Awe in a Machine World: Embracing Our Finite Humanity

You will not outperform the algorithm this week. It's already won, and your week hasn't started. You will not outoptimize your calendar. The world may want you to work your way to a better version of yourself by pretending to be god, but rest and awe are the radical steps we take to remind ourselves and those people who are closest to us that that we make terrible gods, and we don't have to fake that anymore. In a world that says, fake it till you make it, in God, can I just tell you, you've already made it? [00:59:50] (39 seconds)  #RestNotHustle

See, Jesus, he doesn't just teach about awe. He's where our awe goes. He's where awe came from. He's the reason that your limits and my limits don't disqualify us. The reason that your glitch, no matter how discomforting or how frustrating or how anxious or how overwhelmed you feel. It doesn't have to be fatal. The reason that you can rest even when you feel restless and the work isn't done, don't let yourself fade back into the machine this week, into the noise. Hear me. You will not outwork your inbox this week. [00:59:16] (34 seconds)  #AweInJesus

When God is ultimate, you don't have to be. And you know in that moment when God is really who God is, AI will not scare you because AI is not ultimate or infinite either. You don't have to live in fear of technology or how fast it's all moving. You can experience the peace of God no matter the circumstances of your life. As a matter of fact, when awe produces worship in our everyday lives, these glitches that we experience where it's just like, can't do this and that, I can't figure that out and that, my schedule's too full, my work's too much, oh my goodness, this all just feels so heavy, those glitches, they become helpful. [00:45:34] (36 seconds)  #GodOverAI

All the ways that you feel hurried, all the ways that you feel overwhelmed could be merciful reminders that we are finite and that we were never meant to carry infinite demands. You will not be infinite, not the way God is, even in heaven. The exhaustion that you're feeling, it isn't evidence that there's some deeper problem of you needing to become limitless. No. It's evidence that the system that you are living in and certainly the way you are living in it oftentimes has a problem. [00:46:23] (26 seconds)  #FiniteNotFaulty

Your technology, it might monitor you to see you on something, but god, he sees you because he never leaves you. He's not just trying to get you to look at something so that you'll buy it. He's just not leaving you because he loves you. He died to be beside you forever. He didn't need you. He doesn't need you now. He wants you. It's way different than wanting something from you. He wants something for you. [00:43:16] (33 seconds)  #SeenAndWanted

You and I live downstream of the most advanced technology that has ever been created in all of human history. We actually carry it around in our pockets. We sleep next to it. Less than 20% of us ever leave home without it. We are the most optimized, the most monitored, the most quantified, the most dashboarded people who have ever lived, and we are also the most anxious. We have a limited capacity, and we all know it. And we are facing an increasingly limitless demand, and we're breaking because of the combination. [00:26:55] (35 seconds)  #PocketedAnxiety

The limits that you and I keep bumping into in our lives in 2026, those limits are not design flaws. They are the design. You were made to worship, to live in awe, to experience the gap in capacity between you and the god of the universe. Part of that means to rest, to recover, to live in light of God's power when you feel powerless, when you feel overwhelmed. [00:46:49] (26 seconds)  #LimitsByDesign

It's easy to believe that. It's easy to believe that the only reason that you aren't limitless or aren't like God is because sin entered the world. We live in a broken world, but I just wanna call you back to something. When God made humanity before sin ever entered the picture, he gave you and me limited capacity. As a matter of fact, the first motivation for the first temptation was that people would be like god. We're not supposed to be. [00:40:10] (30 seconds)  #CreatedFinite

Did you catch that? Jesus is saying, I'm the ladder. It wasn't some abstraction. It wasn't some piece of technology that actually would be epitomized in a person. The thing that connected heaven and earth is god himself who doesn't need anything from you. He was doing just fine, but he loves you. And out of the overflow of his character and love, he became the latter, willing to pay the ultimate price to allow you and me to reenter the relationship that we were made to live in in awe to experience forever, guess what, as finite beings in awe of the infinite. [00:57:53] (44 seconds)  #JesusTheLadder

That tendency, whether it's the mountains or the ocean or maybe for you it's a loved one, maybe for you it's a hobby you used to love, maybe it's a calling you used to be driven by, That that that reality where all those things just over time become more and more normal, that term is habituation, and we are all predisposed to it. We get used to the glory. We normalize miracles. What used to seem like magic becomes mundane. If you and I don't mark our moments with god, the thing that yesterday we would have called a miracle and god did it today, what do we call? We just call it history. [00:56:03] (34 seconds)  #ResistHabituation

Don't let god's faithfulness fade into the scenery of your life. Mark the moment. Because remembered wonder here's what it does. It creates resilient faith. Because if you will remember and mark the moments with god when he showed up in the last crisis, you will be much more confident that he will show up in this one and the next one and the next one. Here's why I think this is so important, maybe more important than ever. Jacob, he saw a ladder in a dream. [00:56:44] (27 seconds)  #RememberedWonder

And when awe finally has somewhere to go, like, you connect the dots and you're like, oh, that's who's actually awe worthy, what we call that is worship. It's not just the songs we sing, although it is that. It's the way we live. It's every intention, every attitude, every heart motivation, every thought can be directed upward with awe in our minds. Humans are built with a unique capacity to worship God because part of what it means to be made in the image of God is that we were made by God's awesome power capable of seeing, recognizing, and reciprocating. [00:38:51] (35 seconds)  #WorshipInEveryday

The system might be trying to type login, and it can't finish. I think for a lot of us, that's how we feel every day. We start our day trying to log in, trying to log in to our work, trying to log in to our relationships, trying to log in maybe in our connection to god, trying to log in, being more aware of our bodies, and we crash after a couple letters, and we're tired, and we're overwhelmed, and we aren't sure what to do about it. We're anxious. [00:44:35] (21 seconds)  #CrashingAtLogin

As a matter of fact, when it doesn't feel like you deserve the rest, that's the time you should do it the most because god made you for it. In Jesus, there is an invitation to rest even when the work is waiting because the work will still be waiting. That's the whole concept of Sabbath. So for you, maybe that means you leave your phone somewhere else and you take a walk with a loved one. You go to bed an hour earlier or stay in bed an hour later. Just try it. [00:51:57] (26 seconds)  #DoTheSabbath

Well, actually, the word in the original language here is not about the idea that god was nervous or anxious when he was making you. It's that, actually, you were made in awe. This word points to the idea of reverence, not anxiety. David isn't saying that God assembled you and me and he was worried about it, but rather that the very idea of your and my creation in the image of God, which is unique amongst all of creation, It was all worthy that your and my creation was already all worthy because of who created us and the way that he uniquely created us. [00:36:29] (34 seconds)  #MadeInReverence

The optimization of secular humanism, is the framework in which all of us live if we're not doing anything about it, like, that's just the world that we live in. The optimization of secular humanism will sell you the idea that this smaller and weaker god that's available to you is just personal potential. Here's the way you keep working harder, keep getting better, getting it all done. But that god is not worth you. That god is not worthy of your worship. [00:37:11] (26 seconds)  #BeyondSecularOptimization

One of the ways that our technology reality is weighing on us is that it's constantly trying to get more from us. But the picture of God really is the divine father is that he is always trying to offer more for us, more love, more purpose, more peace that no matter what you're going through in this life, when you go through it with a relationship with God, you go through it with more of those things. [00:34:52] (23 seconds)  #GodGivesMore

This passage tells us that the god who made us has never left us and that he never will. And whether you're feeling like you're on the top of the world and you don't need god at all, like, don't you knew how important I am, Phil? Don't you know how many resources I have? Don't you know how much I could get done today? Yeah. It's still not as much as god. Or you feel yourself at the lowest of lows, wondering if you even can get out of bed tomorrow. God is still there with you and longs to have closer relationship with you. [00:42:14] (28 seconds)  #GodNeverLeft

And that was not them reading one another's ancient LinkedIn profiles. Right? A husband and wife knowing one another is a acknowledgment of intimacy, deep knowledge of one another that is exclusive and unique. David is saying, that's the way God. You know me. That's actually the way God knows you even if you're not a Christian. An algorithm might know a lot about you, but God actually knows you deeper than any context window could ever provide, deeper than any ad could ever target. [00:33:13] (31 seconds)  #KnownNotProfiled

When we were kids, boredom felt like an enemy to avoid, didn't it? It was the long car ride without a screen, the quiet afternoon without streaming, the moment when every adult said to someone my age or older, especially in the summertime, go outside and figure it out. We'll see you at dinner. But boredom, it did something for us that we didn't fully appreciate at the time. It gave our imagination room to wake up, room to breathe. [00:52:59] (34 seconds)  #ImaginationFromBoredom