My goal in these Nerd Dad conversations is to help dads do what they are called to do: Love God with all they are, and help their children do the same. You’re raising a little nerd, whether you like it or not. So, how do you do this well? In short, provide activities and experiences that point them towards God in awe and wonder, that pique their God-given curiosity, and that they can participate in from hope, not for hope.
Show Notes:
The best nerd activities will always:
1.Point us to God (Enhance our enjoyment, not steal it)
Get out in nature. Read a book. Experience the beauty God has made as well as the world he has made us for. Make a friend and be a friend. God uses all of these things to draw us closer to him.
2.Pique our curiosity (all honest questions point us to God)
Ask all of the questions and earnestly seek answers. Don’t just google it. Ask, then ask some more, and ask again.
3.Extend from hope (not be where we go for it)
Participate in all the activities you have from the hope Christ has given you. How will you know if it’s healthy? Just look at the fruit it bears (Gal. 5:22)
Just ask yourself: When you do this activity, are you more loving, peaceful, and self-controlled?
Referenced in the show:
”The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above[fn] proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge. There is no speech, nor are there words, whose voice is not heard. Their voice[fn] goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world.” (Psalm 19:1-4)
Read:
Tolkien’s The Hobbit (the illustrated version is lovely, by Jemima Catlin)
resources: Gladys Hunt: Honey for a Child’s Heart, Sarah Mackenzie: Read Aloud Revival
Science
Get a book on the Hubble telescope, or the new James Webb! (nothing makes you feel smaller, quicker, than good book on space).
Creatures
- Encyclopedia of Animals (& insects), Jules Howard
- Celebrating Birds, Natalie Rojas (from Wingspan!)
- Ocean Anatomy, Julia Rothman
People
- Guy Stuff, Dr. Cara Natterson (we’ve loved this with the boys)
- God Made All of Me, Justin & Lindsey Holcomb
- What am I feeling by Josh & Christi Straub
Bible Support
- Jesus Storybook Bible, Sally Lloyd Jones
- Indescribable, Louie Giglio
- Bible Infographics for Kids, Harvest House Publishers
- Why Trust the Bible, Greg Gilbert
Some light space reading:
Ways to listen:
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🎧 search Gospel Tech in your favorite streaming service (iTunes, Amazon)
Transcription:
Hello everyone and welcome to the Gospel Tech podcast. My name is Nathan Sutherland and this podcast is dedicated to helping families love God and use tech. Today, we are continuing our conversation about nerd dads. How do we do it well and specifically today, how can we help raise up young nerds in the way they should go? I’m excited for this conversation because it extends from last time and it looks more practically at what are three things we can actually do as fathers who love our kids and are passionate about certain things in our lives.
How do we help our kids walk in those things or, excuse me, in their own nerdiness, if you will, maybe not the things that we’re passionate about, but to raise them up to understand what it looks like to be passionate about things God’s given us, how to do that well and how to do it so that we don’t find our purpose in those things, but instead know our purpose and therefore can dive right into the beautiful things God has provided us to do and to have and to enjoy so that we can give him all the glory in doing that. So that’s our conversation for today. With no further ado, let’s get this conversation started.
Thank you to everyone who’s helped to make this podcast possible. Thank you for listening, for liking and subscribing, therefore, you don’t miss any new content. You can do that wherever you listen to podcasts or you can go to gospeltech.net/podcast and check out the most recent episodes there. Today’s conversation on how do we raise up nerds in the way they should go, doing that Proverbs 22:6 thing of being a parent, raising up his children and the way they should go. That is kind of our big picture look for today. So it’s two parts. First, understanding this conversation is about being a nerd, being someone who’s passionate about something, so passionate that you want other people to be passionate about it as well. This is the concept of being a disciple of Christ, but it extends to other areas. We all have these niche areas. We are just passionate about something, we want other people to care.
And then the parenting part, as a dad, we are called to raise up our children in the fear and admonition of the Lord, to raise them up in the way that they should go, and being a nerd is part of that. And there’s really going to be three parts. We’re going to talk about how in raising them up, our nerd activities, whatever we choose to invest in, needs to meet a three part standard. The first is it needs to point us to God. It needs to enhance our enjoyment, not steal it. The second is it needs to pique our curiosity because all honest questions are going to point us back to the Lord if we pull on that question long enough. And three, it’s going to extend our hope, not be the source of our hope. So we have hope already. I already am okay and therefore I dive into this because it’s a passion God’s given me, not I need this thing to be okay.
And if we can meet that standard then with our kids, then it’s great. We can let them watch that show, listen to that music, play that game, go do that activity, participate with us because we’re doing it from hope rather than for hope. So that’s going to be the overview of the conversation. Let’s dive right in to number one, we need activities. When we nerd well, you go, “All right, but what should I do with my kid?” Some people really want to play games with their kids. Some people really want to watch shows with their kids. Some people want to go outside and do different activities. But there are people that are unhealthy in some of these environments. Yes, even outside of video games and shows, you can be unhealthy. There are people that choose their favorite hobby or sport over their family, over their commitments, over their own well-being and health. So how do we know?
One, it’s going to point us to God in awe and wonder. It’s going to lift our eyes off ourselves and make us go, “Wow, God is amazing.” For example, one of these activities you could do for an adventure would be nature. And hear this, I live in the northwest. I actually live in Washington state and I live near a volcano. We call them mountains, but they’re not mountains. These are volcanoes and several of them are active to the point where someone in history is going to go, “Why again, did hundreds of thousands of people live at the base of this volcano?” We will be a future Pompeii, but for now we get to enjoy the absolute majesty and ridiculousness of a giant piece of rock that starts basically at sea level with nothing else around it and then explodes up to 12 to 14,000 feet depending on where you’re at.
That’s awesome. So one of these Volcanoes near us, my dad took a picture maybe last week or so of this gorgeous sunrise. I mean it’s purple and pink and orange. It’s incredible. And in the foreground on his backyard, there’s a deer leaping across his grass and it’s almost silly how pretty it is. And he sent it to a family text and one of my sisters replied, “The heavens declare the glory of God.” And that’s so true. Something as simple as the sunrise. You look at it and it’s like, “I need to pause for a moment. I just need to stop and remember that God is so good and that this world is so incredible and that we’re allowed such beauty even in such brokenness.” And my wife was driving down the road the other day and saw someone entering where we live, there’s a couple hundred 30, 40-year-old oak trees that have been planted and they’re gorgeous.
And this time of year they were just turning into the orange and reds and this person had their camera up on their steering wheel and was going like five miles an hour and was attempting to take in video what was happening in the beauty of nature, to the point where that’s exactly what we’re talking about. You should recognize nature is ridiculous and it’s beautiful and that should make us go, “But why?” Right? It should draw forth from us worship and praise and a reprioritization to the point where this lady was like, “This is so important that I get this video right now, I’m going to be dangerous, illegal and really, really inconvenient going five miles an hour, but I need to capture this in this moment.” Now, maybe it was a selfish thing and it was going to go on social media, it was all for likes, but the point was nature triggered it. Right?
It wasn’t a VR experience, it wasn’t something that you could replicate easily. These trees do that once a year. And if you missed it, guess what? All the leaves just blew down. It’s gone. You can come to my neighborhood tomorrow, you’d have to wait 11 months and 29 days to get back to that spot. It’s going to be very, very specific because it’s part of nature and we’re not in control of that, and that’s really important. I want to read that verse my sister sent out in greater detail, is the word I was looking for. Psalm 19, we’re going to go 1-4 because it just keeps getting better. Listen to this, “The heavens declare the glory of God and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. Day to day, pours out speech and night to night reveals knowledge. There is no speech, nor are there words whose voice is not heard. Their voice goes out through all the earth and their words to the end of the world.”
I love that because when we get into nature, we are getting into something that points us to God. It’s making us experience wonder, just amazement or awe. A little bit of fear like standing on the edge of a cliff, you’re like, “Oh, I get it. I’m mortal. This thing is beyond me. It doesn’t do what I say. It doesn’t wait for my words. It does what it wants.” But we also were told in scripture that it does what God says, that Jesus spoke it into existence, and whether it’s calming a storm or making something from nothing, that it is word that drove that and it obeys its king, and that is a beautiful reminder. So getting out in nature is amazing as there is sometimes a distraction, people will go to beautiful areas like Sedona and they will see the incredible red rocks and they’ll go, “Oh, this is so beautiful. This must be the source of spiritual truth.” And we sort of miss the destination for the sign.
And by that, I’m borrowing an example used by Rob Mayer, I love this example. He’s like, “Hey, when you’re driving to Disneyland, you want to make sure that when you see the sign to Disneyland, you celebrate because you’re almost there. You don’t pull over to the side of the road, get out of the car and go, we made it. Look at the sign.” And that’s nature for us. Nature is supposed to go, “Wow, this is incredible. God is so good.” It’s a sign pointing us back to the creator of that thing and it should draw forth worship, not stop at the sign, stop at the nature, the tree, the rock, the volcano, and go, “Wow, this thing is so good. I should worship it.” It’s beautiful that it draws forth worship. That’s good. I’m glad that happens, but it’s not all the way there. We want to finish that thought.
So nature is one way we can help our children experience nerdiness. Get them out in it, hike in it, bike in it, walk in it, go get on a boat, go for a swim. Do something physical with the body God designed for you in the nature he created and be amazed at it. Now the second thing I would say is friends. Friends are a great way for us to experience wonder and awe. I was actually having a conversation with a friend this morning, doing a little Bible study. We read John 15, and in that Jesus says, “I no longer call you servants, but I call you friends.” And he goes on to explain that this is because he’s told them everything they need to know and that he considers them not just servants doing his will, but friends doing his work with him.
And that’s beautiful because two things. One, it gives us a biblical example of friendship. It is a thing. There are biblical ideas of friends. I bring that up because if you’re like me, there was a stage of life where I’m like, “What are friends? Do we even need them? Do they just distract us from God’s work?” We do need them. In fact, Jesus considers us his friends and he actually calls us to be friends of others even if that’s unilaterally. In this section of John, John 13, 14, and 15, he says repeatedly to love one another that people are going to know that we love God because of our love for one another. And in this case he calls us specifically to love one another again. And in doing that kind of sets it in this relief as it’s juxtaposed against, well, friendship isn’t, I don’t know if juxtaposed, yeah it is, it’s contrasted specifically against Judas. That Jesus considered Judas a friend.
Judas, by the way, this point has already left. Jesus knows he’s going to be betrayed. But he knew that when he washed Judas feet as well, and that Jesus, when he offers Judas the sop says, “Judas, repent.” This is your last chance, man. The road you’re picking is going to be bitter. Right? “Dipped it in bitter herbs and gave it to him. And that’s when Judas is,” anyway, it’s when Judas chooses to betray him. But on Jesus’s side, we see friendship. We see love and kindness and peace and repeated call to repentance, out of humility and out of self-sacrifice, it only hurt Jesus to continue to offer this. It didn’t hurt Judas at all. He wasn’t repentant at all until the very end, and then even then, didn’t repent. And I digress. The point of this is that in having friends, we are seeking people to love them unilaterally, yes, like Christ loves us, but to love them beyond feelings.
Instead, we’re choosing the highest good for them, which means loving them, speaking truth in love, coming alongside them in hurt. The obvious answer is give up your life for someone. That’s what it means to be a friend. That’s what Jesus tells us to do. The true mark of a friend is when one gives one’s life up for another. And we see Jesus do that and we think that makes a lot of sense. And then we’re told to do things like forgive our enemies. And we’re like, “Yeah, no, I can’t do that. I’d die, but I couldn’t forgive. I have to live with that.” Jackie Hill Perry has this great GIF that she posted to social media a while back where she was like me and the quote is, “Lord, I’ll do anything you want,” and it says, the Lord, “Forgive your enemies.” And then it’s just a GIF of guy pounding a table like, “No, I can’t do that.”
And that’s where we’re at. We’re like, “Lord, I die for you. Oh, but I can’t live for you. That’s too much to ask.” And friendship is a way that forces us to recognize what God is doing in our hearts and what he’s calling us to do. The reason we want to be a good friend is, well, there’s an aspect of openness, of humility, of expecting to say hard things, of not just being a yes person, but allowing people to speak hope into us. I like the way this particular friend in this bible study put it, where he goes, “A good friend keeps golfing even when it’s raining.” And I love that. I hate golf, but I love that picture. Hate’s a strong word. I get little joy out of golf for clarification. But I love that picture because his friend said yes to go golfing with him.
And when it started raining, golf was no longer convenient. It’s no longer as fun. It’s no longer there for the thrills and the beauty of it. It’s just kind of a slog quite literally. And yet that friend stayed there and kept playing golf with him. And I was like, that’s an awesome picture. That is friendship. Friends are there even when it’s not convenient, even when it’s not necessarily as fun as something else, even when it’s not maybe what they even want to be doing right now, they’re going to be your friend because they’re your friend. They’re choosing to serve and love you. We see this picture of friendship in the Bible, the good Samaritan, this will be my last one, the good Samaritan, where this Samaritan stops and helps a Jewish man who has been beaten up and left to die on the road and other people walk past because they’re either busy or they don’t want to become unclean.
And his sworn enemy, this person that he probably would’ve walked past if it had been shoe on the other foot situation and the Samaritan had been beaten up and left there, this Samaritan picks him up, takes him to an inn, pays his medical costs and makes sure that he’s well. That is a man who’s unilaterally being a friend. And when Jesus says who was the neighbor to this other man who was the friend to this other man? They go, well, the guy who helped him. Not the guys in proximity, not the guys that had racial similarities were on the same side of a fight or shared a common theology even. There were pretty big theological differences between these two groups. It was the one who served him.
And that’s what we can do as friendship. Why? Because it brings us beyond ourself and I would argue to the end of ourselves. I don’t think you can be a good friend without being sacrificial. I don’t think you can be sacrificial enough to be a good friend without a heart changed by Jesus. I do think there are people, by the way, who don’t know they trust in Jesus yet, who God is using friendship to draw them out, who’s bringing them to the end of themselves and going, “Okay, but how do I? I want to be a good friend, how do I do that? I want to love this person, to serve this person, to help them, but I don’t have the ability to do it.” And those are the questions that point us towards the Lord. So I would say the Lord uses friendship. And the third thing we can do to experience awe and wonder is to read.
Yes, read scripture like we did Psalm 19 where we read these promises of God and these truths about God that then point our eyes up and go, “Wow, that is true still today, 2,500 years later, amazing.” 3,000 years later. So that’s a great one. But then read good fantasy. And I’m a broken record on these two, but if you haven’t a great spot to start with reading with your kids, it’s not intimidating, you’re not going to run into content that’s like worrisome or you’re going to have to filter would be C.S. Lewis’s Narnia. You’ve got a solid lay theologian who is very bright and makes the gospel accessible, and he does that through allegory in the Narnia series. And then Tolkien’s Hobbit. The illustrated version, we actually just got, Owen got for his birthday, by Jemima Catlin, is awesome. It’s lovely. Check it out. If you need a Christmas present, you can look into that. But the friendship, the beauty, the battles, the struggle between, excuse me, good and evil is a wonderful example of how we can process big questions through fiction.
And the world is one worth saving in both accounts. It’s got a struggle within the world, but there is a reason to fight. And that is a wonderful thing for our kids to recognize as well. We’re not called to just let this world go to trash and wait for God to fix it. We’re called to be a part of the restorative work that he is already doing. He’s indwelling us with this Holy Spirit. Let’s go do his work and will in this world, not on our strength, but on his. So read good fiction. If you want good fiction and some non-fiction, but a lot of it is good fiction, suggestions it’s Gladys Hunt’s Honey for a Child’s Heart and Sarah Mackenzie’s Read-Aloud Revival. They’re both solid reads. You can get them from your local library or get them off Amazon, but they give you lots and lots and lots of awesome reads that aren’t necessarily faith-based. They’re just fun reads.
So second is read about science, read about space, read about creatures, read about people. Some examples on this, I wanted to throw these in here. Get a book on the Hubble Telescope or the news James Webb Telescope, either about how they work or about the pictures they’re taking because there’s nothing like seeing a nebula and trying to wrap your brain around scope that will help you reflect on how great God is and how massive the galaxy and then the universe is. Nothing makes you feel smaller quicker than space. Then creatures, if you look up Encyclopedia of Animals by, let me see, I wrote it down, Jules Howard. And there’s one on insects as well. Those are awesome. Cool pictures, but lots of facts about animals. So for those kids who are into Wild Kratts, it’s a solid hit.
Celebrating Birds by Natalie Rojas. This is the book that’s a field guide for birds, but it’s based on the artwork from the board game Wingspan and it’s awesome. Rent it from your library again, or excuse me, borrow it from your library, I guess you don’t rent them. Or purchase it. Beautiful artwork. And then it’s like the little cards in Wingspan, if you’ve played it, has these gorgeous watercolor pictures and then it’s got lots of bird facts about them. So that’s cool. And then Ocean Anatomy by Julia Rothman is one that goes deeper into the actual biology of ocean creatures. So there’s a whole section on a cuttlefish versus squid and how are they similar and different and does a great job of just helping a child understand some of the marine biology of the world around them that is so diverse and so incredible. So in those three, you’ve covered space, land animals and oceanic animals, and that’s not even the beginning of understanding each of those.
You could pick just a single creature and spend your life studying that creature and how it works and functions and reproduces and where it lives and how it’s being affected in the environment. You could specialize in a single creature or a single biome. That’s incredible. And that’s something that’s going to pick our eyes up off of ourselves and our ability to fix things and look to the Lord and go, “Lord, these are meant to bring on wonder. How do we do that well?” And then there are scriptural supports. Finally, the thing you should read is scripture, but sometimes it’s big words and younger kids especially can struggle with some of those bigger concepts. So first, I always suggest and would encourage you to strongly check out if you have not yet the Jesus Storybook Bible, they have an audio version you can get on Audible if you’re into that. But it’s great.
And by the way, the audio version has a British reader. If your children into British accents, check it out. My kids were. And when Henry memorized the David and Goliath part, he spoke with an accent when he first did it because God always wins his battles and it was lovely. And don’t worry about how terrible my British accent is. If you’re listening to this in the UK, I apologize. So Jesus Storybook Bible. The Indescribable Devotional series is another great option. Little snippets of science and then tied in with truths from scripture. And Bible Infographics for Kids is just like a bunch of numbers and math and great points for students and young people to just be amazed at and recognize what God has done throughout scripture. So it’s a fun one. So that’s the first thing we do, is we engage in activities and adventures, we nerd out in areas that draw our eyes to the Lord.
That might mean we’re not choosing activities that make us constantly look in on ourselves. Social media can do that. I’m constantly posting about myself and wondering if people are liking it and thinking of changing what I post in order to get more likes. That for me can draw me inward. There’s a reason that I don’t have personal accounts. I post for this ministry and I don’t actually post it, anna posts it. And I create some stuff. Anna creates a lot of it. And then we post as often as will be helpful, but not so often as to make us feel awesome. And if one day the Lord takes that and makes it huge, I must not find that. I will prayerfully pursue not finding that a reflection of my value or purpose because that’s not what it is. It’s glorifying God because if he can use this ministry, my goodness, he’s good. So we talked about friends, nature and then reading.
The second thing we want to do then is pique our curiosity. We want to engage adventures that make us curious and ask great questions. The short version of this is simply asking great questions leads us back to the Lord. And it can be in any real area. It can be about theology or philosophy. It could be about nature or sports. The sports one would be like we were watching football the other day, we don’t have TV, so we were watching the free ESPN version of a college game, which the kids loved. And I was like, “You guys have a weird childhood. One day you’ll probably blame me for this,” but they were loving it. And one of my boys wanted to know why doesn’t that guy just jump over the other guy?
Great question. Let’s talk about athleticism. “Well, for some people that’s an option, buddy. But for your father, that wouldn’t be one.” I played football. I never once jumped someone, I would’ve broken both my knees backwards, it wouldn’t have ended well. Then we can talk about things like physics. What are the dangers, what are the benefits, things about your competitive nature, things about problem solving. Is that always the best option? You can just ask great questions because at some point you pull that thread long enough, you get through how God made you to, I don’t know, kinesiology, to the physics of how someone can physically do that, to why were we designed with these. Why is this sport hard? Why is it even a challenge? You can follow that question a long ways. So sports count.
As I mentioned, theology, like what makes God good? How is God of the Bible different from other Gods? Philosophy. What would a philosophy one, why is there pain? Why do bad things happen to good people? These questions are really powerful. Everyone gets them from a young age. Little kids can’t usually voice them quite so clearly. Henry asked me the other day, how do we know that it rained? Or how do we know that there was water above and water below at creation? They’re like, oh yeah, no one was there to see it. So it’s either divine inspired and Moses was told this or that we were just given the idea that this is what happened, that they figured it out and spoke truth and that God didn’t correct him. That’s a great question. And let’s talk about how do you know canonical truth? How do you know what is in the Bible is true if no one was there to see it? And those are huge questions.
By the way, great resources on that would be the catechism, that New City Catechism does a great job of repeating biblical truth. But going on, Why Trust the Bible? would be a book if your children have questions on that. It walks you through how can we trust this as a historical document? How can we understand it as such and then understand it as inspiration in addition to it being a well-founded, well-researched well-documented piece of history? So that’s a side note on that. But Why Trust the Bible?, a great resource if you have questions in that yourself.
And I said, all questions lead us back to God, but they also lead us to awe and wonder. I want to go through this math, science, space. So a light year is 5.8 ish, 5.87 trillion miles. For us, a little context, Mars is 235 million miles away. It would take us seven months.
So that’s millions. And if you were to add a thousand more of them, you would get, or not a thousand, you’d have a thousand more millions to get to a billion and then you would need a thousand more billions to just get one trillion. And that number’s massive. So here we go. When we say something like then that the Milky Way galaxy is a medium-sized galaxy, this is a quote from a research piece in the University of Maine. We’re being honest, but also we’re being absurd. The Milky Way, our galaxy we live in, a hundred thousand light-years across. In miles, that would be 587 with 15 zeros. That’s how many miles. The Milky Way as a medium-sized galaxy, it contains 200 billion stars, not including planets, just stars. That’s massive, incredibly massive. You could travel at the speed of light and it would take you a hundred thousand years to cross it.
That’s nuts, but listen to this. IC 1101 is located a billion light-years from us and it’s currently the biggest galaxy we know of. It contains 100 trillion stars, 100 trillion stars over our 200 billion. A billion light-years away is 5.8 with 28 zeros. A hundred trillion is a number that I don’t have enough brains to even explain how big that is. And that’s one galaxy out of a hundreds of billions of galaxies that we have. And oh, by the way, did we mention that space is expanding and did we mention that it’s accelerating and it’s expansion? Look at space and you immediately get a sense of how minuscule we are just as a planet, as a galaxy, let alone as an individual on that planet whose life is just, you’re a breath, you’re a shadow, you’re a vapor. The author of Ecclesiastes was all too correct in stating that about us.
So the scale and the math involved in these amounts of space in the universe and in the galaxy should hurt our brain and it should humble our souls. So we want to take adventures that help us engage such things that pique our curiosity, that make us ask big questions. Because honestly, the inability of our minds, society’s history, science to answer such big questions is beautiful. And we want to be a part of finding those answers, but also in recognizing our own personal limits and that finding the answers only gives us more questions. We have yet to fully answer any aspect really of science. And when we do, we usually find something else that’s awesome and go, “Wow, we thought we had this peg and now we just realized we’ve got it wrong.” We were seeing the corner of the object, not the whole object. It goes on from there.
Like when we discovered dark matter, it had been theorized, we then discovered it and we’re like, “Yeah, it doesn’t actually answer anything. We’ve got a lot of questions about where 70% of space’s mass comes from.” Anyway, I digress. Pique your curiosity, ask those great questions, not glib once, don’t just Google it. Do the research. Ask people who study it, who are passionate about this area, who are nerds for this specific thing you are studying and then get them talking because there’s a good chance someone who’s truly passionate about it won’t pretend like they have all the answers. If they’re truly passionate, they’re going to recognize their own limitations because that’s part of why they’re passionate. It’s worth giving their life and their mind and their heart to for study because it’s something they’re passionate about, not because they think they can control it or even know it all.
All right, bring it on to last one is we need to make sure our activities are from hope, not for hope. So we can misuse anything. Let’s be clear about that. We can misuse our spouse and expect expectation. We can misuse our kids and expect them to give us purpose. We can misuse the ministry or mission God’s called us on and expect that to bring us happiness and satisfaction. We can misuse anything, even the good things God’s given us. So I’m not saying get rid of all bad stuff and somehow you’ll never make a mistake. I’m saying when we use the good things of life, when we use the things that God has provided us and they’re okay, they bring wonder and they bring curiosity, they draw us closer towards God. Awesome.
In this case where we’re using it because we’re okay, we’re using it to be okay. Some of those people go into nature and we talked about this, where you look at nature and you worship the sign, not the creator of the sign, not the destination the sign’s pointing you towards. So we don’t want to worship the volcano or the red rocks or the tree, but we recognize it as worship. So are we going to the nature because it helps us clear our minds and calm our hearts and experience wonder and awe or are we stopping at the thing? That’s the first piece.
The second piece is it making us more present or is it distracting us from the present? A lot of technology, it’s, “Wow, this is amazing. This is incredible. Maybe I can even worship God through it.” We sometimes get creative with it. “Well, I’m using it as a ministry,” and most people are like, “Oh good, good on you.” But we don’t ask how. How are you ministering to these people? “Well, I believe in God.” Cool. And are you helping these people in their struggles and trials? Are you helping these people ask big questions? Are you loving them and serving them and washing their feet? Or are you just filling a squad for them? And if you were gone, the Lord took you home tomorrow, they would just replace you with another answer the blank, whatever class you played to fill out the squad. That’s the question, we need to be honest with that.
Please, don’t use ministry as an excuse to do your will. It’s a dangerous road to walk. So instead, use this tech from the hope god’s given you. Play your games. Just know your limits on it. Know what you’re doing in there. Listen to your music, go to your shows and concerts, participate in school, work your job, but do it because you already have hope. And if you don’t, repent. Repent of looking for your hope and your spouse and your child and your ministry and your job and your blessings and your money, whatever the Lord has given you that you’re misusing and instead give that back to him. He’s going to remove it and he’s going to replace it with something better. Not to teach you a lesson because he’s mean, but because he’s loving and this thing’s bringing death. And that’s how you can know.
If you go, “Well, I don’t know. How do I know if this thing is bringing me joy in life?” Look at the fruit it produces. If it brings, so video games for me, brought anger, jealousy, dissension, lust, greed. I was cynical and sarcastic and bitter, but I was surprised when it came out of me. If something would happened and I would just have this really snarky mean response. And I’d be like, “Wow, that’s kind of shocking.” And I repent of it, I’d be like, “Lord, I’m sorry this happened.” And I wasn’t following it back to the root. I was getting that from this environment and this conflict that was coming through me from looking to video games for my purpose. I wasn’t okay unless I was gaming. And the more distance that got put between me and gaming, the worse I got. Or the more people came between me and gaming, I started to blame the people and be like, “If you just weren’t so darn inconvenient, I’d be okay.”
So we need to recognize that life for what it is and then pursue the Lord. Let me give you an example then of the good fruit. I’ll actually just, we know Galatians 5:22, we know that love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness and self-control. Let’s just grab three. If your activity produces more love, more kindness and more self-control or actually let’s go love, peace and self-control. Let’s just do those three. Love choosing the highest good for the other person, as Christ says, the greatest example of love, a friendship is giving your life up for someone else, including giving up your convenience, giving up your right to be mad about something. You are then giving that up and forgiving them unilaterally.
By the way, if you’re in an unsafe situation, if the law needs to be involved, that is absolutely biblical and loving to get someone the help that they need. I’m not saying accept abuse because, “Well, the Lord could change it and he’s not, therefore.” I’m not going with that and said, I’m agreeing, oh my goodness, who said it? It was Frederick Douglas. I’m super glad I looked it up. And the quote goes something like, “I prayed to the Lord for freedom and then I prayed with my legs that he ran to freedom to escape slavery.” And that that’s a picture of what we do as well. That yes, we trust and follow the Lord, but sometimes we need to trust him with our actions.
And so when I gave up video games, I didn’t just suffer in languish, I instead got three amazing blessings. The first is I got a new physical hobby, I got a form of exercise. I didn’t really enjoy endurance exercise before, but the Lord brought that in. That’s part of actually how I stay healthy in ministries. I don’t have a commute home anymore. I instead get to go out and do a ride. And I needed that commute for leveling and listening to good podcasts and praying in the car and just walking from my office into the house can be crazy. So that’s one thing I gained as a boon. I also gained board games. Carcassonne, if you haven’t played it’s like a cooperative, collaborative puzzle game. Ticket to Ride, getting trained tickets around the United States. Settlers of Catan, basically the new monopoly. If you want to fight with your siblings and family members play Settlers, it’s awesome. But that idea of board games became a major part.
And then, oh, I got speaking and teaching. There was a ministry that was born out of the Lord working in my heart in the years that followed me giving up video games to go, “Hey, you’re passionate about these kids. What are you doing to serve and love them?” Like great, you’re teaching them language arts, keep doing that. But language arts is actually starting to get in the way of the stuff you want to say. So I started a nonprofit, I’m doing this podcast because of that. At the end of the day, when you want to go, “All right, am I using this adventure? Am I participating in this from hope or for hope? Am I doing it because I already am okay and therefore I want to participate or I need it to be okay?” Look at the fruit it produces. Look at whether you are running to the Lord with this activity or you’re running from Him. Are you trusting the Lord in this? Is it making you more present? Or is it bringing fruit of Galatians 5:19-21?
So to review, parents and specifically dads, as we raise up nerds in the tech world, as we help them be passionate about things in this world, let’s look to what activities they’re engaging and make sure it hits a standard of three things. One, it needs to point them to Christ, it needs to point them in awes and wonder to the Lord. Two is it needs to pique their curiosity and make them more interested in the world around them. And three, it needs to extend from hope, not just using it for hope. And now we’ve got a young person who’s got an idea that they’re excited about and that is going to draw them ever on into the Lord and to what he’s calling them to do. There’s a good chance it may not be their lifetime living, but there’s also a really good chance it will help inspire that lifetime living. No one told me when I was growing up that I’m going to run a nonprofit and be a professional speaker. A lot of people ask me if I’d be a teacher, people ask me if I’d be a lawyer.
I did one and tried to be another. But I didn’t know even six years ago that I would be doing this job I’m doing right now. I thought I was going to be speaking to kids in public schools and that was going to be my only format. I still get to do that and I get to talk about how we love God and use tech. So recognize that helping your child see the Lord clearly and see who they are in light of that is going to help every area of their life. And specifically, being a nerd is something we want every kid to do. You were designed as a nerd to be passionate about things and to be so passionate, you want other people to be passionate too. So please be passionate about your children, help raise them up in the way they should go. And I hope that these three standards help you do that. That’ll point you to the Lord, that’ll pique your curiosity and that it will be something that will extend from the hope you have in Christ.
If this was helpful and encouraging, would you consider sharing it with others? Would you let your children listen to this and have a conversation saying, “Hey, what are you passionate about? What do you love? How are you doing in these three areas?” And then ask them, “How do you think I’m doing, child of mine, in these three areas? Do you see the Lord working in these or do you see me getting distracted by them?” And let this be just a beginning to a conversation about who God is, who we are in light of that and what he’s calling us to be. And if this was encouraging, would you consider joining us next week? Before we do though, if you have any questions, you can go [email protected]. I can compile those and put them in future episodes. If you would like to reach out to me directly, just [email protected]. And then next week, would you join us again for this conversation as we talk about how we can love God and use tech.
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