGPT just took all that information and gave me the answer in a matter of seconds.
Matt Tully
My favorite use case for ChatGPT relates to Excel formulas, where you can go in and, in natural human language, explain what I’m trying to do, and it will create this complex formula that almost always works perfectly. It is amazing. Those are examples, I think, of augmenting things that we’re doing, simplifying things that we’re trying to do, without really replacing us in the driver’s seat of that role.
Brett McCracken
Yeah, I think the way that AI augments search has already proven to be helpful for me. Now, when you Google a question, it gives you that AI summary at the top, and I find that to be helpful a lot of times. Recently, I’ve been Googling things like “best examples of revisionist westerns,” because I’m teaching this faith in film cohort with TGC, and I’m doing genre studies on different genres. And the AI summaries have been really helpful, and it’s reminded me of, Oh, I didn’t remember that film, and I didn’t remember that one. And so I think as an augmenting tool to the natural algorithms of search, it’s super helpful.
Matt Tully
Maybe a final question. And Ivan, you’ve already given us a little glimpse into something that you do along these lines, but maybe there’s something else that you’d mentioned. What’s one screen-free habit that’s had the biggest impact on your own spiritual life, your own family life, and your own church’s life, as you think about being intentional with these technologies?
Ivan Mesa
Oh, that’s an easy answer. I think books in general. I cannot summarize and tell the story of my conversion apart from books. I cannot tell the story of my discipleship and growth in Christ apart from books. I’m an editor of books. I work for an organization, the Gospel coalition, that produces books. I work with Crossway as well. I did this book. So I think books in general have been kind of my secret sauce to work against and mitigate against the onslaught of social media and technology. It’s sit down with a book that’s not beeping at me, notifying me of emails and crises and a text message. So I think the book itself, the artifact of beginning a book, seeing the argument from beginning to end, chapter to chapter, page to page, has helped me in this age of social media, technology, and AI to just focus in on those things that matter most. So whether it’s Christian books or even non-Christian books, in terms of common grace and benefiting from a good book of fiction or poetry, those have all been a means of grace that the Lord has used to help me to be a better human and a more faithful Christian.
Matt Tully
That’s helpful. Brett, how about you?
Brett McCracken
I would say two (I think maybe that’s cheating): the church and nature. And if you’ve read The Wisdom Pyramid, you know that those are two of the prominent, foundational things that I advocate. But in terms of a non-screen moment of my week that I look forward to, it’s going to church and being in the embodied presence of the saints and singing in an embodied way and hearing actual voices, and shaking hands in a physical way. And all of that is just so recalibrating for me, because I spend so much of my week working on a device for the digital ministry of the Gospel Coalition.
Matt Tully
Would you then advocate for or do you tend to bring a physical Bible with you so you don’t have to be looking at your phone?
Brett McCracken
Yes. As often as I can remember to bring my physical Bible, I do. Sometimes I forget, and I have to use the ESV app for my Bible reading. So the church and then nature. Living in Southern California helps, because it’s nice all year round, but going on walks in the middle of my day has been really helpful for me just to have screen-free time to process. I’m a big believer in the importance of space to think, which is an increasingly rare thing in a hyper-productive, optimize-every-moment mode of living that technology allows us to do. But when you try to optimize every moment—every five minutes, every sixty seconds of gaps in your day—you end up having no space to think and to critically connect dots and make connections of what’s happened in your life in the recent history. So going on solo walks in my neighborhood or family walks with my kids has been so helpful just to not only have that space to think and to reflect but also just to appreciate the beauty of God’s creation in a way that cultivates gratitude and worship.
Matt Tully
Ivan and Brett, thank you so much for taking some time today to help us think through these complex issues. But they’re ever present. They’re all around us, and we can’t really escape some of the challenges that we discussed today. And I think this book in particular is going to be such a helpful resource for so many Christians as we try to be faithful in the midst of an increasingly tricky world to navigate on these fronts.
Jim Hamilton discusses what to do when you hate your job, offering encouragement for those frustrated in their work and explaining the difference between a job and a vocation.
Rosaria Butterfield encourages us to engage our LGBTQ neighbors for Christ, highlighting how God used the radically ordinary hospitality of Christians to draw her to himself.
Learn about the new resources released this month from Crossway, including Scrolling Ourselves to Death, edited by Brett McCracken and Ivan Mesa, and Every Hour I Need You by Katie Faris.
April 21, 2025
by:
Crossway
New Books
Below is a list of the new and notable resources releasing this month from Crossway. Titles include Scrolling Ourselves to Death, edited by Brett McCracken and Ivan Mesa, and Every Hour I Need You by Katie Faris.
Scrolling Ourselves to Death: Reclaiming Life in a Digital Age
On the 40th anniversary of Neil Postman’s prophetic book Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), Scrolling Ourselves to Death gathers today’s most incisive writers to think critically about the shaping power of contemporary technology. This book explores Postman’s insights, connects them to the challenges facing Christians today, and turns difficult challenges into life-giving opportunities for the church. Stepping back from their screens, readers will be equipped to live faithfully, and grow spiritually, in a “scrolling ourselves to death” world.
“Rarely does a collection of chapters from diverse contributors come together to form such a cohesive vision, offering penetrating insights into our current cultural moment. Scrolling Ourselves to Death goes beyond merely revisiting Neil Postman’s groundbreaking work; it uses Postman’s insights as a springboard for deeper reflection and application, all while keeping an eye on the eternal truths of Scripture that remain unchanged in our rapidly advancing technological age.”
—Trevin Wax, Vice President for Research and Resource Development, North American Mission Board; Visiting Professor, Cedarville University; author, The Thrill of Orthodoxy; The Multi-Directional Leader; and This Is Our Time
Part of the Foundational Tools for Our Faith series, this book delves into the origins, theological meaning, and modern relevance of the Nicene Creed. Each chapter provides insightful analysis of key terms and phrases within the creed. By examining the truths the creed affirms and the errors it opposes, bestselling author Kevin DeYoung aims to help readers recite this essential statement of faith with understanding and clarity.
“Like the Nicene Creed itself, Kevin DeYoung has given us important truths in a short space. Historically informed, theologically informative, and biblically sensitive, this little book will help you understand why the Nicene Creed may be the most important words ever written outside of the words of the Bible.”
—Mark Dever, Pastor, Capitol Hill Baptist Church, Washington, DC
Synthesizing Keller’s work topic by topic, each chapter of this book highlights a key aspect of the Christian life—covering his views on prayer, suffering, friendship, vocation, intimacy with God, and more. Written by pastor Matt Smethurst, Tim Keller on the Christian Life draws from Keller’s nearly 50 years of sermons, conference messages, and books to share practical theological insight that will galvanize leaders and laypeople alike.
“Matt Smethurst has researched an impressive amount of content for this book: sermons, books, papers, courses, articles, and unpublished conversations. He found resources even I wasn’t familiar with, and he has produced a work of scholarship that will long stand as the most thorough examination of the biblical themes that animated all of Tim’s ministry.”
—Kathy Keller, Editor, Gospel in Life
Written for girls ages 9–12, this devotional traces the theme of beauty to help young readers know and love the one who created them in his likeness. Each reading includes a portion of a poem, a related Bible verse, a concise devotion, and a brief prayer. As young readers marvel at the beauty of God, they will be transformed, learning that the more they appreciate God’s beauty, the more beautiful they will become.
“In our culture, outward beauty is sought after—no matter the cost. That’s why What Makes You Beautiful is timely and needed. Kristen Wetherell shows girls that real beauty is more than skin deep, and the source of that beauty is found in relationship with the one who makes us beautiful. What Makes You Beautiful is a beautiful book that is engaging, biblical, and Christ-centered. I highly recommend it for all girls!”
—Christina Fox, author, Who Are You? A Little Book About Your Big Identity
The whole earth is a symphony to God. The universe echoes his glory, and believers harmonize with songs of adoration. In the illustrated book Pippa and the Singing Tree, singer and hymn writer Kristyn Getty teaches children how they can answer Scripture’s call to worship. Combining beauty and rhythm with artwork by P. J. Lynch, this story makes a great gift or church resource. In a special note at the end of the book, Getty shares some of her favorite psalms, along with prompts that will inspire kids to worship the Lord.
“This beautifully illustrated story of Pippa and the Singing Tree offers a winsome call to sing a new song of praise to God. The Irish undertones and clear voice of songwriter-poet Kristyn Getty ring out on every page. This story will be a timeless treasure.”
—Sandra McCracken, singer-songwriter; coauthor, The Maker of the Mountain
Having raised 5 children between the ages of 7 and 18, Katie Faris understands the challenges of parenting and the importance of remembering God’s provision and providence. In Every Hour I Need You, she walks with women, helping them contemplate God’s unchanging character and discover how his purposes are at work, even in the everyday moments of motherhood. These 30 brief devotions focus on distinct characteristics of God—including his sovereignty, generosity, and patience—inviting women to know him more through his word, experience deeper spiritual affections and stronger faith, and serve Christ through the care of their families at home.
“Katie Faris understands the challenges that moms are facing and graciously points them to their greatest hope and deepest comfort: God himself. These thirty rich reflections will help a mom in the trenches lift her eyes to her Savior, gaining a fresh perspective as she meditates on her Lord. The truths from this book will trickle down into a mom’s daily life and decisions, helping her navigate the joys and trials of motherhood.”
—Emily A. Jensen, coauthor, Risen Motherhood and Gospel Mom
Primarily drawing from Puritan tradition, Bingham shows readers how to balance belief in salvation through faith with a responsibility for one’s personal spiritual growth. He studies biblical practices—including meditation, prayer, and self-examination—from a Protestant perspective. Blending historical analysis and practical application, this edifying study cultivates a greater understanding of Reformed theology and an ever-growing relationship with God.
“A Heart Aflame for God is one of the most edifying and spiritually insightful books I have ever read. While confessional Protestants often look to other traditions for guidance in spiritual formation, Matthew Bingham is like a miner uncovering the rich, life-giving treasures of the Reformed tradition. I wish I could travel back in time and hand this book to my younger self. Highly recommended!”
—Hans Madueme, Professor of Theological Studies, Covenant College
This book explores Grimké’s vision of the Christian life, emphasizing his beliefs on personal piety, family, the mission of the church, and the relationship between faith and politics. His blend of doctrinal integrity and social concern helps readers wisely engage in topics like race, ethnicity, culture, and politics in the church today. As the church continues to navigate these polarized issues, Grimké reminds us that, through Christ, unity is possible.
“Drew Martin skillfully and gracefully takes us into the remarkable life and ministry of Francis Grimké, whose witness to peace and hope in a world—and a church—riven with strife and injustice stands as relevant to our time as ever before.”
—John Inazu, Sally D. Danforth Distinguished Professor of Law and Religion, Washington University in St. Louis
The 10 Questions series invites children ages 8–14 to investigate spiritual questions and provides reliable theological and practical answers on their level. The first book, 10 Questions about Salvation, helps readers find joy, security, and hope in God’s gracious love. Each 10 Questions book presents one main topic, poses 10 vital questions on the topic, and answers each question through 3 short devotions. Readers can work through the 30 readings in any order they choose. Written to be read alone or aloud with family, 10 Questions about Salvation is the perfect way to start or end each day reflecting on the things of God.
“Nothing is more important to parents than the salvation of our children. Yet it can be difficult to have meaningful conversations about it with our kids. In this clear and concise book, Champ Thornton provides families with an engaging resource to talk about the need for salvation and the Savior who meets that need.”
—Nancy Guthrie, author, The One Year Praying through the Bible for Your Kids
We all long to feel special. We seek recognition for our efforts and validation for who we are. This easy-to-understand story, with winsome language and colorful pictures, helps kids ages 3–7 understand that their value doesn’t come from the approval of others or the success of their actions but from the unconditional love of God in Christ. A TGC Kids book.
“The Gospel Coalition’s illustrated storybooks provide ready-made conversation starters for families to use on important issues that kids struggle with. They answer these challenges with biblical truths that offer gospel solutions to their problems. Parents and grandparents should add these picture books to their family libraries.”
—Marty Machowski, Executive Pastor, Covenant Fellowship Church, Glen Mills, Pennsylvania; author, The Ology and The Redemption Tales
Through real-life stories, A Light on the Hill reveals how God works through church bodies and remains faithful during times of uncertainty. Exploring themes such as pastoral ministry, faithfulness, courage, racial reconciliation, church and politics, and more, this book will help readers see the long-term effects of faithful church ministries. Ultimately they will be encouraged to invest in a local church and preserve the gospel for the next generation.
“I love the church, I love churches, and I love books about churches. I’ve always loved reading biographies of specific churches, and this is among the best I’ve ever read. Based on years of archival research, and with a good flare for the dramatic, Morell tells the fascinating 150-year story of Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, DC. Morell’s approach is edifying without being pedantic, honest without being censorious, and rich in detail without getting lost in the weeds. The result is a book that deserves a wider audience than local church histories usually enjoy.”
—Kevin DeYoung, Senior Pastor, Christ Covenant Church, Matthews, North Carolina; Associate Professor of Systematic Theology, Reformed Theological Seminary, Charlotte
The first volume in the Short Studies in Systematic Theology series, this book explores what it means to do theology, why theology matters, and what it looks like to derive doctrine from God’s word—helping us understand what to believe, what to value, and how to live. Each chapter looks at 1 of 5 crucial components for constructing good theology: revelation from God, tradition from the past, worship, wisdom, and experience of brokenness, with case studies illustrating how doctrine is developed from each of these important sources. Readers will be left with a deeper understanding of how to make sure their theology faithfully reflects the truth of God’s word.
“Theological Method seeks to help new theologians get started on a sound basis. Graham Cole sets forth a theological method that is meant to be good theology—a method that, first and foremost, is itself true to the Bible and, second, shows how theologians throughout history have best used the Bible to edify the church. I am impressed with the conciseness of Theological Method. Cole has done an excellent job summarizing the basics in this short volume.”
—John M. Frame, Professor of Systematic Theology and Philosophy Emeritus, Reformed Theological Seminary
In this collection of essays, John MacArthur and other teachers from the Master’s College confront the false worldviews that dominate our postmodern world. The authors provide models for cultivating a biblical mindset on worship, psychology, gender, science, education, history, government, economics, and literature. This second edition includes new chapters on hermeneutics, mental illness, complementarianism, and Christian liberal arts. Written for students as well as teachers and pastors, Think Biblically helps us navigate today’s culture with our thoughts and lives centered on Christ.
“It is good to see another edition of Think Biblically, with chapters written by the faculty of the Master’s University and several by John MacArthur. As the title suggests, the book challenges us to think biblically about all sorts of things, including (fascinatingly for me, as a former math major) mathematics. Principally, however, it is a book that challenges us to take the Bible seriously as the inerrant word of God. A perfect gift for college students.”
—Derek W. H. Thomas, Chancellor’s Professor of Systematic and Pastoral Theology, Reformed Theological Seminary; Teaching Fellow, Ligonier Ministries
We’re not supermoms, and we were never meant to be. By God’s good design, we’re dependent creatures, and we look to the Lord for “life and breath and everything” (Acts 17:25).
If you could have any superpower as a mom, which would you choose? Maybe you’d like the flexibility to be everywhere at once—watching over your children at home, school, practice, and all the rest. How would you like to read your children’s minds or have the capacity to get your to-do list done every day and still have time and energy to spare?
While those abilities are tempting, we’re not really supermoms, and we were never meant to be. By God’s good design, we’re dependent creatures, and we look to the Lord for “life and breath and everything” (Acts 17:25). Nevertheless, sometimes we move through our days acting as though we are self-sufficient, everything does depend on us, and we really are in control. We can even feel like that’s what’s expected of us.
As moms, we need to remember that only God is God and that this reality is a good thing. While there are some attributes of God that we’re called to emulate, others belong to him alone. Understanding and embracing this truth can transform our parenting.
Only God Is God, and That’s a Good Thing
Just as our young children depend on us, we depend on God. But though our children should grow increasingly independent as they age, we moms are never meant to outgrow our dependence on the Lord. It’s when we resist this reality, when we insist on doing things our way, that there are problems. However, a humble recognition of who God is and who we are (and aren’t) leads to our rescue from this false sense of self-sufficiency.
There’s no one else like God. Scripture says he is incomparable:
There is none like you among the gods, O Lord,
nor are there any works like yours. —Psalm 86:8
To whom then will you compare me,
that I should be like him? says the Holy One. —Isaiah 40:25
Who is a God like you, pardoning iniquity
and passing over transgression
or the remnant of his inheritance?
He does not retain his anger forever,
because he delights in steadfast love. —Micah 7:18
We can’t label God or stuff him into any of our boxes. Our words fall short in describing him. Yet our Lord chooses to reveal himself in his word. American author and evangelist A. W. Tozer defined an attribute as being “whatever God has in any way revealed as being true of Himself,”1 and studying God’s attributes is one way to get to know him better for who he truly is.
Knowing God by Studying His Attributes
Though God is one, and we can never truly separate his attributes from one another, looking at them individually is an attempt to wrap our finite minds around God’s infinite, mind-boggling nature. When we do, it’s helpful to distinguish between what theologians call God’s communicable and incommunicable attributes.
Many of God’s attributes are communicable—meaning that they’re meant for us too. God communicates, shares, and passes them on to his people. As 2 Corinthians 3:18 explains, “And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.” There’s this mysterious transfer that takes place. As we behold God, as we spend more time in his presence and get to know him better, we become more and more like him. Examples of these attributes include God’s love, patience, goodness, and gentleness. As moms, we’re meant to imitate these virtues and increasingly display them in our parenting.
As moms, we need to remember that only God is God, and that this reality is a good thing.
But God’s incommunicable attributes are all his, and he doesn’t share them with anyone else. They include his self-existence, self-sufficiency, incomprehensibility, eternality, unchangeableness, and sovereignty, as well as the fact that he is present everywhere, all-powerful, and all-knowing. These attributes offer great hope and freedom to believing moms.
Why Does This Matter?
God has both communicable and incommunicable attributes, and both are important. But what difference does it make to us, as moms, that some attributes only belong to God—that they’re not meant for us, and that we aren’t called to emulate them? God’s incommunicable attributes yield three practical encouragements—as well as many more—to moms:
1. We don’t have to be supermoms.
More than anything else in my life, motherhood has illuminated my need for God. It’s revealed my weaknesses and limitations, showing me what I’m not and will never be. And though I can be tempted to feel guilty and discouraged, or even to compare myself with other moms who seem to have it all together, the Lord’s teaching me that there’s a better way. Our very limitations can lead us to the Lord and his sufficiency (2 Cor. 12:9). We moms can’t do all the things, be everywhere at once, or say all the right words; but God is all-powerful, present everywhere, all-knowing, and all-wise. We need him, and so do our families.
2. We can depend on our great God.
The results of parenting don’t ultimately rest on our efforts. Isn’t this good news? We lack resources, but not God. We lack power, but not God. And through Jesus, we can draw near to God in prayer (Heb. 4:16), casting our cares on him (1 Pet. 5:7), confident in his ability to do what we can’t do. We can’t change our children’s hearts, but he can. We can’t save their souls, but he can.
3. We can trust God.
When anxiety and fear about health, safety, choices, and the future weigh on our shoulders, God’s sovereignty reassures us that even though we feel out of control, God remains in complete control. Because he is good, wise, and powerful—and never changes in his nature—we can trust him.
Motherhood Is Holy Ground
Motherhood becomes holy ground when God uses it to open our eyes to see who we are—our finiteness, our dependence on the Lord, and our need for him—and to draw us closer to him. In a world where we often feel like we need to be the strong ones, God welcomes us to come to him humbly, as children: “Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 18:4). In God’s kingdom, humility and weakness aren’t frowned upon but honored, and the self-existent one welcomes us. So let’s go to him, pouring out our sorrows and asking him to sustain and help us.
We weren’t made to carry the weight of the world—or even the weight of our families—on our own shoulders. Rather, God’s incommunicable attributes free us from that burden and offer hope in someone—named Jesus—who is our true and ultimate hero. “He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power” (Heb. 1:3; see also Col. 1:15–17). Having rescued us from sin through his death and resurrection, our Lord’s power provides all we need for life—including mom life—"through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence” (2 Pet. 1:3).
Instead of emulating God’s incommunicable attributes, we worship him for being all that we’re not. We adore him for being incomprehensible and beyond our understanding, and we praise him for acting in incomprehensible ways, such as saving helpless sinners. Ultimately, we surrender to the Lord and trust him with our families.
Notes:
A. W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 1961), 12.
Katie Faris (BA, Grove City College) is the author of God Is Still Good; He Will Be Enough; and Loving My Children. She is also a contributing writer to several blogs including the Gospel Coalition and the Focused Pastor. A pastor’s wife and mother to five, Katie lives with her family in New Jersey. To learn more, visit katiefaris.com.
Pray for wisdom. Pray for your children. Pray that your time in the word and prayer will be fruitful and that God will bear the fruit of his Spirit in your family.
While motherhood is a desirable and godly calling, it also brings pain and heartache. But God is still good. He really is, no matter what. These are ten truths for moms like me to cling to on our difficult days.
If you are not resting in your vertical identity, you will look horizontally, searching to find yourself and your reason for living in something in the creation
