Pick up your phone.
Open up your settings app.
Now check your screen time…
Where is it going?
Or more pointedly, what are you letting influence you?
Now it’s easy to take pot shots at the media. We’ve slowly become aware that the media serves the advertisers not the readership. Social media isn’t the people driven utopia we thought. Everyone from companies to foreign governments are using social media as a weapon to influence and control. To sow fear, misinformation and bias. Like it or not, these things have an incredible influence on our perception, values and emotions.
I’m increasingly asking the question why I allow this influence into my life. My goal is to grow more like Jesus. I want less digital media and more faith hope and love.
So, this year we as a church are pushing hard into reading the bible. We want our lives to be shaped and influenced by the word of a God. In an environment of fear, uncertainty, doubt and intolerance, we seek daily, intentionally, to take hold of the love, truth, and grace of a God through reading his word.
Why not join us? Yesterday we started “the Bible Project: New Testament in One Year” plan. You can subscribe at http://bible.com/r/3RR
Once you do – here are the rules:
- Try to read everyday.
- Make a time and a place where you can develop a habit: first thing in the morning, or around the dinner table.
- Seek to catch up.
- But if you fall behind, don’t sweat it, skip back to where we are and keep going.
- Remember. If it’s worth doing it’s worth doing badly. Don’t beat yourself up if you take a while to get into the swing of things. Just keep moving forward and seeking God’s promises.
“So I say to you:
Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.”
Luke 11:9
Your word is a lamp for my feet,
Psalm 119:105
a light on my path.
Blessed is the one
Psalm 1:1-3
who does not walk in step with the wicked
or stand in the way that sinners take
or sit in the company of mockers,
but whose delight is in the law of the LORD,
and who meditates on his law day and night.
That person is like a tree planted by streams of water,
which yields its fruit in season
and whose leaf does not wither—
whatever they do prospers.
