What Does It Mean To Be Human

Welcome to the Awakening Church Podcast.

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Happy Sunday.

How are we doing?

High schools are doing great.

Welcome, welcome.

If you don't know each other, my name is Ryan.

We're thrilled to have you join us today.

And today we're kicking off a brand new series called Still Wondering.

I have my good friend Paul Taylor here.

Thank you so much for being uh with us.

I want to just set up where we're going in the series and why Paul's been here and why he's here.

I'm so grateful that he said yes to our invitation.

So we are doing a series over the next five, six weeks called Still Wondering.

That's what some of Life's biggest questions.

You took part in helping shape this series and responding what are the pressing questions of the day.

Next week we're going to talk about what is truth and like how do you know what's real and is the Bible reliable?

Talk about how can Jesus be the only way?

What about a good God and suffering?

All these major big questions around purpose and identity.

Today we have uh Paul Taylor who's gonna share on what does it mean to be human in the age of AI?

This has been the most pressing question of our time.

A little background on Paul and actually we got to know each other um more so over COVID because we got to co-lead a prayer movement together for Bay Area churches online called uh If my people, which is really special.

But Paul, he's a I don't know, are you a native here?

Uh no, but I moved here 30 years ago.

Yeah, a long time ago.

Stanford Stanford.

Are you originally from Texas?

I didn't know that before.

Houston.

There we go.

We're gonna know each other up too.

Talk amongst yourselves.

Um Stanford Grad started off in tech, uh Oracle, right, and then transitioned into ministry, teaching pastor.

Uh you're working on your doctorate right now as well.

Uh founded the Faith Tech Work.

Yep.

You're uh the president of that, you're currently on staff at Transforming the Bay with Christ.

Got it, got it early at this time, which we partner with and are part of as well.

Yeah.

Now, the reason I paused here is we took our staff to a um a conference on AI and faith, and he gave a presentation that was awesome.

And I was like, gosh, in our series, this is one of the main questions we've got.

It was the best ever ever, ever, ever, ever mediocre.

Um he gave, and you can get more time, don't worry about it.

I'm taking up all your time.

Um but he gave such a great one.

I'm like, our church needs to hear this, would you come?

And he graciously said, yes.

Thank you for that.

It's so fun to be here.

And so, would you give a warm awakening welcome?

Thanks, guys.

Okay.

Awesome.

Well, it is so good to be with the Awakening.

Um, I've heard of this church from a long time from Ryan, and it's so good to be here and experience this community.

It's been really rich.

I I love baptisms, and uh it's really good to hear the story.

This service and last service are really fun.

Uh as Ryan said, I was a pastor for 19 years in Palo Alto at Peninsula Bible Church.

Now I work with Transforming the Bay with Christ, which is a unity movement in the Bay Area.

We cultivate networks of pastors.

So Ryan helps co-lead one in the San Jose area.

We have about 40 networks of pastors all across the Bay Area, which is really fun to be a part of.

I'm married.

My wife Rachel is a pastor at Peninsula Covenant Church in Redwood City.

And we have five kids, and they are, I say they are where they belong, which is out of my house.

So it's uh wonderful.

We love our kids, they're amazing people.

And I've got one who's graduated college for in college.

Uh I know.

Take a moment to let that sink in.

And uh yeah, they're wonderful people.

It's really big, really fun seeing them grow into kind of the uh you know adults, like the government calls them adults, but the government hasn't met them.

So um but we love our family, we love this kind of new season of life with being empty nest and uh doing all the things we get to do.

So about 10 years ago, my kids were not adults at all yet, and we had this rhythm as a family of family movie night.

Maybe some of you do this Friday night, we make pizza, watch movies, and we had just received, this was about 2015, our beta version of the Amazon Alexa.

How many of you have like smart little things in your home?

Yeah, right?

So I had wired up uh smart light switches in my house, and so when we would sit down for family movie night, I would do something that felt magical.

We'd all get our pizza, we'd sit on the couch, and I would say, Alexa, turn on family dark and the lights would go out.

We'd watch the movie, you know, eat our pizza, all that stuff.

And then in the movie, then I would say one more thing, Alexa, turn on family bright and the lights would come on.

Now, when I started doing that, I realized something that scared me a little bit.

I realized that what I had just done is the same thing as the first thing the Bible records God having done.

That through the power of my voice, I had called forth light and darkness.

And furthermore, I realized that I really liked it.

That I kind of reveled in the power of being able to say, literally, let there be light, Alexa.

And there was.

What's really going on?

And that led to kind of a season for me of really thinking and praying and studying through these questions.

Fast forward to today, we're three and a half years after the release of ChatGPT, and already artificial intelligence has changed the world.

People are using it, they're scared of it, they're excited about it, there's all these things going on.

But one of the really amazing things is that it has forced the kinds of questions I started asking 10 years ago to the surface.

And so we live in the middle of this cultural moment that is very unique because I believe everyone, everywhere, all the time, is asking the same question.

What does it mean to be human?

We have this new kind of technology that actually looks like it's human, and so it's causing us to ask this question.

And my hope is that as a church, as the large community of people who follow Jesus, we would recognize this for the opportunity that it is.

Because the church is at her best when she's able to engage with culture and to answer the questions that people are asking.

See, sometimes we do the opposite thing.

We tell them they should be asking questions that they don't care about, and then we give them answers to those questions.

But we have the opportunity now to say, you're already asking this question.

And here's a news flash.

We have the answer.

And the answer is the simplest Sunday school answer that you all know.

What does it mean to be human?

It's Jesus.

Literally the person that we celebrated last week who died and rose so that we could live.

That's the answer to the question that everybody's asking.

This is the opportunity for the church to shine.

And we've done this before.

You know, when culture changes, the church often steps into that culture and engages with the issues.

So when the printing press was invented, that threw all sorts of chaos into the church.

When uh the theory of evolution was first presented, when the civil rights movement happened, all of those things create the opportunity for Christians to think back to what it means to be human and to engage with culture in a way that points people ultimately to Jesus.

So that's my hope is that as we think about this this morning, we'd be able to understand how God's created us and then be better equipped to represent that to the world.

Okay, you probably already know that AI is a big deal.

You're probably slightly concerned about it yourselves.

And I have this idea that a lot of people use artificial intelligence, they use ChatGPT or Claude or Grok or Gemini or whatever, and they use it, but but but they're also a little bit scared of it as we're using it.

And so what I'd like to do is really understand what it is that is going on and how we can be better equipped to handle it.

One of the scary things about AI is that it seems to be human, it seems to be more sympathetic, more compassionate, more productive than we are.

And so it forces us to ask this question of what is it about being human that is distinct?

How are we different?

How are we different from the things we're creating?

Now I have a confession to make.

Because isn't driving like an essential part of our humanity?

But the theologian in me says, no, driving is not core to what it means to be human.

150 years ago they rode horses, and I have no idea how to ride a horse.

Doesn't mean I'm less of a human, I hope.

A hundred years ago there were buggies, who knows what they'll be doing in 50 years.

And so I can acknowledge that there's something I'm losing, but it doesn't have to do with my humanity.

So then what is our humanity?

What does it mean to be human?

If it's not driving, if it's not writing code, if it's not writing good emails, what is humanity?

And what I want to suggest to you is a framework that I think helps us understand how God created us and ultimately helps us to understand God a little better as well, and to represent him to the world in a richer way.

It turns out that the scriptures talk a lot about what it means to be human.

From the first pages of Genesis, we get this idea of the Imago Day.

In the Old Testament, we get the best and the worst stories of humanity.

In the Psalms, we have these rich, heartfelt cries from people's experience.

Then we see the perfect human in Jesus Christ, we get to the book of Revelation, and we get to see redeemed humanity in all of its glory.

And I want to suggest this framework that helps to capture all of that.

I think being human involves four key relationships.

I'm not the first to suggest this.

Lots of theologians see it this way.

Basically, it's a relationship with God, relationship with the rest of creation, relationship with other people, and relationship with ourselves.

But I want to articulate those relationships in a way that resonates outside of a Christian context.

Because if we're talking about what it means to be human, then if you're talking to another human and explain it to them, they should say, yeah, duh.

That makes sense.

Not just Christians, but anyone.

So I want to abstract those relationships into four words, and it just so happens that those four words begin with either the letter A or the letter I.

So I call it the four AI framework.

I actually had been teaching this for a while before one of my friends was like, hey, all your words start with A or I.

You should call it 4AI.

And I was like, that's a great, great idea.

So that's what we call it.

And each of these postures, then, describes one part of what it means to be human.

So I want to kind of walk you through that framework and then we're gonna apply just a little piece of it.

The first one is relationship with God.

Uh the book of Genesis opens with this story.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

The story of the Bible begins with God, not with us.

We are inserted into the story.

And yet we are created in a unique relationship.

Nobody else is said to be created in the image of God.

God interacts with us in a different way than he interacts with other parts of creation.

We can categorize this as a posture of awe.

Say that with me.

Awe.

It's kind of a weird word to say if you say it too much.

Say it again.

Awe.

And I want to invite you to just experience it.

This might be a little weird, but just kind of look up and think about that experience of wonder that you sometimes have.

My wife and I like to drive to the ocean, and when we go to the ocean, you stand on the sand and you see the ocean and you feel small and you like it.

There's something pleasurable about recognizing our insignificance, about being in the presence of something vast.

There's a sociologist by the name of Dr.

Keltner who wrote a book about awe, and he says this awe is the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your understanding of the world.

That's awe, and it's a core part of being human.

The second one has to do with our relationship to the rest of creation.

Psalm 8 says, You made them rulers over the works of your hands, you put everything under their feet.

See, we're given this vocation in Scripture of being in charge of the world that God had made.

And if you think about that, it's it's a little bit of a crazy thing that God did that.

That He created this beautiful world and He said to you and I, you're in charge of it.

I'm not sure I would make that decision.

I don't know that I would trust this world to my stewardship.

And that's what God did.

And so we like to feel small, but we also like to do things and see how they change the world around us.

That's agency.

We can characterize that as a posture of agency.

So say that with me.

Agency.

So we've got what's up here?

Awe, and we have agency.

This is our ability to affect the world.

And God wants us to be creative, to be innovative, to take the world that He's given us and make it better to do fun things with it.

Third thing is that we're created in relationship with other people.

And so we read the first matchmaking introduction in Genesis chapter 2.

Genesis 2 · chapter mention

The Lord God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man.

There's this close, intimate connectedness between people.

And it's true for me, I'm sure it's probably true for you, that your relationships with people, your parents, your children, your siblings, your friends, your co-workers, your classmates, your colleagues, that defines a huge part of your experience.

The best things of your day are probably interactions with people, and the hardest parts of your day are probably interactions with people.

Our relationships are so core to what it means to be human.

So I call that intimacy.

So we've got what?

We've got agency, and we've got intimacy.

Now we have to be careful with that word because we're not talking about sexual intimacy or romantic intimacy.

We're just talking about the broad spectrum of engagement with another person, of relationship.

And this is something that drives us.

We long for this.

Sometimes we experience close relationship, other times we experience broken relationship or abusive relationship.

But all of that is part of being human, of how God created us.

The fourth one has to do, and this is an interesting one, with knowing ourselves.

Psalm 139 says this, verse 13 for you that speaking to God created my inmost being.

You knit me together in my mother's womb.

And this is an interesting statement because the psalmist is talking to God and saying that God created something within him.

So there's the psalmist, but then there's like a core within him.

And I call that identity.

So we have what?

Awe, we have agency, intimacy, and identity.

When we think about ourselves, there is a there there.

There's something within us, there's some me, there's some you that exists and it's unique and it's special and it's powerful.

We end up spending a lot of time shaping our identities, caring for it, cultivating, protecting our identities.

I can act in a way that expresses my identity, I can also act in a way that violates my identity.

My identity can shape and change and it can grow or it can shrink.

And so this thing within me is actually a very key part of what it means to be me.

Taken together those four postures of let's do it one more time together, of awe, agency, intimacy, and identity.

These all kind of exist in this like dynamic system where they're all pulling on the same time and we experience all of them in different measure.

But together, I'm convinced they are a helpful framework to say this is what the human experience is like.

This is what God created us to be.

And when they're all working together, it kind of hums like four guitar strings, all in tune with this energy of life.

There's three particular ways I think this framework could be helpful.

First of all, if that's what it means to be human, then a machine, anything we create, can never be human.

AI can write words that express what it's like to stand at the ocean.

But it can never experience the awe of being there.

AI, you know, like Grok can act like your friend.

Grok probably can't, but um Claude, you guys don't know AI, right?

I mean, Grok's kind of Claude can act like your friend, but it can never actually be intimate with you.

It can never reciprocate being vulnerable and sharing deeply.

And so these postures of humanity are things that AI and any technology can never recreate.

That's the first way it's helpful.

The second way it's helpful is it actually gives us an understanding of what we have to protect.

It helps us to know this.

This is what it means to be human, so I can protect these things, but I can, I don't have to worry about the other things.

And notice that driving a car is not one of the postures.

But if we know what it is that we want to protect, then we can be freed up to use technology more confidently.

G.K.

Chesterton is an old British preacher.

Actually, he's passed, but he used to be old.

And he has this idea of a playground on a cliff surrounded by a fence.

And he says that the children in that playground can play confidently because they know that the fence protects them.

Here's his language.

He says they could fling themselves into every frantic game and make the place the noisiest of nurseries if they trust the fence.

But if the fence falls down and there's a playground on the edge of a cliff, he says they would be huddled in terror in the center.

My hope is that this understanding of what it means to be human can give us that fence so that we can live in our culture, so that we can engage with technology and the things that we create in a way that actually is enjoyable and productive without worrying that we're losing something.

The third way I think it helps us is that it can actually help us to lean more fully into what it means to be human.

I'm hopeful that this new age of artificial intelligence we're in can actually force us to ask deep questions.

And because we have to wrestle with these things, we could actually become more human.

It could actually force us to consider what it means to lean into and ask questions like Am I really experiencing awe?

Am I using my agency wisely?

Am I connecting with other people with genuine intimacy?

And do I know who I am, who God has created me?

And as we lean into that, we can experience what God intends for us, and we end up representing God's will to the world around us.

Because we, as we live that out, start to hum with the kind of energy of a life well lived.

That's my hope for the framework.

And as we do this, then I think we encounter God in deep ways.

I think we encounter his purposes for us.

And then we're able to live that out in the world.

So we're gonna take one of those ideas and we're gonna dive a little bit deeper.

I'm in the middle right now of a six-week cohort where I'm teaching in depth through all of this material.

So we're going to be taking one whole week on each of these postures, really diving into what the Bible says about each of these different ways of relating.

But I want to take one and just explore it for a minute.

We're gonna take agency.

Because in this culture, where we're actually doing so much more than we used to be able to do, agency becomes a really important topic.

We are creating actually agents, and we're giving them some of our agency.

We're offloading some of what we do in the world to other types of technology.

So, how do we understand the right way to think about that?

How do we understand what God thinks about all of that stuff?

How many of you are parents?

You have children?

Okay, keep your hands up.

How many of you have ever been a child?

Okay, some of you aren't raising your hands, and I'm worried about what's going on in this church, but that's okay.

Um if you're familiar with children, you know that sense, especially when they're really little, and they first do something that changes the world.

And they get this like excited look on their faces.

Now, usually what they've done is knock something over because that's the easiest way to affect the world around you, is to destroy it.

And so, you know, like if you build a tower of something in a room with a three-year-old, like you know what that three-year-old's gonna do, right?

They're gonna go up and there and knock it over.

But then they're gonna have this look of like, I did something and the world is different.

That's agency.

That's this God-given desire to actually affect the world around us.

And I want to give a little definition of what agency is so we can go a little deeper into what it means.

I believe that agency is the exercise of genuine authority within given limits.

Agency is the exercise of genuine authority within given limits.

Let's unpack that for a minute.

The best example of this is early on in the scriptures, when God has just created humankind, this is what we read in Genesis 1.26.

God said, Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky.

Now, I want to invite you to put yourselves in the mind of that first human.

And God has created, we'll call him Adam, that's what people like to call him.

So God's created Adam.

Adam is there, and God says, I've created you in my image, and you are supposed to rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky.

What do you think Adam's thinking?

Like, well, what's a bird?

That's a good one, too.

But after he solved that question, he's probably thinking something like, How am I supposed to rule over the fish and the birds?

How am I supposed to be in charge?

Notice that God points out the two kinds of creatures that live in realms that we can't get to.

And so wrapped up in that is this dual nature of agency being genuine authority, God has put humankind in charge within given limits.

There are limits to what we can do.

And if you think about us today, we've managed to get a little bit better than that first human at swimming and flying, but we're still not fish, and we're still not birds, and we're never going to be.

We're never gonna conquer the oceans and the skies.

And so there's this sense of power, but power within bounds, power within limits.

So as we grow in our capabilities, what technology helps us to do is to extend those capabilities, but never to transcend our limitations.

Technology helps us to become more powerful, but there's always an upper limit.

There's always a bound.

What's going on today has been going on forever, and that's that some people are trying to use technology to transcend the limitation, to break the boundaries that God has given us.

They're trying to build technology to make us live forever, to make us escape from our physical bodies, or to make us solve problems that are unsolvable.

What's true for us then is to realize that God has given those limits as a gift, that it's something good for us.

And I'm convinced that those limits that God has given can never be broken, but the consequences of them can be displaced, can be moved in the system.

This is what C.

S.

Lewis says on that note.

He says in his book, Abolition of Man, what we call man's power over nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men, with nature as its instrument.

And so as we use technology and develop it and build it, we need to be aware that we can't break those limits.

And if we try, we're just pushing them somewhere else.

Let me show you what I mean.

I have a balloon here.

This didn't go so well in the first service.

So if you know somebody that went to the first service, you can ask them how I failed miserably.

But we're gonna try this again.

So we're gonna blow up this balloon.

Okay, a little more.

Okay, in the first service, I tried to tie it, and there was a hole in my balloon, which completely ruined my points.

But we're gonna see if I can tie it better.

Okay.

Okay, good.

So here we go.

There's a balloon, right?

Let's imagine that this air inside this balloon is the limits that God has placed on us, and I decide I want to destroy those limits, I want to break through them.

So I try to squeeze it.

See, in the first service, there was a hole, so that all the air left.

And it was like my whole point was ruined.

In this service, though, you guys got the better one.

That's the point I was trying to make.

You can't actually destroy it, right?

If you try to break the limits, it just moves somewhere else.

Now you've probably experienced this in your life because you probably said at one point, I don't really need to sleep.

I don't really need to eat healthy, I don't really need to exercise, I can just do all the things, I can just live all the time, and I can stay awake, and I can be really productive.

And you realize that you haven't actually broken that limit.

You've just pushed it aside until it all catches up to you.

And you've moved it to some later time.

Uh, credit cards are another example, right?

You can say, hey, I can buy anything I want and I'll pay for it later.

But you haven't really broken the limit of your financial capability.

You've just pushed it till later.

We're doing this with artificial intelligence in some significant ways.

You know, we're building data centers and building technology that is affecting the globe, the planet, the earth in ways that are negative, and we're just pushing them away to where we can't see them.

Or we're building technology and hiring people in developing countries to sort through all the terrible things that it does so that it's safe for us, but it affects them.

My suggestion for us is that as we're using technology, we avoid that temptation to break our limits because we know that it's just going to push it somewhere else.

Instead, we can actually see those boundaries that God has given us as gifts that are meant to help us flourish, to help us live this rich kind of life.

And we don't have to ignore them.

In fact, we can embrace them.

Embrace your limits.

This means recognizing that you know we are physical beings, we have bodies that have uh requirements and that age and that change, and that those are good parts of what it means to be human.

That we exist where we actually need other physical people, we need relationships, we need community, or something deep breaks within us.

That we need oxygen and food and outside and we need to be physical, we need to stand by the ocean sometimes and feel small that that restores something to us.

So the encouragement then is to realize that these limits God has given us are actually things that we can embrace.

And when we do so, I'm convinced that we encounter God in a powerful way.

That we sense the presence of God in our limitation.

I know for me some of my deepest times of feeling close to God have been in the midst of the deepest pain.

When I thought my balloon was going away.

When things have fallen away, when when when life gets hard.

And so, how can we in those times understand that those limits are gifts?

The cool thing is when we do that, we actually demonstrate to the world who Jesus is in a new way.

We actually show the world around us by embracing our limits that we embrace the God who created them and we live out the person of Jesus in our schools, in our communities, in our workplaces, so that when people see us, they actually see Jesus.

They actually encounter God-made flesh because they can see what it's like to live as God intended, and to know that the limit of all limits that all of us face is death.

Our lives on this earth will end.

And nothing we can do, no technology we can develop is ever going to change that.

But we know somebody who gave his life so that we could live.

That's what you celebrated last week.

And as we trust in God to break that limit, we proclaim him to the world.

That's my hope here.

This isn't about how to use technology well, it's not about how to protect yourself, it's not about how to build the right kind of tech, it's ultimately about how to live like Jesus and show Jesus to the world.

That's the goal here.

This is the opportunity that we can take hold of as the church.

And I'm incredibly optimistic in this age of artificial intelligence.

Not because I think the tech is amazing, although I do.

Not because I think the tech is gonna save us, I'm convinced it won't.

And not because it's not gonna cause problems, because it will.

It's already creating hurt, and it's already creating people that are suffering because of it.

It's already hurting the globe, it's already doing a lot of bad stuff.

That's our job as the church is to step into a hurting world to bring healing, to bring redemption, to bring peace.

And I believe in God and in his church.

I believe that God has called us and equipped us and given us his spirit to do just that.

So I am confident in the church of Jesus Christ that we, through his power, will rise to this moment and lead in ways that really show the world what it means to be human.

Let me pray for us and pray for you as we wrap up.

Father, thank you.

Thank you for this um gift of humanity that you've given us.

Thank you for creating us in your image, for giving us a sense of what it means to uh be big in our power and to be small under your glory, to be close with other people, to know ourselves and to know how you've created us to be.

God, I want to pray particularly for this community, for awakening church and for your work here.

Thanks for the people that you're leading to faith, for the stories, for the families, for the individuals, for the way that you're using awakening to represent who you are to the world.

And I pray you would do that more and more.

That Jesus would be clear in this church and that you would equip them to do that.

Thank you, thank you, thank you that you choose us to show the world who you are.

And I pray that you would equip us to do that well.

We love you, Jesus.

We're grateful for you.

We pray in the name of Jesus and by your Holy Spirit.

Amen.

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