Infinite Loop | Glitch | Menlo Church Live Stream

Because you are not the sum of your productivity or the average scrolls or time you spend on a screen per day. You are more than the optimized version of your latest performance review. You are more than what your kids think of you or what your parents think of you or what your teachers think of you. You are someone made in the image of God with infinite dignity, value, and worth. He loves you out of the overflow of his character. And he does not need anything from you. And nothing will change any of that. Anything that's telling you anything different than that isn't telling you the truth. [00:47:39] (34 seconds)  #MoreThanProductivity

Paul is not asking them, like, you know what? Consider the way you think sometimes. If you have some free time, maybe just, like, take a little bit to figure out if maybe God's got no. No. No. No. That's not what he's suggesting. He says that we should understand that some of our own thoughts, that what's literally living in our mind are insurgents of an enemy who is lying to us. And so he's saying all the same things you would think about in a the setting of war and what you would do with an enemy, do it with those thoughts. Arrest them in your mind. Take them captive. Lead them and make them obedient in your agency to who you are in Jesus. [00:45:08] (38 seconds)  #TakeThoughtsCaptive

The thought that says maybe God has forgotten you or that he's lost interest in you. Use your agency to arrest it. The scriptures tell you that actually the creator of the universe doesn't just love you. He doesn't just he didn't just make you, but actually, by God's sheer power, he's holding you together at the molecular level every moment of every day. It's better than he gives you your breath. He gives you the ability to breathe. Forgot about you. You'd fly apart at the molecular level. I haven't seen that yet. God hasn't forgotten about any of us. And when we remind ourselves of that, those other thoughts, they stand out for what they are. They're lies. We lead them in chains back to Jesus. We let him show us what is really true. [00:46:58] (41 seconds)  #GodHasNotForgotten

As someone who has experienced trauma and abuse in my family of origin as a child for decades and walked through circumstances in leadership and ministry, where people and organizations have at times felt stuck in the pain of the past, I wanna tell you something that you're probably not gonna stumble across on your feed this week. You can be genuinely wronged and hurting and still be called to something with your one true and precious life. They're not mutually exclusive. The presence of pain doesn't erase the promise of purpose. In my experience, actually, God has often used the limp from the wounds that God is still healing to help me help others because of it. [00:50:55] (47 seconds)  #PurposeBeyondPain

When we surrender our agency for our entertainment or the cheat code of cognitive debt through unintentional use of technology, then every feed you scroll through is rewiring your mind. Every chatbot conversation that you have is rewiring your mind. Every notification that you open up on your phone or device is rewiring your mind. And if you're thinking, Phil, aren't you kinda overstating this? Honestly, I think I'm understating it. It's what Paul means by living sacrifice. Surrender is not the loss of your agency. It's every moment of every day recognizing that surrender is the highest use of our agency, when we are the ones choosing where and to whom we surrender. [00:42:03] (46 seconds)  #ProtectYourAgency

Anger about what's been done to you can keep you on the platform longer than almost anything else. So every platform that you spend time on is feeding you a steady drop of reasons to feel like a victim and that you have been wronged. Left, right, center, the platform actually doesn't care about your politics. As a matter of fact, in the most defined way, the platform doesn't care about anything. It has been programmed to optimize your engagement. And the easiest way to do that is to remind you every few seconds, if possible, that you have been wronged. And if you're not careful, over time, we will trade our agency for outrage and grievance. It trades the question, what is God asking me to do in this moment? For a very different question. How could God ask me to do anything after what I've been through? [00:48:48] (52 seconds)  #DontTradeAgencyForOutrage

Now I want us to think a little bit about a caterpillar. If somebody described a caterpillar to you, you you wouldn't say, oh, yeah. Yeah. Caterpillar said, don't they at some point in their life, they get like a facelift. Right? Oh, you know what? No. No. No. They, they get their nails painted. That's what it is. They get their nails painted. No. You understand that a caterpillar transforming into a butterfly is a complete metamorphosis. It's a complete restructuring. Everything changes, and what it means to know Jesus and to be transformed is like that. [00:39:57] (34 seconds)  #CompleteMetamorphosis

In other words, you're not doing the transforming. You are increasingly using your agency, the God given ability to make choices, to submit, to surrender to the transformation that god is bringing. Now we don't like this because we want transformation on our terms. But the problem is the thing that you and I most need to be transformed on in our lives is usually a blind spot. We wouldn't even pick it if we could see it and we can't see it. And so the greatest form of agency is when we use our agency to say, God, this is yours. I'll follow you. [00:40:46] (36 seconds)  #UseAgencyToSurrender

And actually, what we're seeing happen, especially in younger communities that are using it more indiscriminately right now, is that you'll go over the period of months and realize, It's been a while since I've had an original thought because we're just using these predictive text algorithms over and over and over again to tell us the thing that gets us to where we're trying to go faster. Instead, we settle for the best guess of our preferred chatbot. But remember, you'll either surrender your agency or you'll use your agency to surrender. Is it your decision where it's going or is it somebody else's? [00:34:25] (36 seconds)  #GuardOriginalThoughts

He's asking us to choose to surrender as a part of a lifestyle of worship, of awe, like we talked about last week, rather than slowly surrendering to tools or aspects of convenience or false ideas of who we are. The word that we translate as worship, it comes from the Roman Empire word for imperial worship. Paul is saying, don't give your body, your loyalty to Caesar or pledge supreme allegiance to a earthly kingdom or to a political affiliation, but hold it back for the greater kingdom to which you have the deepest allegiance, to the kind of loyalty that shapes every other loyalty. [00:37:41] (39 seconds)  #ChooseYourWorship

And so if we wait, if we create this false choice, I'll do that when I'm all better, you are describing heaven. None of us are all better this side of eternity. And the places where we're still carrying the wound, those are the places where God often wants to show up and use his voice through our life in a way that are only possible because of it. So here's the question. If we take our agency back from the algorithm, what will we do with it? We aren't just trying to optimize ourselves even harder or climb to the next best version of our artificial future self. It has everything to do with right now, right here, in the moment that God has placed you. [00:51:42] (39 seconds)  #ServeDespiteTheWound

And the results were really sobering. The ChatGPT group showed the weakest neural engagement of all three. The search engine group was sort of in the middle, and the brain only group showed the strongest and most distributed brain activity of all three. The CHADGPT group also reported the lowest sense of ownership over what they had written, and many struggled to accurately recall or even quote their own argument shortly after making it. The researchers came up with a term for this. They called it cognitive debt. In other words, when we outsource the work of thinking too quickly, the bill eventually comes due. [00:32:13] (38 seconds)  #CognitiveDebtIsReal

AI can represent a cheat code that provides an immediate fix, but it cheats you and me out of long term growth. When we use it in an undisciplined way, we don't realize what we're giving up. It's a cheat code that makes it so that you don't have to think, so that you don't have to decide, so that you don't have to wrestle with that sentence or that difficult question or even that thing you might have prayed about before. It's a cheat code where the agent does all of that for you in an instant. [00:33:59] (26 seconds)  #AICheatCodeCostsGrowth

You were made for awe and you were made with agency. And as an image bearer of the creator of the universe, these are worth sitting in because everything that we touch in this digital world is sort of undermining it if we allow it in an indiscriminate way. Don't surrender to just anything or anyone. Surrender to the only one who's truly worthy of it. [00:57:45] (22 seconds)  #MadeForAweAndAgency

I also wanna make sure that you hear something from me really clearly. Some of you, you have been genuinely hurt. You've been wronged by people in power, leaders, teachers, pastors, parents. I'm so sorry. Those wounds are real, and I don't want it to ever feel like the way we're talking about this on weekends, this is like one prayer away and it's all good. This is not an instant problem to solve. But the algorithm has largely figured out that one of the most easily attachable emotions for you and me is grievance. Anger about what's been done to you can keep you on the platform longer than almost anything else. [00:48:14] (40 seconds)  #HonoringRealWounds

The digital version of us is constantly tweaking things and being tweaked with tools that are changing almost every day, but that's not the way our soul works. The soul isn't being tweaked, it's being transformed. It's being realigned. It's being remade every single day. Paul tells us that this happens by the renewing of our mind, which is a really cool metaphor, but it's actually not just a metaphor. As a matter of fact, this idea of what can happen with our minds, renewing is the best possible outcome, but it's not the only outcome of what can happen with our minds. [00:41:21] (34 seconds)  #MindRenewalNotTweak

Because you'll either surrender your agency in unintentional, indiscriminate use of technology, or you will use your agency to surrender to the only one who is worthy of it. Another section of the New Testament that the apostle Paul wrote was to the church in Corinth. Now he had a really special relationship with the church at Corinth. He's navigating a number of the same challenges and problems over the course of a couple letters that we have and one more that we think he probably wrote. And he takes these things that seem like they're pretty difficult to correct things in their life, in the life of the church. So we should pay extra special attention to second Corinthians because these are things that have lingered for them, things that have been really difficult in a church that Paul deeply loves. [00:42:49] (43 seconds)  #SurrenderOrBeSurrendered

The first one we talked about last week. I want you to continue our sixty minute digital fast, that once a week takes sixty minutes where you unplug, where you really do disconnect. I've heard some stories already that this has been harder than some people thought that it was gonna be. Other people are like, this was my favorite sixty minutes of the week. I would just say, try it out. If you didn't try it last week, no problem. Try it this week. Last week, we spent a lot of time thinking about awe. Maybe this week, just add agency to that. Where are some decisions you have outsourced that you know you need to take back? [00:54:22] (31 seconds)  #60MinuteDigitalFast

And finally, ask yourself this question, the such a time as this question. Look at your actual life, your job, your family, your neighborhood, your friendships, your classmates, your hobbies, where God has placed you in the landscape of all of eternity in this moment that he's asked you to live a more surrendered life. What is the redemptive thing that God might be asking you to do? What is the Esther thing that God might be asking you to do? Next week, we're gonna look at the third component of this framework, but I just encourage you, don't rush past these first two. [00:57:15] (30 seconds)  #AskWhatsGodAsking

Also, I just want to encourage you that you can take a single act, a single act of cognitive resistance, and it can make a difference in your life. Somewhere where you have outsourced the way you've thought in your agency and just bring it back. What do you need to do this week that requires your actual brain? Try this. This week at some point, write your emails for an entire day without a chatbot. You want a crazy one? Read an entire article and not just the summary or the headline. Pray without the support of an app. [00:54:53] (31 seconds)  #PracticeCognitiveResistance