Tear Down the Idols • Pleasure • Ps Joel Milgate • Church Online: 03 May

``There's a small ritual at the threshold, a thumbprint, a glance, a pattern traced on glass. The face of the faithful relaxes now that you've entered in. The shoulders drop. The eyes glaze. Inside, there's no walls. There's no ceiling. There's no exit signs. The space is infinite. A feed that never ends. A scroll without a bottom. The outside world is shut out. There's no clock here. Five minutes becomes forty. I was just gonna check one thing. [00:18:13] (29 seconds)  #EndlessScroll

You never really leave. You carry something with you all of the time, a vague restlessness, a quiet dissatisfaction with your own body, a subtle comparison running in the background of your marriage, a wandering eye that's been trained to wander 10,000 swipes deep, an appetite for novelty you didn't have a year ago, and eventually, because the liturgy works, you start looking for the more concentrated dose. So you download Tinder because, of course, you do. You've been swiping on people for years already, or you open a tab in private mode because you've been trained to expect bodies on demand. [00:20:37] (31 seconds)  #ConditionedToSwipe

The feed didn't make you do it. It just formed you to want it. It distorted what God put in you. And here's the frightening thing, church. This temple sleeps on your bedside table. You worship there in the queue at the supermarket, in the bathroom at work, and in the bed behind your spouse while they're asleep. You give it the first waking moments of your and your last conscious thoughts. You give it more attention in a week than you give God in a year. [00:21:09] (25 seconds)  #PocketTemple

You're being formed in a thousand small moments you didn't even know were moments. By the time you sit down in church on a Sunday morning, welcome. You've already been to a 100 services this week. You just didn't know you were attending. And the gospel it preaches, the old gospel, the ache inside of you is solved by satisfying it. That pleasure is proof you're alive. That restless heart finds its rest not in God, but in the next image, the next body, the next swipe, the next conquest, the next orgasm, and that good life is simply more of what feels good, on demand forever. [00:21:46] (34 seconds)  #FormedByFeeds