The world we’re living in is very inter-connected. For example, we have smartphones and we may have more than one. While using all these gadgets, it gives us a multi-sensory experience. The speaker shows a picture of a surfer riding a wave. Such a person must have very good skills, and his entire being is surrounded by water; one mistake and he’ll tumble into the water. Today we are in this wave of the modern age and many things in today’s society are very useful and convenient. However, they also come with dangers.

We can see texts, hear audios, watch videos and see pictures. Some are interactive as well. Recently there’s Pokémon GO where you can catch Pokémons wherever you go. Many elderly in their 60s and 70s also participate in it. This technology is termed ‘augmented reality’ because what you see on the screen is additional elements on top of the world you see in front of you.

At the same time as we have these capabilities to connect with the rest of the world, we also have a wide social circle. Whether through Facebook, WhatsApp, or Instagram, we are constantly submerged in these social circles created by these apps to the point they control our lives. Most people have all of these accounts and if you don’t have one, it seems that you’re backward.

We make use of all these platforms whether in work, school, or at home. Before we sleep, we’re using these platforms. A phone app called ‘Rescue Time’ collects information on how much time you spend on apps from 11,000 people. It says that on average, a person uses his phone for 3 hours 15 minutes. Every day, a person on average would touch his phone 58 times. In other studies conducted in the U.S., some people even use up to 9 hours on the phone per day.

All these gadgets have taken up a huge portion of our time. Through these platforms, we see a lot of things happening in different parts of the world. Different stories; true or fake, we see differing opinions and some have increasing influence. The topic today will be split into 2 sermons; the effects on our psychology will be discussed today.

All these things that can affect our values are constantly presented on our phones. We have to examine if these things have benefits to our faith and if we subconsciously support these movements and ideas, or even become a proponent of these ideas. Whether if we have or deny such experience, it’s a reality. We may say that “My faith is very sure, so I won’t be influenced by such opinions,” or we see some things online and think they won’t affect us, and so we spread it to others although we may not agree with the message. However, the person who saw what you posted may have the impression that you support this idea.

The speaker wants to bring up 2 ideas for consideration - some popular opinions we shouldn’t support and should be on guard, and to know if these opinions influence our ideas.

Earlier we mentioned that we spend much time on gadgets. The effect of this is that we’re always in our world. Perhaps when we’re using our phones (/laptop) we’re communicating with others or for the younger, they may play games for long hours on computers. In the past, we would talk on the phone or ask to meet face to face. But now we use text because it’s more convenient. Slowly and unknowingly, this mode of communication (texting) has become the primary mode of communication. Whether when we’re in the room, toilet or the office, we’re in our world. It’s a safe world because we don’t have to look at other’s facial expressions. Sometimes when others send us a text, we may tell from their tone that they’re unhappy or happy, and this can sufficiently convey his intent. However after some time, we’ve lost the ability to communicate face to face and after a while, we prefer to seclude ourselves in our world to communicate through texting and we become over-reliant on it. When we over-rely, it becomes an addiction.

There’s this term used to term phone addiction, ‘nomophobia’ - ‘no phone phobia’. According to the institute of health by the U.S., they stated that the overly high usage of mobile phones has negative impacts, including on the body and psychology. It causes you to become more lonely or bored easily, causing you to become more introverted, or become egoistic. Have you ever had this feeling that when someone invited you out, you don’t want to go? Because you’re unsure of what to do or talk about when you meet, or you find it boring. When you feel bored, it’s because there’s something else more interesting to you. When we feel this way, it suggests that we’re lacking confidence in our ability to communicate with others and prefer to seclude ourselves from the world. After a while, we become less concerned with the affairs of others.

We read 2 Timothy 3:2;

‘For men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, ‘

In this letter that Paul wrote to Timothy, he talked about the danger of the last days. “Men will be lovers to themselves”, meaning men will become more selfish. On some level, men are by nature selfish. When a child is born, all he knows at first is of himself. When he’s hungry, he’ll cry. After a while, the infant becomes aware of others besides himself, and slowly his social circle increases and he learns to care for others. In the beginning, men only knew of himself. The 2 ends of this spectrum, to be evil and egoistic, & to be altruistic, and we’re often somewhere in between.

With these modern amenities, it’s easier for us to fall into the category of being egoistic than altruistic. We have to come to this realisation. We turn to Hebrews 10:24-25;

24 ‘And let us consider one another in order to stir up love and good works,
25 not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as is the manner of some, but exhorting one another, and so much the more as you see the Day approaching.’

Here says to consider.. stir up works. If we’re alone in our world, we’re unable to do these 3 things and they’re very important in the last days. The author of Hebrews in v25 says that one thing we can do to achieve these 3 things is to not forsake the assembling of ourselves. When we come to service, we’ll see people. We must remember to exalt one another, so much more as you see the Day approaching. When we see things that can negatively influence us, we have to warn others to be aware. If we don’t come for service and don’t have this interaction with other believers, not only will we be unable to consider one another, stir up love and good works, we’re unable to do this for others. We may say that we can send encouragement to people through our phones, but let’s not be limited to just this mode of communicating. We must avoid being separated from other people.

We know that we have to build up a strong relationship with Jesus. We may think, “Matters of faith are between me and God,” but it’s not the only relationship God wants us to build up. We read 1 John 4:20-21;

20 ‘If someone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, how can he love God whom he has not seen?
21 And this commandment we have from Him: that he who loves God must love his brother also.’

Even if we tell ourselves that we’re God-fearing but we don’t want to see others, then our God-fearing[ness] is false. We also read Romans 15:1-2;

1 ‘We then who are strong ought to bear with the scruples of the weak, and not to please ourselves.
2 Let each of us please his neighbor for his good, leading to edification. ‘

Paul here encourages us to go one step further in our encouragement. If you think you’re strong, you must strengthen those who are weak. Not for your pleasure, but leading to people’s edification. If we do so, then we would please God. The Lord Jesus is our role model. V3 says;

‘For even Christ did not please Himself; but as it is written, “The reproaches of those who reproached You fell on Me.” ‘

We must learn from the manner of Christ. We must understand that our social circle is not limited to just within the phone although we spend much time on it. We’re limited by time and only have 24 hours a day. When we invest more time on our phones, we reduce the time we interact with others. We must know how to make wise usage of our phones. As we use our phones for entertainment, we must also use it to benefit others. Whether we’re using our phones for divine work, or to send tracks to others, we must know how to make use of these gadgets.

Secondly, one of the greatest contributions of these modern amenities is that information is available immediately. We’re living in the age with the explosion of information and we can obtain them readily. Today if there’s anything we want to find out, we can search online for it, especially in recent times of the electronic cloud. All of our information can be stored in this invisible cloud. With this, we don’t need to memorise anything, and there’s no need to memorise history and facts. This is because all these information is readily available at your fingertips. Sometimes because of the readiness of information, accompanied by the feeling that information is free, we don’t spend much effort in finding out information. It’s building up this idea within us that all this information is within our grasp. Slowly but surely, we stop training our memories and abilities to think about complex things and this may contribute to a decline in our cognitive abilities.

The internet has created instant knowledge, but it has also given us a slower ability to process information. The Chinese have a saying that when you read ten thousand books, it’s as if you’ve walked a thousand miles. However, today whatever place you wish to visit can be accessed easily through photos. It seems as if the things of the past have no meaning in today’s content. When we’re constantly submerged in these apps (for example on WhatsApp, we’re engaged in multiple social circles - while in our work’s group a colleague is posting a picture, another group is posting another thing), our brain is constantly engaged in different areas. Our concentration is spread very thinly amongst all these areas, and sometimes our attention has to be divided up to many things at once (一心两用 or 三用 or even 四用). However, research shows that humans can only concentrate on one thing at a time. If you try to multitask, there’ll be some things you cannot do well. While we have access to much different information, our connection with these things is very shallow.

Everything we receive has to be attended to because we place ourselves in different social circles and we have to go on different platforms to broadcast our status. There’s this condition where we don’t want to miss anything, a syndrome called ‘FOMO - Fear Of Missing Out. In 2013, the word ‘FOMO’ is officially in the Oxford dictionary.

This word means that you fear missing out on something happening somewhere else and because you fear to miss out, it creates anxiety in you. You may think, “That’s not true, not everything matters to me,” but you still spend some time looking at it, don’t you? This especially affects those of the elite. They abound in knowledge and have seen many things. This is because they spend a lot of time to know these things and want to know more than others. They wish to obtain information of high quality and they constantly fear missing out information. This creates psychological problems. From this syndrome, a new problem arises.

An American investor coined another term, FOBO, ‘Fear Of Better Option’. What is the fear of the better option? The speaker quotes, “When your FOMO syndrome gets worse, it forms FOBO. if I choose A, it represents an opportunity cost of B, and because of that I cannot fully commit to this choice of A. If I constantly worry if B is the better choice, it creates anxiety in the future, the fear of making the wrong choice.” This is true for investors. When you invest, you may fear if you should have put your money somewhere else. Even more extremely, “I don’t want to do anything, because I’m scared of making choices so I’d rather make no choices at all.”

Do such symptoms resonate with you? Can we escape from all these troubles? The knowledge in the world is now in the explosive state of growth. The other day the speaker was at his son’s calling to bar and listened to what the Chief Justice said, “There exists this thing called the half-life of knowledge. The knowledge of half-life comes from an area of physics where radioactive substances become half-life. This can also apply to knowledge as well. In the past, the knowledge we learned, it’s half-life is about 20 years. If I leave electrical engineering and I graduated in 1987, the information I learned in university can be used for about 20 years. However, in the 90s, the half-life of information has decreased, and the information that you’ve learnt can only be used for about 10 years. In today’s context, perhaps if you study things like literature, this information doesn’t degrade itself. If you’re learning science, the half-life of what you learnt can be as short as a year. Whatever you learn within a year could have been replaced already. In such an age where information is growing so quickly, we’re constantly chasing new information if not we’ll be replaced”. (The half-life of knowledge is the amount of time before half of the knowledge in a particular area is shown to be untrue.)

Are these things to worry about? One thing to be sure of is that the truth never changes. If we spend our time chasing knowledge, we’ll never catch up. Our smartphones can give us information readily, but the danger is that whatever we see online may not be true. What’s true is in the Bible. What’s better worth of our time is to search for the truth in the Bible. In Hebrews 5:13-14;

13 ‘For everyone who partakes only of milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, for he is a babe.
14 But solid food belongs to those who are of full age, that is, those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil.’

Here encourages us to be skilled in the word of righteousness. If we’re unskilled, we’re like babies; we’re easily deceived. We of our full age can eat solid food, so we must have our senses exercised to discern both good and evil. If we’re discerning, we can tell what’s good and bad. The word in the Bible is something we must become skilled in - it doesn’t refer to just memorising the Bible, it refers to when we read the Bible and listen to the word of God, and if we can use it to edify. Can we understand? Can we explain it to others? Does it become a part of our faith, to act it out of our lives? If we can, then we’ve become skilled in the word of righteousness and can discern between good and evil and won’t be easily deceived by others and we’re firm in the Word.

Many of us like to use our gadgets to read the Bible, the speaker included. Through, some preachers don’t think it’s fully beneficial. Using our gadgets have their pros and cons. The speaker doesn’t know if you’ve already left your physical Bible on the bookshelf. In church, the speaker uses the softcopy Bible because it’s faster, especially for sermons but at home, he uses the physical Bible.

A pastor (of another church) tells others that we should still use the physical copy of the Bible. Some may say that the physical Bible is too heavy and the phone is more convenient, but the pastor shared online the benefits of using a physical Bible. One of the points included that when we use something digital, it causes distraction. When the speaker uses the soft copy Bible when listening to sermons, his habit will be to see if the interpreter interpreted correctly. If there’s a word interpreted wrongly, he’ll check the correct word for it in the dictionary. When he does it, he misses out on a point. Some people are not just looking at the Bible because our electronic devices are constantly connected to other things and so sometimes during sermons you hear the noise of a video. This is because they’re distracted from the sermon, and so the digital causes distraction.

Secondly, when we use our gadgets, it’s difficult to take notes. This applies more to the older generation because we’re more used to pen to paper. He’s not saying that the younger generation is not familiar with taking notes with the traditional note-taking but that so they may use their gadgets to use their phones for note-taking and reading the Bible. The flipping of the physical Bible can allow you to highlight or underline verses and you’re familiar with your own Bible. You’ll roughly know if this verse is at this side or another side of the page. Then, the Bible is yours and the word of God is yours. Whatever we see on the word of God is always on the same page but your tablet, you’ll treat it at a place where you see things. Subconsciously, you may not treasure this as the word of God. The speaker encourages us to go back to the physical Bible. Let us not be negatively influenced by all these new gadgets. While we know that there are benefits, we must be aware of the negative influences. We must overcome all these dangers.

The speaker shows a guy riding on top of the waves. The first picture the guy was surrounded by water. When we ride the waves, we must be in control of it and not be controlled by it.