“Boredom and the Bible” - Digital Disconnect (DID210012)

[Music] welcome to digital disconnect it's such a joy to be with you i'm your host scott ritsima for episode number 12 of 13. boredom and the bible is the name of this session you know there is nothing more calculated to energize the mind and strengthen the intellect than the study of the word of god no other book is so potent to elevate the thoughts to give vigor to the faculties than the broad ennobling truths of the bible if god's word were studied as it should be men would have a breadth of mind men and women a conviction of character and a stability of purpose that is rarely seen in these times i hope we love the word of god that is really what it's all about for the word of god is that which testifies of jesus in whom we live and move and have our being and i was thinking about our relationship with god as it relates to the media inundation that we've experienced in the digital age and i've wondered we use media as a tool to enhance our biblical understanding to to enhance our our our knowledge of the truth but is media becoming a greater stumbling block in our relationship with jesus than it is an aid we want to make sure we get this right so let's begin with prayer and ask god to guide us as we think about these things father in heaven we ask for a real sense of your presence right now with us here with all those viewing this at home or listening in their cars that they would know they have the holy spirit with them speaking to their hearts drawing them to a deeper study and love of your word i pray for that now in jesus name amen my wife and i um moved to california at one point when we were first married now i grew up in michigan and michigan does not have big mountains out west is where you go to see the mountains and i was always yearning for and interested in the mountains well we got an opportunity after newly married in michigan to go live in california where we stayed for five years now as i mentioned we're living in michigan but when we moved out there i was very excited to see the mountains in fact the school that was hiring us they were really talking up the mountains oh southern california is the greatest place in the world because you got the ocean right over there the mountains right over there okay sign me up so we're driving in our u-haul truck we're heading into the inland valley we're about to see the san gabriel the san bernardino mountain ranges and it's june and we're driving looking for these mountains we've heard about and i'm like honey where are the mountains i'm looking on my paper map remember those things the rand mcnally and the green swath is here we should be able oh i do see a faint outline of the mountains peeking up above what i now realize is a bunch of smog and haze and grayish brown nastiness and oh the mountains were supposed to be so beautiful to behold that's what i was so excited about i wanted to see the beauty of the mountain ranges and all their clarity and i see a faint outline this is an apt analogy for many people's spiritual experience we know of the existence of god we acknowledge his presence but we don't see him in all of his beauty and goodness we don't experience the closeness well the most wonderful thing would happen in the climate in southern california two things actually one would be the rains that would come through when the rain front would come through it would actually clean out that air clear out that air in a magnificent way and another thing was the wind would blow through the santa ana winds would come through and clear out the air well in the bible both rain and wind represent something they both represent the holy spirit where jesus said to nicodemus the holy spirit will blow where he pleases and the the former and latter rain represents the falling of the holy spirit in the last days the latter rain so let's think about this for a second what happened to the view of those mountains when the rain and the wind came through oh boy the next day i'm running to the front window and i'm saying honey come look at this it was raining down here and it's snowing up there it doesn't do that in michigan you get piled on by the snow but we were so excited to see did they move the mountains 90 closer i mean they're that much more clear so what changed well something happened in the in in what's between us in the mountains you see did is god distant from us no the bible says he is not far from each one of us maybe there's something between us and god maybe our media maybe our busyness maybe our own selfishness whatever it is that is clouding and smogifying our vision and view of the most high god you know the average young person by the age of 21 will have consumed 10 000 hours of video games there are 5 million gamers in the united states playing over 40 hours per week in fact if you think about satan being the one who wanted to be in the position of the creator but god creates this world in six days rests on the seventh day and you've got all the onlooking universe witnessing yes god is the creator god and nobody else can do that can they you can imagine all of the one-third of the angels the evil angels looking at satan and he's wanting to be god and he can't do what the lord just did and he's wringing his hands and he can't create a world well fast forward to the digital age i want to quote for you from a book called game addiction where the secular writer here says something that to me sounds very spiritual as if satan has created a counterfeit reality he's become a counterfeit creator by making a digital immersion a world in a place in which people live listen to this our minds are set free to explore and exercise heightened abilities and senses in a space that still looks and feels real he's talking about in the video games games take our senses beyond the confines of reality beyond the confines of god's reality at the same time those sensations allow the inflation and extension of our consciousness unique ways of being so satan creates a virtual place where people go where they live where they immerse their mind their consciousness their interests their time their achievements their accomplishments their very identity becomes subsumed into that video game world in the extreme cases of the massively multi-player online role-playing games particularly which is what that book game addiction was about it sounded spiritual didn't it our minds are taken beyond the confines of reality it almost sounds what you imagine eve was thinking she imagining she would be ascending upon a higher state of being when she took of that fruit satan said you can be like god well whether it has that spiritual implication or not the bottom line is video games are a massive addiction in the diagnostic and statistic manual the psychiatry community they've published a diagnosable addiction of video game addiction world health organization the same thing and you might say how is that possible it's not a drug we know about drug addictions what is a how is a video game an addiction it's not alcohol well actually there are seven million more video game addicts in america than alcoholics if you ask the american medical association but there are two different types of addictions that have been recognized by the psychiatry practice for many years one is a chemical addiction and one is a process addiction gambling pornography and yes video gaming there's no chemical being inserted into your brain with a chemical addiction you take the drug or the alcohol or the tobacco or the caffeine or whatever and it causes a chemical reaction in your brain when you take the chemical in but you heard in the previous session the process of addiction of pornography it elicits the internal natural the drugs that mimic the drug from a street high when we misuse the brains god gave us and become pleasure seeking hedonists so this is what the video game industry has done it has made millions of process addicts addicts addicts to a process addiction and the reward circuitry in the brain gets all messed up when you do that dopamine receptors start shutting down the brain begins to crave higher quantities of input of pleasure in order to get the same hit just like drug addicts except video gaming is maybe a little more insidious in the fact that number one it's socially acceptable to play video games we induct our children into that from early ages you know 83 percent of kids have a gaming console in their home we don't see 83 percent of kids being given tobacco when they're eight years old another thing about video gaming is it's a novelty addiction a pornography is as well novelty meaning a new experience you're gonna level up and it's not the same old same old so it's endless you know uh new experiences and novelties that can captivate the user another thing about video gaming that is particularly dangerous is that there's no satiation point if somebody said somebody's addicted to binging on um unhealthy food or alcohol there comes a point where there's a maxed out point a satiation point doesn't happen with a video game you can just keep on playing i've talked to many video gamers who have testimonies of where they played all weekend and i mean all weekend with maybe two of the three nights they got a couple of hours of sleep and that's it and you just keep on going deeper and deeper in the most extreme cases and you can be addicted to a low dose of a drug you can be addicted to you know a low dose of video games as well but you know you think about the the media and the digital tools that we supposedly uh call them with video games and with other childhood media addictions there's a quotation a couple of quotations from professional scholars even just secular people are blowing the whistle on this i want you to see the quotation from dr marianne wolfe who says no self-respecting internal review board at any university would allow a researcher to do what our culture has already done with no adjudication or previous evidence what is our culture done introduce a complete quasi-addictive set of attention compelling devices without knowing the possible side effects and ramifications for the subjects our kids so in other words our kids are guinea pigs they're subjects in a vast societal experiment on addiction using media that's amazing another quotation i want you to see as well on the screen from the big disconnect by dr catherine steiner adair she says talk of addiction when we're talking about childhood media use this is not hyperbole and even adults too she says this is a clinical reality as adults we may choose to mess with our own mind and gamble with our own neurology but i have never met a caring parent who would knowingly risk his or her child's future in this way and yet we are handing these devices that we use the language of addiction to describe over to our children who are even more vulnerable to the impact of everyday use on their developing brains i mean we've discussed the developing brains of the child how the limbic system is becoming overactive with all of the hyper stimulating screen time entertainment television and cartoons and movies are already stimulating enough video games have a four-fold increase of over stimulus increasing the the the sleep deprivation and and stress cascade more than even entertainment television and then the prefrontal cortex of not just the child developing brain but we all have developing brains we've seen in this series that is hampered that is diminished the prefrontal function and the mental health crisis of a generation being upon us largely due to the media now the question of boredom and the bible in this session takes us to the issue of pleasure i want to show you a graphic that shows the pleasure centers of a normal brain they're nice and lit up and orange there and but look at the one next to it that's a drug user's brain not a lot happening in the pleasure centers in other words you see in that graphic what we know from experience people who are addicted to something find less happiness in the rest of life there's always a quest for the next hit of that drug or that plug-in drug or that mobile device and we we become pleasure-seeking instead of enjoying the joys that are already right before us studies have been done on media use and pleasure the kaiser family foundation published a report many years ago that the more media the young people are using the less happy they are and the more bored they are which that strikes people as a contradiction you might say well i go and watch the big game on prime time because i'm bored and i'm excited i'm going to be excited to watch it or i'm going to flip on the video game console because i'm bored and i want to cure my boredom or i'm going to listen to some worldly music just to to take me out of the doldrums of boredom we think the entertainment media cures boredom the research is telling us it increases boredom it is the cause of the boredom just like the drug users drugs is the cause of the low pleasure receptor function that we saw on the previous graphic a provocative piece was published in the atlantic magazine called has the smartphone destroyed a generation this this article jean twenge asks a provocative question and answers it from the research there have been surveys that have been done going back generations asking the same questions of teenagers how do you spend your time and doing this or doing this or doing this and ranking their happiness levels i want you to hear the quote and see the quote from the magazine from the article it says the results of this survey could not be clearer teens who spend more time than average on screen activities are more likely to be unhappy and those who spend more time than average on non-screen activities are more likely to be happy continuing the quote there's a there's not a single exception all screen activities are linked to less happiness and all non-screen activities are linked to more happiness so if you were going to give advice for a happy adolescence or frankly this applies to all of us based on this survey the advice would be straightforward put down the phone turn off the laptop and do something anything that does not involve a screen oh i love that advice from dr jean twenge at san diego state university who has studied the adolescent years in this generation z maybe more than any researcher out there she wrote the book igen and a lot of generation z the teenagers and young college students of today have taken that very advice put down the phone turn off the laptop and do something anything that does not involve a screen there was a survey that was done of these young people asking them how many of you have at some point in recent years given up a social media platform or taken a social media fast and a full one-third of them had chosen themselves to get off of a social media platform at least for a time i found that to be very interesting because they can act you can notice the own your own dynamics or do a little trial and test and you can see the annoyance of it or whatever the problems mental health might be occurring with that but um the the number two number one and number two reasons that the teens gave for why they gave up the social media at least for a fast or gave it up completely was number one it was a waste of my time yeah yeah we'll talk about that the average person the average user of the internet today using social media is on there for hours a day the second thing too much negativity i found that interesting so they're finding more happiness more positivity more joy away from the media and we've seen that in studies we saw pennsylvania university denmark study take them off to social media or take it down to a very limited amount and you reduce depression right so um i want to show you uh a video clip right now of a family that actually went on a media fast so these guys were challenged 30-day media fast and i want you to hear how that goes for them and hear from even the young people how they feel about life when they've been off the media take a listen three years ago i picked up a copy of neil postman's i'm using herself to death says he was a college professor and one exercises he'd have his students do was to go on a i believe that in the book was a one month media fast so i just decided to do the exact same thing one month let's um just shut down all media no more television no internet no blogging and anything that was digitally related our children were were not initially enthusiastic about the media fest they were terrified our first impressions were rather shocked and a little bit scared but as we got along closer to the day and we um we were praying about it we were thinking about it a lot we were we were excited i don't think one of our children would say no we wish we never had to do it because there is a benefit it just gives you perspective on how much time you're spending doing stuff i couldn't stop thinking about music just wanting to turn on the radio or or just look up something just for fun or just watch a quick movie um it was pretty shocking how addictive i was and i didn't like that at all and it kind of helps if any sort of addictions are building up it kind of helps to break those it is a fast and it takes time and it's not just one one day and then you're through with your pain no it keeps going but then once we get near the end it um it's easier you enjoy it you really can see the difference it's not just about taking away if all you do is take away from your kids something and leave them nothing that's they're no better spot they loved the extra time of of playing basketball with dad or playing cards with me or just working on extra things our lives are so busy and noisy and it's also it's like it brings a quietness and then quietness is when you you know hear god's voice it is so sweet the silence and not just the silence but the peace because if you're if you're doing everything and you have this noise going through your head you really cannot have peace and you don't know that you're missing it until you have it most important thing for me for my kids to have is that they would love god with all their heart and know him and live their life in relationship with him this has been so good in our lives and it hasn't been boring at all we're not just saying no media but we're saying use it in responsible and god glorifying ways amen can you agree with that fantastic documentary that that clip was pulled from called captivated by media talk 101 and i think everybody young and old can learn from that very same the experience that they had in that in that trial that they did that test that they did and as you think about the some of the comments particularly the young lady at one point and she says that she would go outside because you know you got to replace the media with something she would go outside with the bible and she would read the bible for sometimes hours and enjoy it i haven't heard a lot of people talk that way uh the the idea that the bible is sweeter than honey that's what it says in psalm 119 that it's sweeter than honey so what are we doing to our taste buds what are these our appetites as human beings are trained what are we doing with our media use and the stimulant effect of our media use to make it so that so many people universally don't care to read and maybe especially read the bible well let's back up and zoom out and think about pleasure in general how does pleasure work in god's universe in god's creation of us did he want us to have joy well it says he created us for his pleasure and will god is a god of pleasure he wants us to enjoy his beautiful creation life as he designed it he is the true author of joy happiness and pleasure satan is the enemy of souls and is about pleasure seeking and hedonistic violations of god's law under the false name of pleasure when really it just leads to greater depression what kind of things bring pleasure you know you ever had an opportunity to sponsor an orphan sponsor a child in a school overseas in a needy place where they don't have the child doesn't have parents and you're giving them an education you got the little picture hanging on your fridge and maybe you start collecting those pleasure follows when you do that doesn't it altruistic deeds deeds of mercy of many kinds how about when you study the bible with somebody and you share the truth with them and they've never seen the picture of christ and the bible truth that you are revealing that the spirit of god is revealing to them as you take them through the word of god when you do that pleasure follows doesn't it how about when you view a beautiful sunset or a rainbow or a double rainbow or name your favorite captivating scene of nature you view that you ponder and give gratitude to the god of creation at that moment and know his presence with you and pleasure follows how about you enjoy some family time you take an afternoon off and you get a meal and you go outside and enjoy beside a lake there's actually a quotation an admonition i read one time and it says parents should take their children out on a lovely afternoon under a spreading tree and have a meal together in a beautiful place and some people say well when you read counsel like that you know when you read instruction that that god has inspired into your life well it's some sort of legalistic thing i said to my children one day we're going to take very seriously these admonitions and i'm going to follow this strictly and most kids go oh no what are they going to take away we're going to go and dad's not working this afternoon we're going to the lake pleasure follows how about when you study the word of god for yourself and you pray like the psalmist prays open now mine eyes that i might behold wondrous things out of thy law pleasure follows invest in a marital relationship pleasure follows attend a joyful wedding celebration accomplish a difficult task enjoy a nutritious meal that you didn't cook no or that you did cook and put some hard work into pleasure follows now why do i keep saying that refrain pleasure follows because it's the cart and the horse our culture puts the cart before the horse i'm gonna seek pleasure and that's the end that's out front that's the goal that's where my sights are set on seeking pleasure but that's not god's design you seek god pleasure follows like the cart follows the horse it's as simple as that and god wants us to maximize our joy you see satan has this reputation as being the one who is going to deliver pleasure and god is the killjoy that is so false that is absolutely incorrect god wants to maximize our joy in the present and eternal experience that he has to offer us satan isn't any good at it anyway the analogy is a caffeine addict i was a mountain dew addict hi i'm scott and i was a mountain dew addict um i used to wake up first thing in the morning i would drink the mountain dew for breakfast i would have the through the buzz to be able to take notes first period in in class i'm talking 12th grade here i'm 18 years old and i'm not eating breakfast and then i crack another pop as we call it in michigan maybe refer to it as soda or coke although i have to take issue with you it's not coke it's mountain dew anyway i was a mountain dew addict and the biggest problem wasn't just the crash that followed and that i didn't actually have much energy i'll tell you later on in life when i made some reforms and diets and health i found oh wow so living without the caffeine sugar high actually i have more energy if you would if you would have told me that back then i'd be like what are you talking about i'm getting the energy from the rush from the mountain dew no you can live with a higher energy level without that stuff really well try it out i did try it out and found wow it works but that wasn't just the only problem the high followed by the crash that's the pleasure seeking drug addict experience media addict experience analogized by the mountain dew addiction that i've personally experienced but you know when i was drinking the mountain dew or take your pick your you know luxurious dessert indulgence addiction you know whatever it is that ruins your taste buds i did not want to eat real food after drinking mountain dew you know give me a pizza you know give me uh you know lucky charms give me something exciting to the to the taste buds the little caesars pizza or the domino's or the pizza hut or whatever um today i still love pizza by the way so people who know me might be like pizza's his favorite food i try to eat the healthier pizza but anyway um i didn't want to eat broccoli i didn't want to eat vegetables the mountain dew spoiled the appetite for the real thing you see the analogy boredom and the bible the bible is sweet as honey sweeter than honey to our tastes but many people don't taste the sweetness do they what's the problem well it says in hebrews i'm sorry in proverbs chapter 27 that a sated man a satisfied man a satiated man the person who's been full loathes the honey can we actually come to a point where we loathe the bible if the bible represented by honey oh yes many people are bored by it because we're sated with something else the mountain dew addiction made me have a distaste for the broccoli you've eaten your dessert first you don't want the entree i want to show you a brain scan though that brings hope one month off of the addiction and the pleasure receptors start coming back 14 months off and several months in between you're really starting to get more pleasure there aren't you so the joy and happiness of life really starts to return or maybe starts to come to the fur for the first time and you don't know even know the difference jesus says i will satisfy the desire of every living thing he opens his hand and satisfies our every need [Music]

Channel: Three Angels Broadcasting Network (3ABN)

Views: 8,291

Keywords: 3ABN, Three Angels Broadcasting Network, yt:quality=high, Digital Disconnect, Media, Effect of Media, Social Media, Gaming, Digital Device, Spirituality and Media

Id: pS6-sZWAP0c

Length: 28min 15sec (1695 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 12 2021