Desire Paths - Devices and Social Media

All right, well good morning and welcome to the house.

If we haven't met, my name is Greg.

I'm one of the pastors here.

I would love to meet ya, buy you a coffee or a soda

or something like that, whatever you like,

and maybe talk about your life.

I'd love to meet ya, get to know ya, find out your story,

and if part of that is if you wanna talk about Jesus,

I like to talk about Jesus as well.

I am a Cubs fan by genetics.

It is mostly because my father was.

If you wanna talk about the Cubs or baseball,

I can do that, I don't actually know that much,

but I do know a lot about Jesus,

and so if you wanna do that, I am in.

Today is the first Sunday in the church calendar

of what is called Lent.

Lent goes back 1,700 years.

That's 1,700 years.

If Advent is about the anticipation of the birth of Jesus,

then Lent is about sharing the path

that Jesus took to the cross and then to resurrection.

Now when the church first started practicing Lent,

it was 40 days of fasting that led up to Easter,

but around the year 600, that 40 days became 46.

Pope Gregory the Great, my nickname in high school,

believed that Sundays should be feast days.

Even though you were fasting on the way to Easter,

that Sunday should still be feast days

because Sunday is the day that we celebrate

the resurrection of Jesus.

Every Sunday is a repeating, a reminder

that Jesus rose on the third day.

He said this is a day that we should fast.

We should not fast, but we should feast on these days.

Since then it has come to be called mini-Easters.

Each Sunday during Lent is to be considered a mini-Easter.

It reminds me of what Jesus said

when the Pharisees asked him,

why aren't your disciples fasting?

This is what he said, do wedding guests mourn

while celebrating with the groom?

Of course not.

And so on Sundays, we still feast,

even though during the week we fast.

Pope Gregory expanded the 40 days backwards

to include Ash Wednesday, which was this last Wednesday,

giving Lent 40 days of fasting

and six days of feasting.

Now if you group Catholic or in a mainline denomination

like Presbyterian, Lutheran, Methodist,

then you've probably heard a lot of that before,

but for others, maybe this is the first time

you're ever hearing this.

You have no idea what the concept of fasting is.

And so let's talk about what that is.

Fasting is the intentional choice

to abstain from some thing.

While giving God the attention,

you would have given that thing.

In the Bible, fasting is almost always connected with food,

but it could be just about anything

because there are so many things competing for our attention

when we could be giving God that space.

Christine Painter in her book about fasting wrote,

we live in a culture that depends on distracting us

from our true hungers.

We live in a culture that depends, listen to that,

our culture depends on distracting us from our true hungers.

What we really want and need

is being wallpapered over and over

with ways of hiding what our hearts are truly longing for.

If you've ever done a renovation

and if you live in an old house,

if you've ever done a renovation of that,

you've ever thought like, you know what,

instead of painting one more time,

I think I'm gonna scrape down

and see if I can't get to the original in 17 coats in.

You're like, oh, I shouldn't have done this.

You think there's only one layer of wallpaper?

No, there's four.

When we did our floors in our kitchen a few years ago,

we found there is original wood underneath,

but then there's tar with something

that got put on top of that,

and then there was plywood with another laminate

on top of that.

So while someday we wanna go back

to the original flooring in our kitchen,

we know the amount of work that it's gonna take

to get all that tar off that original wood.

During Lent, we fast not just to deprive ourselves

of something, but to prepare ourselves

to receive from God what we actually need.

The point isn't just not doing something.

Yeah, the point isn't just not doing something.

The point is what you might find on the other side

if you choose not to do that thing,

even if it's just more time focused on God.

Now in the Bible, there are three people

who are recorded as having 40-day fasts.

Okay, they are Elijah, Moses, and Jesus.

Now for Moses, the other side of his fast

is where he found the 10 commandments.

For Elijah, what he found on the other side

of his 40-day fast was an experience

and meeting with the very presence of God on a mountain.

For Jesus, on the other side of his fast,

on the other side of his temptation, he began his ministry.

He called his disciples, he healed the sick.

He proclaimed the arrival, the kingdom of heaven.

What might be under the layers of habits

that we're covering our lives with

that might only be uncovered if we stop

for long enough to notice?

Might be on the other side of that fast for us.

So that is where the name of this sermon series comes in.

You want to put that up for me, Liam?

Desire paths.

Desire paths.

A desire path is something that we are all familiar with,

but we never knew the name of it.

Okay, we've all seen one of these, right?

Put up the next photo.

We've all seen one of these, we've been in a park,

and we saw that, right?

You probably made one.

The landscaper hates you.

That is called a desire path.

A desire path is a shortcut.

The path of least resistance.

I remember being a kid and going places with all my friends,

and there was always a shortcut.

Check out this. This is a map of where I grew up, okay?

So that circle in the top, that red circle in the top,

that's where I grew up, where my parents currently live,

and I lived about two and a half blocks from Wharton Field House.

There was Browning Park right next to it.

There was a big field there.

There was a parking lot.

We got lots and lots of trouble there.

And any guesses on how we got to Wharton Field House from my house?

Yeah, show the next one, Liam.

Yeah, like that.

Yeah.

So I would go out my backyard, through the neighbor's yard,

down onto the street, down to my friend's house.

We would jump over the fence of his backyard,

go through the yard of the other person's house,

and then the only reason we wouldn't cut all the way through those other two

is because all of those houses were up on hills.

And so we would have had to like go up and then down and then up and down,

and it was just less energy to actually go down to the corner

and find our way around.

Some colleges are famous for paving all of the desire paths

that pop up around their campus.

Instead of fighting, they just go along with it.

But there's a problem with paving desire paths,

because someone will always desire something else.

There's an artist named Chas Hutton that illustrates this problem really well.

Let's put that one up, Liam.

So on the top left of this image, everything's good.

That sidewalk is a great shortcut.

That was probably a desire path to start with,

that they turned into a sidewalk thinking that they were helping.

But what if you're at the corner, at the top right?

You just walked across the street from the other side.

The fastest way is to actually cut through.

A lot of the city wants to discourage that, so what do they do?

They put a bench there.

We're going to block your way.

Use the sidewalk we gave you.

But the path just moves.

It dips down and around it.

Why would we? We don't want to sit.

We're just trying to get somewhere.

So then the city puts in a trash can, again, trying to block the desire path.

So let's put up the next one.

So then, boom! Ah, bush!

We're going to put up a whole hedge.

That'll stop them.

No, because kids like me would have been like, I can jump through that.

That's just in my way.

Oh, they gave us a new obstacle. How awesome.

And then finally, finally, you see in the bottom left,

the city has been beaten into submission, and they paved the desire path.

They give the people what they want.

But then look at those last two squares.

The people say, ah, turns out this is where we want to walk.

Because that's how desire paths work.

Sometimes we hope and we pray, and God paves the path that we've been hoping and praying for.

He gives us exactly what we have been asking for,

and then we find ourselves cutting new desire paths,

hoping God will change the landscape again.

Isaiah reminds us that all we, like sheep, have gone astray.

Each of us turned to our own way.

The rest of that verse reminds us of what Lent is moving towards.

It says, and the Lord laid on him the iniquities of us all.

There's something about fasting that's saying for this time,

I will not make my own way.

Because his word is a lamp to my feet, a light into my path.

I will intentionally avoid the paths that I have made for myself.

And I will only travel on the paths that God has paved.

So these next six Sundays, we'll discuss the opportunities that we have to fast during Lent,

whether it's from food, sex, smoking, spending, or the way that we speak.

With the time that we have left today, the desire path that we're starting with this week is this.

Do me a favor. Everyone get out your phone.

Some of you are like, easy, I already have it out.

I'll give you a second. Everyone get out your phone.

Alright, everyone got it. Now hold it up.

Everyone hold it up if you're able, hold it up.

Now everyone look around. Could you have imagined 15, 20, 30 years ago,

everyone in a room having one of these?

No, no, no, no, there's no way. There's no way.

Now, now take that phone and turn it off.

And I don't mean put it on silent. I don't mean put it on vibrate.

I don't even mean put it on airplane mode.

I mean turn it off.

I'll give you a second.

If you need help from your children, they'll help.

Robin's over here like, I don't think I've ever turned this off.

Now let me ask you a question. Because I heard a little gasp over here.

How did that feel? Great. It felt great for some of us.

For some of us were like, don't you tell me what to do with my phone.

Someone was like, oh no, that's some church hurt right there,

pastor tell me what to do with my phone.

I was looking for a reason to leave this church. That's it right there.

All right, but let's be empathetic now. Does anyone need a hug?

Anyone? Good?

I found a story about how a teacher decided to keep track of all the notifications

that her class got during one period.

One class, one period, 801 notifications.

In a book called The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt, he says,

when you add it all up, the average number of notifications on young people's phones

just from the top social and communication apps amount to 192 alerts per day.

And when you add the dozens of other apps for which they have not turned off

push notifications, the number of interruptions grows higher.

He says every notification is an off-ramp for what their brains were engaging in.

Think of all the energy that has to be used just to re-engage

with the thing that you were already doing.

Notifications are a distraction, but it turns out even just this is a distraction.

Research shows that if this is even just visible on the table

when you're in a conversation with someone, it doesn't even have to be your phone.

If a phone is visible on the table or anywhere during a conversation with someone,

research shows that the quality and intimacy of that social interaction goes down.

So if you turned off your phone, the next step is put it away.

Put it out of view.

Put it in your purse. Put it in the flap of your hoodie whenever you got to do.

And again, think about how you're feeling,

how many of us are thinking about how many minutes there are left until we get to turn it back on.

Most of the people in this room are adults.

If as an adult you felt the twinge of fear or anxiety or worry,

the countdown, the thought about turning it off and when it would come back on,

for half of a sermon, think about how our children are feeling,

about how their brains, how their emotions, about how their bodies are dealing with the same thing.

For those of us that are tempted, maybe we didn't actually turn it off.

J.C. mentioned this verse in his sermon last week.

No temptation has overtaken you except what is common to mankind.

And God is faithful.

He will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear,

but when you are tempted, God will always provide a way out so that you can endure it.

Sometimes the way out that window is the power button.

During Lent, we're looking at the paths we have made for ourselves.

If there is anything we have made for ourselves, it is phones and devices.

And we're asking, is fasting from that path God's way to something better?

Christine Painter again, she says, fasting is ultimately a paradox of emptying out to be filled,

paring back to receive a different kind of feast, one that nourishes our true hungers.

She says, our fast is an act of discernment of the habits that keep us from this rich feast available to us.

These phones, these phones of ours, but really also devices in general,

they are not the richest feast available, but we consume so much of them.

If we're being honest, we know that social media in particular is not just a junk food, it is a poison,

especially to our youth.

The last show that pre-teens spend around 40 hours a week on their phones and devices.

If you have a full-time job, their full-time job apparently is their device.

For teens, 13 to 18, it goes up a little bit to 50 hours a week, but let's be honest,

it is not that much better for those of us that are adults.

The most time that we spend on devices is in large part because of how social media apps have used our brains against us.

Look at this graphic. This is called the Hooked Model.

This is what social media apps have used to addict us to the dopamine dependency

that our phones, games, social media apps in particular, create.

It manipulates the way that our brains use dopamine to get us to be addicted.

The first step is just the trigger. This is your notification.

It's the ding. It gives you just enough information. A ding.

Your brain sends you a little hit of dopamine. Oh, oh, there's something.

It gives you just enough to get you to step two, which is the action.

Because if you got a notification, what do you have to do? You have to tap on it.

Because why? You want to know what it says.

The tap, the action gets you to the third step, which is the variable reward.

It's called variable rewards because they want to disappoint you most of the time by design.

I'm not making this up. I am not making this up.

They have found in research with lab rats that when they learn that if they push a button that they get a treat,

that they've learned that the dopamine in their brains goes crazy if they don't give you a treat at least nine out of ten times.

Because they just keep pushing the button and their brains get overloaded with dopamine

until they become addicted to what they're doing and then they get another reward.

And it's rewarded and then it's not.

And it is the disappointment that causes you to seek and hope for the bigger hit.

It turns into this dopamine dependency that our brain has that eventually trains us to be so invested

that we move to step four, which is investment.

This is where the trigger becomes internal.

Jonathan Haight wrote,

Once your own feelings are enough to trigger a behavior that gets variable rewarded, the user is hooked.

At this point, the app does not have to send us a notification anymore.

I've been there. I've been there.

I go to the bathroom, close the door, get going.

What's the first thing I do? It's not because I had a notification.

It's because my brain goes, oh, I wonder what's happening there.

Oh, I wonder if that happened. Oh, I wonder if this. Let me see what's going on.

I wonder if someone said such and such. Oh, I wonder if someone liked. I wonder if this. I wonder if that.

Have you ever noticed that in your notifications, especially on something like a social media app,

that most of the notifications, you're like, I don't care.

That's the variable reward.

Training you to keep looking and looking and looking for the reward you're looking for

so that you will become so invested that your own brain becomes the trigger.

They're all the same. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Reddit, Pinterest, TikTok.

I remember when Pinterest was just a place he went to pin some good ideas.

But they have all started doing this.

They are all designed to addict us to dopamine.

In 1854, Henry David Thoreau wrote this.

The cost of a thing is the amount of life which is required to be exchanged for it.

The real cost of a thing is the amount of life that is required to be exchanged for that thing.

We're adding up what social media is costing us.

It's costing our kids.

How much life are we exchanging?

What's the total?

Because we know that social media increases anxiety.

We know that it decreases the quality of sleep.

We know that it increases depression.

We know that it decreases self-esteem, especially in girls of a certain age.

We know that it increases body image issues.

We know that it decreases focus.

We know that it increases social isolation and cyberbullying

and decreases in-person and social interactions.

So what do we do?

We fast.

I think that when we find that we are worried that we can't live without something,

we have to intentionally choose to live without it.

To find if there is actually a healthy way to live with it.

We fast during Lent.

We choose a desire path that we will stop walking.

To see what God might have for us instead.

Christine Painter, again in her book about fasting,

reminds us that fasting is an invitation into authentic freedom.

Freedom from the things that weigh us down or keep us constricted.

Fasting helps us remember our true hungers.

So listen, at the risk of decreasing the intimacy of this moment,

this phone has a flashlight on it.

I use the flashlight on this phone almost every day.

This phone can be a really great tool sometimes,

but the apps on this phone are not the lamp to my feet.

They are not the light to my path.

As a church, we don't post online very much.

We post about the Tuesday night activity.

We usually post Friday or Saturday about what's coming up on Sunday.

But during Lent, we as a church, we are going too fast from posting throughout the week.

And we're only going to post on Sunday the live stream on a feast day.

Some of you are wondering, what about you, Greg?

I deleted all the social media platforms from my phones.

From my iPad, I signed out online.

I would like to say that I have been free and clear since Tuesday night.

I intend on fasting from these things for the entirety of Easter,

even of Lent, even on feast days for myself,

because I don't know that I want to spend my time catching up on a Sunday.

Because it won't just be 20 minutes.

It'll be like, oh, I missed everything from this last week.

That scroll is endless.

While I am not a teenager, even though I act like it sometimes,

my brain is not affected like a teenager.

It does not mean that my brain is immune from the tricks that they have, right?

That's true of all of us.

I hope that some of you will join me.

I hope that some of you will join the church.

And take this seriously.

Think about what life you are paying to give so much time

to something that is designed to addict you.

And we can trust that God will give us the desires of our heart when we hope in him.

And we can trust God with the desire paths that we have had,

that he knows what to do with them,

whether they are those that are meant to be paved,

or if they are those that we need to let the grass grow back

and enjoy a beautiful field.

So spend this next week thinking about whether to fast from this.

And let's see what God has for us on the other side.

Amen?

Let's pray.

God, there's a reason that your scriptures say that blessed is he who meditates on my word

day and at night.

I pray for every one of us right now that is itching to turn our phone back on,

that your spirit would help us.

Not because we are flawed.

Not because it's sinful.

But because this phone, this device is not something that is meant to make us feel this way.

I pray that this length that we learn whatever we have in our hands,

whatever we have in our lives, whatever desire paths that we have been walking,

they are not better than the path that you have for us.

By your spirit, would you help us turn our hearts and open our eyes to the light

that you have for our path.

In the name of Jesus we pray, Amen.