Ep. 213: Yes, Our Culture Has Changed You
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Our Second Conversation with Tony Reinke
Have you ever the heard the saying, “Time is money”? In today’s culture, that has never been truer. There are so many things competing for our attention, each demanding something from us – our money, our time, our mindfulness, even our sleep. So, how do we know what to focus on? On this week’s episode of indoubt, Tony Reinke joins us again and this time we’re discussing his new book, Competing Spectacles. By talking through the things that compete for our attention, Isaac and Tony take the time to discuss the ultimate spectacle – Jesus, and how we should be responding to Him daily amidst the distractions of our culture.
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Kourtney Cromwell:
Welcome to the indoubt Podcast where we explore the challenging topics that young adults often face. Each week we talk with guests who help answer questions of faith, life, and culture, connecting them to our daily experiences and God’s Word. For more info on indoubt, visit indoubt.ca.
Kourtney Cromwell:
Hey everyone, this is Kourtney and I’m so happy you’re joining us for this episode of indoubt. We recently had Tony Reinke as our guest, and if you want to check it out (it’s Episode 203), and he’s with us one more time to talk about his latest book, Competing Spectacles: Treasuring Christ in the Media Age. So the focus of today’s conversation is taking a look at what pulls at us in today’s culture that distracts us in the every day.
Whether you’re listening on your drive, at the gym or at home, no matter where you’re listening actually, I hope that this episode grabs your attention enough to make a difference, or at least ask yourself some important questions. So here’s the episode with Isaac and Tony Reinke.
Isaac Dagneau:
With me today is Tony Reinke and my name is Isaac, one of the hosts of indoubt. Tony is an author, he’s a journalist, a not-for-profit journalist, and he’s a senior writer for Desiring God, and you may have heard his voice before because he’s the host of the Ask Pastor John podcast with John Piper. So I’d like to welcome you again to indoubt, Tony.
Tony Reinke:
I appreciate it. Thanks, Isaac.
Isaac Dagneau:
For those listening, we’ve had the opportunity to already have a conversation with Tony on his book that he wrote some years ago called 12 Ways Your Phone is Changing You, so we had the discussion about that book. We talked about digital detox, different things like that, so I’d encourage you to go check out our archive and find that and take a listen. Now, Tony though, for those who perhaps haven’t listened to that previous conversation we had, and they’re unfamiliar with who you are, I’m just wondering if you could introduce yourself.
Tony Reinke:
Yeah, appreciate it. My name is Tony Reinke, a non-profit Christian journalist. I live in Phoenix, Arizona now with my wife, and we have three kiddos, an 18-year-old son, a 14-year-old daughter and a 12-year-old son. I’m the author of five books, two on technology and media, and I work for DesiringGod.org as you said, and I host the popular Ask Pastor John podcast with John Piper. That podcast is now 1400 episodes in, and I had no idea it would continue to go after the first year, but here we are about to turn seven years old on January 11th so it’s been a lot of fun working with Pastor John on that project.
Isaac Dagneau:
Yeah, that’s so good. And just to ask, do you think your 18-year-old’s going to get at you for calling him a kiddo on this. I don’t know what their temperaments are, but anyway, I just thought I’d let you know.
Tony Reinke:
Yeah, he’s now a man, just turned 18. It’s hard to… Yeah, he’s a man now. It’s hard because it’s never been that way.
Isaac Dagneau:
Okay, yeah, so you’ve redeemed that. That’s good. And Tony, can you just share a little bit about your own testimony coming to faith in Jesus?
Tony Reinke:
Yeah, so I was a good, obedient, Lutheran, and I was that way all my life. Went to church every Sunday, got good grades, obeyed my parents and did what I thought was all the right things. I was baptized as an infant. I was confirmed at 13, was the good kid. And then it was at the age of 21 that I realized that I was actually a sinner in need of grace, that I couldn’t save myself by my own self-righteousness, and that happened in a sermon on Luke 18 on the Parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector that hit me just like a freight train at age 21 and changed everything for me.
Isaac Dagneau:
Yeah, that’s so good. Well, thank you for sharing that.
Tony Reinke:
You bet.
Isaac Dagneau:
Tony, you’ve recently, like very recently, written a book called Competing Spectacles. Now, for those of us that have no idea, and we haven’t seen any book trailers or any summaries of that book whatsoever, what is the theme of this book and what do you mean by spectacles?
Tony Reinke:
Yeah, so a spectacle is a moment in time of varying length in which a collective gaze is fixed on something specific. Could be an image, could be an event, could be a Twitter moment. A spectacle is something that captures human attention, an instant when our eyes and our brain focuses and fixates on something that’s projected at us. In an outrage society like ours, spectacles are often controversies, so the latest scandal in sports, in entertainment or politics. I think there’s some political controversies going on these days. You know, a spark, a little tweet just grows into a viral flame on social media, and it ignites into millions of feeds of users. That’s a spectacle.
In our delete culture, delete culture itself makes for captivating spectacle, sort of grab the pitchforks and let’s go get somebody and take them out. And as our media gets faster and faster, those spectacles become smaller and smaller, so the most minuscule public slip of the tongue or passive aggressive celebrity comment or hypocritical political image, those become spectacles in and of themselves.
And so often the most of viral social media spectacles are often very spicy tales that are later exposed to be fake, false news. So whether it’s true or false or fiction, a spectacle is some moment captured that holds together a collective gaze, and that’s the focus of this book. So a spectacle, I mean this is very, very broad in general when we start to press into it. A spectacle can come as a brilliant photograph, an eye-catching billboard, a creative animation, a magazine centerfold, a witty commercial, a music video. It can be an advertisement; it can be a sarcastic anti-advertisement. We’re seeing lots of those now, like KFC is like making these fake ads, like, “We know you’re watching an ad, so let’s be in on the joke.” It’s kind of like this, you know, like they’re elbowing us in the side saying, “Ha ha, watch. We’re making an advertisement and you know we’re making an advertisement, and we’re telling you we’re making…” You know, it’s like this big inside joke.
That happens with sitcoms too, even movies about movies. So spectacles go meta, you know, TV shows about TV shows, ads about ads, movies about movies, and spectacles are this sort of ambitious, in one sense they can become this ambitious video game landscape in video games. I mean, we’re starting to see that now, just some amazing immersive gaming technology that is making video games more addictive than they’ve ever been before, and more mesmerizing too.
So it could be that. It could be just a sports clip of an athlete’s glory or injury. It could be a viral GIF on social media. All of that is spectacle, and our culture is awash in spectacle, so awash that we’re seeing competing spectacles. So there’s huge competition to grab as many eyes as possible. So the president’s tweets get more insane. The pranks get more insane. The daredevil tricks become more insane. There’s stiff competition for eyes in this attention market, as it’s been called. And the competition presses us into competition for our attention.
And also, here’s the catch: God claims our attention too, and that’s where the spiritual tension comes into play.
Isaac Dagneau:
Interesting. Okay. Well I want to get to that more spiritual aspect in a little bit here, but before we jump there, you say early on in your book, “Spectacles can lead us to be self-centred or self-forgetting or others-focused.” And now when you read that, and I mean you obviously give some more context there as well, but this implies the very influential power that spectacles can have on either the person that is the centre of the spectacle or just the many eyes that are watching. So I’m just wondering if you could elaborate on the power of spectacles in our lives?
Tony Reinke:
Yeah, so that argument there in the book is, I’m talking about the Super Bowl, which is a mass spectacle that gathers our attention in different ways. So, if you go to the stadium live and in person, you’re inside the stadium roaring with, you know, 60,000 people. So you’re viewing the spectacle live and in person, but you can also watch that game live and remotely inside your living room with six friends watching the big Super Bowl. Or you can also watch highlight clips of the Super Bowl the next day on demand, on your phone by yourself.
So spectacles can gather together huge crowds. They can also be taken in in smaller crowds, and they can be taken in in isolation. That’s basically the only point I’m trying to make there is that spectacles can be all three, live and in person, live and remote, on demand in isolation. So, what I’m saying there is that when I define spectacles, I’m not saying that everybody’s looking at the same thing at the same time, because you can now look at a spectacle on demand and offset it in the time and space. That’s all the point I’m really trying to make there.
But what’s interesting about the Super Bowl is it’s a prime example of just how popular spectacles overlap. So they don’t just compete for our attention. They coalesce their powers to create an even more captivating spectacle such that, you know, the Super Bowl becomes a hybrid of athletic spectacles on the field, celebrity spectacles on the sidelines, and then entertainment spectacles at halftime, and then with advertising spectacles all over the place and in between all the play action. So, all of this together generates a mass interest for the latest consumables, for foods, for devices, for video games, for Hollywood movie releases. All of these big cultural players, the big cultural spectacle makers, they meet at the Super Bowl and feed off one another to create this four-hour, layered, multi-feast for the eyes.
And so spectacles are becoming a huge industry, that especially when you watch the Super Bowl, you see so many different layers of them coming together that it’s the prime place to point and say, “You want to know what it means to live in the age of spectacles? Look at the Super Bowl because that’s where they all meet.”
Isaac Dagneau:
Right, right. Yeah, no, that’s helpful. And you say then, and I think most of us are kind of already understanding this a little bit more, but you also say in your book, you know, “Spectacles want something from us.” So help, help us understand that. I mean, if these big companies like Nike and Budweiser, they probably hired, someone called the marketer, but they’re really the person that needs to create the biggest spectacle, right?
Tony Reinke:
Yes.
Isaac Dagneau:
They want something from us. So yeah, elaborate on that.
Tony Reinke:
Yeah, that’s right. We consume spectacles, so in a sense our first relationship to spectacles is that we consume them, but we don’t merely ingest them. We respond to them. And this is kind of the aha moment that I had five or six years ago. I was like, “Oh, I need to write a book on this,” because when we see a spectacle, most likely that spectacle wants something from us. So visual images awaken the motives in our hearts. Images tug at the strings of our actions. Images want us to celebrate them. Images want our all. Images want our affection. Images want our time, our approval, our buy-in, our re-spreading power on social media. Or maybe they just want our wallets. They want our money.
So you can think of this, with the porn industry, the porn industry wants your lust. If you look at YouTube, YouTubers will give you new spectacles in exchange for your views and your likes. Netflix will flat out give you new spectacles because they want your most precious commodity, they want your time. And Netflix has come out and actually said in public their greatest enemy is not HBO, it is not other streaming services. Netflix greatest enemy is our sleep. So Netflix is after our sleep. They’re after our time, our wakefulness. They’re trying to get us to stay up later to binge shows. Politicians want our votes. The gaming industry wants our money. And so from each of them come this vast array of eye-grabbing spectacles, and each demands something from us.
Another way to say this is attention is the currency of power. Attention is the currency of power. The more plays or likes you give something, the more it grows in power, so there’s a social dynamic to this. If you want to make something trend on social media, you’re giving it incredible power in our society because you’re giving it attention. And if enough people give something enough attention, that attention gets turned into power. So if you make something viral, you’ve accumulated power that you then can use to get something from an audience. Again, that might be votes if you’re a politician, or money if you’re trying to sell something, but attention is the currency of power. That’s what it means to live in an attention market like ours.
Isaac Dagneau:
So what are these spectacles offering us, and maybe beyond just the material thing, like obviously it’s not just the can of beer from Budweiser, but what are they trying to offer us through their spectacles?
Tony Reinke:
Well, in a lot of cases they’re trying to offer us an image, an identity that we want. We talked about this a little bit in the last episode that we recorded, is if you have friends in the goth community and you want to be pulled into that community and loved by that community, you’re going to dress a certain way. You’re going to put on a costume that’s black, you’re going to wear goth clothing because you’re looking for love from those people.
This is another one of the fascinating things about the spectacles that we see in the Super Bowl or on TV. Like if you ever asked yourself the question like, “Why have I seen the same advertisement like a hundred times?” Seriously. There are certain ads by certain companies that we see a hundred times and we see them; those are the ads that are launched at the Super Bowl. So you’d see the first one at the Super Bowl and then you just boom, boom, boom for years you see the same images, same advertisement over and over, and that’s called cultural imprinting.
The reason why advertisers do this is because the assumption is the more somebody sees an advertisement, the more they assume that the image presented in that advertising has taken on a normative place in society. So if I’ve seen an advertisement for 20, 30, 40 times, I can assume that everybody in this world, everybody in my culture has the same assumption about what that product offers. And so if I buy that product and if I use that product, then I can assume that the people around me are going to view me in a certain light, so that’s called cultural imprinting. That’s just a dynamic that works more in a lot of advertising. The more you see the ad, the more you assume that this thing, like if it’s an Apple device, you know, if you own an Apple device, you are creative, you are a streamlined, you are cutting edge, you are aesthetically, you have an aesthetic appetite. Apple products carry a certain cultural imprinting with them that to be seen with an Apple device means that the culture is going to view you that way.
That’s kind of a long answer, but cultural imprinting is something I take up in the book and talk about because I think it’s one of the fascinating things. So we’re trying to fit in, we’re trying to have a certain identity that other people see in us. It’s a very complex relationship that we have with spectacles.
Isaac Dagneau:
Yeah, no. That’s really helpful. So yeah, like you said, spectacles are offering us this image of where other people can look at us and they say, “Wow, they’re cultured, they’re cool, they have this.” We’ve given them our attention. We’ve given them our money. We’ve given them our power because our view of the spectacle, and they’ve offered to us this image that we now get to project to others.
This is maybe a good way to slowly get into this greater spectacle that you talk about. Why is it that when we do buy into what these spectacles offer, we are never fully satisfied? Why is it that I have my MacBook, but then when the newest one comes out I’m like, “Oh well, I’m old news.” Why is it that we never are fully satisfied when we buy into?
Tony Reinke:
Yeah, I’m exactly wired the same way too. It’s because the Bible says that, “Sheol and Abaddon are never satisfied, and never satisfied are the eyes of man.” That’s Proverbs 27:20. “Sheol and Abaddon are never satisfied, and never satisfied are the eyes of man.” So the graveyard, Sheol is like a graveyard, is never full of bodies because Sheol is an open mouth, always consuming life, day and night consuming life. So too are our eyes, so our eyes are insatiable. They’re always roving, never satisfied by anything in this world. And our fallen eyes tug us towards death. That’s what that passage is talking about, which means our great enemy is not external seducers. Our greatest enemy is not the spectacle makers. Our greatest enemy is our own insatiable eye lust that leads to death. That’s Proverbs 27:20. That’s what it’s saying. And that’s absolutely frightening.
I mean, another passage that comes to mind is Numbers 15:39 where God is telling Moses what to say to the people of Israel. And He says, you know, “Remind them that they’re not going to follow the will of God. They’re not going to follow My will and My word because, ‘They’re following after their own eyes.'” So if you fill your eyes with the spectacles of this world, you will grow deaf to the voice of God.
And so the Psalmist, this is why the Psalmist cries out to God in Psalm 119:37, I think it is. The Psalmist says, “Turn my eyes from looking at worthless things and give me life in your ways.” So the fullness of life is not the fullness of eyes. That’s what our culture says. If you want full life, fill your eyes. That’s where our culture tells us. And God’s Word says, “No. Fullness of life is not fullness of eyes.” And that is the competition that we feel because we can fill our eyes with endless spectacles in every direction. In the end, it’s just a feeding on debt. It will not fill us. It will not give us life.
And so that is just reiterate over and over, and this is what it means to have faith, to live by faith is to not live by spectacle.
Isaac Dagneau:
Yeah, yeah. That’s so good, Tony. So I think this is a good time then, like what is this beauty of the greater spectacle that you as a Christian and your ministry that you want to really help people. You’re pointing to another spectacle, one that’s actually going to last.
Tony Reinke:
Yeah, absolutely. So spoiler alert: Book is in two sections. The first half is, The Age of Spectacle, and the second half is, The Divine Spectacle that I’m talking about. So, the response to the spectacle age is not to just throw away all spectacles, because into this spectacle-loving world with all of its spectacle makers and all of this spectacle making industries and technologies came the greatest spectacle ever devised in the mind of God and brought about in world history. That is the cross of Jesus Christ.
Christ crucified is the hinge of all history. It’s the point of contact between BC and AD. It’s where all time collides. It’s where all human spectacles meet one unsurpassed cosmic divine spectacle. And so, from this moment on, from the cross on, God intends all human gaze to centre itself on this climactic moment. It’s as if God says to the world, “This is My beloved Son, crucified for you, a spectacle for your hearts forever.”
And so by design, by God’s divine design, Christians are pro-spectacle and we give our entire lives to the spectacle of Christ crucified, which is historically past and it’s presently invisible. We can’t see it, but this is the divine spectacle that’s at the centre of the Christian life. This is the ballast in our boat and only by faith can we see this ultimate spectacle. And in Him we see that this is the life that I now live. The life I live is now the life that He’s given me in His Cross.
So the supreme spectacle of the cross brings a collision with all of the spectacles of this world and we’re caught in the middle. So, I have been crucified to the world, and the world has been crucified to me, as the apostle Paul talks about. Our response to the ultimate spectacle of the cross is what defines us, and that puts us in direct tension with an age that is driven by what you can see.
And so depending on how you see it, the cross is one of two things. It’s one of two spectacles. Either it was the mocking of a faux, fake King, or it was the coronation of the true King of the universe. The cross was either a tragic misunderstanding and a ruthless murder of an innocent man, or it was a pre-planned, spectacle, orchestrated by God to display His beauty, unsurpassed to the world.
And so, the spectacle of Christ is driven home in conversion when we look back on our life and we see that our sins are what put Christ on that tree, and He who loves me, I have pierced. Now to unfollow on eyes, and to redeemed eyes even, the cross was the spectacle that this world has never and will never rival in weight or significance or glory. It is the divine spectacle of the cosmos.
So Christians aren’t anti-spectacle. What we’re saying is God has a spectacle that orients and centres our life, and that spectacle then creates tension, competing spectacles into the Christian life.
Isaac Dagneau:
Yeah, that’s so good. And help us out here because some of us may be thinking about this, and maybe we haven’t delved down too deep to kind of understand some of the underpinning. So obviously we weren’t there at the cross. We didn’t see, and we’re thinking with our eyeballs, we didn’t see Christ crucified, like we can see the commercials at the Super Bowl, like we can see some of the spectacles today. So how does that work? Do we have to go watch The Passion of the Christ? Is that the way? How does that work? How do we see, but we can’t see this great spectacle?
Tony Reinke:
Exactly. We have to see as God sees, which is faith. We don’t see as the world sees, which is sight. Right now, God has postponed sight. One day our eyes are going to be filled to the brim with visible spectacle. When we see the glorified Jesus Christ and we see him face to face, from that moment on we won’t need faith. We won’t need hope because we’ll be in the presence of the glorified Jesus Christ. And so, there’s coming a day when we will have our eyes satisfied, completely satisfied by a spectacle, a visible spectacle, but right now God has chosen faith to be the way in which we see this spectacle. So, we see as God sees not as man sees.
Now the interesting thing about going to watch The Passion or watch some movie like that, is a lot of the dynamics that make the cross the cross are invisible even in the visible display. So, most movies that present the death of Jesus Christ present it as just a tragedy of an innocent man dying a painful death, when in fact you have to understand what was happening on the spiritual dimension. You have to understand that God was pouring out His righteous wrath on Jesus Christ in the place of sinners. You cannot picture that in a movie. I mean you could try, but it’d be very hard to put a visible, physical representation of what it would mean for Christ to drink the dregs of God’s wrath. You can’t picture that.
Even if you were standing there watching the cross unfold, there’s a spectacle element to it that’s still invisible. There’s a spiritual reality there that you can’t see, but by faith, and so it all comes back to this faith. We walk by faith and not by sight. And so that’s part of the ways to look at this.
Again, it’s not saying that God is anti-sight because when you look at the beatific vision, when you look at that moment when we’ll see Jesus as He is fully manifested in His glory, we will be changed instantaneously. We will be made perfect. We will be made sinless, actually sinless in that moment. And that is a site that we live towards.
So I could waste my life binging Netflix, or I could look forward to that future sight of seeing Jesus Christ face-to-face. I’m not saying that you can’t have in a sense both, like I don’t think God is anti-spectacle in the sense that you can’t watch movies, you can’t watch live sports. I’m not making that argument at all. I’m saying what is the true spectacle that’s got your heart? Because if it’s the next Bears game and it’s not Christ, then then we’ve got to talk, you know?
Isaac Dagneau:
Yeah. And you know, as you share this, something that’s been really helping me out, encouraging me lately is I just feel like I keep seeing this in the Bible, because you’re talking about this idea of I’m seeing with eyes of faith.
Tony Reinke:
Yes.
Isaac Dagneau:
But you can only have faith in something that you know or have been told or have been promised, and you get that through good old black and white words. That’s how you understand what you need to have faith in, or someone’s told you, so you’ve heard it through communication, through words. As I’ve been reading, something that really caught me is reading Deuteronomy 4 and Moses is telling the second-generation Israelites at the Plains of Moab before they go in the Promised Land, and he says he’s recounting their parents’ experience at Mount Horeb, at Mount Sinai. And he says, “You did not see God. You did not see Yahweh. You saw no form, but you only heard words.”
And the very next chapter, he recounts the same event again, then he said, “You met God face-to-face.” It seems like a paradox, like what do you mean you saw no form, but you saw him face-to-face, and all throughout, I’ve just been so encouraged that we do, you do see, it’s just a different kind of sight. So we can see, like you said, with the eyes of faith, just like you’re seeing Him face-to-face. But it’s through hearing the Word of God.
Tony Reinke:
That’s so good.
Isaac Dagneau:
I find that very encouraging.
Tony Reinke:
The apostle Paul even pushes this a little bit further in Galatians 3:1 when he tells the church in Galatia, he’s like, “Why are you turning away from the gospel when, ‘it was before your eyes that Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified?'” So he’s telling them, “How can you turn away from this cross when you’ve seen the cross? Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified in front of your eyes.” Now the crazy thing about that is probably nobody in the Galatian church was there to physically see Jesus crucified. So the question is, what in the world is Paul talking about there?
There’s different theories on this, but I mean he’s literally saying it’s as if, “Christ was crucified.” He uses the word like we would use for billboard, like, “Publicly portrayed as a billboard. Christ was crucified. You saw him like a billboard, crucified.” And he’s speaking metaphorically there, he’s speaking symbolically of His preaching. Like His preaching was so, so sincere and it was so affectionate that to hear a really good cross-centred sermon is as if you’ve beheld the spectacle.
Isaac Dagneau:
Yeah. That’s so good.
Tony Reinke:
That I think is the only way you can understand Galatians 3:1 so vividly, so impressively that the hearers imagine the matter to have happened right before their eyes. There’s great albums that preach Christ and great sermons that preach Christ, and in a sense it’s more than I’m just hearing about the cross. In a sense I’m beholding the spectacle.
Isaac Dagneau:
Yeah, yeah. That’s so good. In light of that, Tony, and as we slowly start to close here, what are different ways that you’ve learned in your own life to give more attention to this greater spectacle over and above the many very easily accessible and free spectacles of our world, especially in light of the fact that so many of those easily accessible spectacles are literally for our eyeballs and they’re very easy to ingest, whereas this greater one is… it takes a little bit something else. Yeah. Give us some of those.
Tony Reinke:
Well, I talked about this in the last podcast, so I’ll just kind of talk about it again. I mean, because attention is the currency of power in our attention market, the more plays or likes means the more power you give something. And so a digital detox is what I talked about last time, and I’ll just reiterate it again. I mean, a digital detox is so important because it’s a withdrawal from this power currency system. It’s a type of fasting. It’s a way, you know, when we talk about food, we talk about, “Food is not my God. Food is not my comfort. Food is not the basis of my happiness. God is.” And so we use food rightly when God is at the centre of our lives, not food.
And so in this attention-driven market of this glut of digital images, you can imagine how fasting becomes even more urgent. You know, fasting from our smart phones, fasting from screens, fasting from Netflix is a pretty counter-cultural way of saying the endless spectacles of digital media available to me on my phone or on my screens, they’re not my God. This sort of self-affirmation that I seek, the glory that I seek, the joy that I seek on screens is not the basis of my happiness. My true happiness is deeper than that. It’s based in God’s acceptance of me and my union with Jesus Christ, His Son.
I think going back to that, I’m a broken record, like, digital detoxes are essential. People probably won’t even know what a broken record is, right? I’m dating myself. Broken record’s where the needle gets stuck and you keep hearing the same track, the same line over and over and over and over again. But I think it needs to be said that digital detoxes are essential because we have the spectacles, we have 3D movies, we have CGI, which is just amazing, amazing technology. We have these landscapes in gaming that are just stunning and they’re good gifts.
When we take a break from them, we say to God, “You are greater than these spectacles. You are greater than this gaming landscape. You’re greater than my video games. You’re greater than Netflix. You’re greater than the movies that I enjoy.” It’s a way of saying like all fasting, it’s a sanctified gratitude. It’s a way to ensure that our lives centre on the gift-giver and not on his proliferation of gifts.
Isaac Dagneau:
Yeah, that’s so good. And you know, I’m just thinking about those listening today. Maybe they’re on the bus, maybe they’re cleaning their bathroom. Maybe they’re just with their headphones on, wherever they… I mean, this is where I listen to podcasts too, right? So if they’re listening, and right now in their life, they can’t do a digital detox, what’s something they can do today that maybe could grow that captivation of this greater spectacle?
Tony Reinke:
Yeah, I think that the immediate thing that we can do is to guard our affections with everything. Spectacles want our affections, and Christ wants your affections too, and this is competition, and we can take time. A lot of times we have so many spectacles and media’s so loud in our lives, we don’t take time to ask ourselves, “What is it that’s really driving my life right now? What is it that my heart most wants right now?” And we can do that in the quiet moments of our lives. We can make quiet moments to think this way about does Christ really have my attention? You know, He died for me. He was buried for me. He was raised to eternal life for me. He bought my eternal joy.
I know by faith there’s nothing more thrilling, nothing greater, there’s no greater spectacle. But does He really have my heart? What is it that really has my heart, and that should drive us to pray, that should drive us to commune with God and say, “You know what, God? I see all these spectacles and my eyes are captivated by all these spectacles, I want to be a man of God, a woman of God, a child of God who has my heart riveted on this spectacle of Your Son, Jesus Christ, because You told us He is the most beautiful thing in the universe. ‘This is My beloved Son in whom I’m well pleased.’ Jesus leaves that highest accolade of what delights Him for His Son. And I want that to be true of my heart, and too often it’s not.”
And so that’s immediate, like if you’re listening to this podcast right now and you’re about to hit pause, it’s about to be over, take time to ask the Lord to expose what is it that I’m really after? And that’s hard and that’s intimidating, but it is so easy to drift away from the greatest spectacle of the universe. If we neglect, if our attention neglects Christ, we will drift away from Him. That’s what Hebrews chapter two verses one to three is all about. When our tension neglects Christ, we will drift away from Him.
And this drift is felt most clearly when we find ourselves always seeking after a new thrill in our media. We lose our interest in the person of Christ, declining interest in the Bible. We yawn through good Christ-centred sermons. We sleep right through the Lord’s table spiritually. You know, we’re not thinking about what this represents, and so Christ grows boring compared to the latest digital thrills.
So what do we do? We pump new throws and our worship services to try and compete with the volume of digital thrills of our age, right? But we’re really only spotlighting the decay of our Holy affections because we’ve grown bored with Christ and to be bored with Christ is to be disconnected with the greatest thrill of the cosmos, disconnected from God’s purpose for this creation, which is a theatre to display the worth and beauty of Jesus Christ. It’s what it’s all about.
So there’s no greater catastrophic loss imaginable to the soul than to grow weary of Jesus Christ, the spectacle of all spectacles. And if I’m right, if this is true, and I think it is, this type of catastrophic loss is accelerated in a media age like ours that inundates us with 360 degrees of digital images coming at us 24/7. So that’s what’s at stake.
And so getting very practical, it’s just like, let’s take time to see, “Lord, expose to me what is it that truly drives my life?”
Isaac Dagneau:
Yeah, that’s so good. It reminds me when you said, “Netflix’s greatest enemy is sleep.” Well, maybe the greatest enemy of all spectacle makers of this world are our affections for Christ.
Tony Reinke:
Absolutely.
Isaac Dagneau:
Absolutely.
Tony Reinke:
It absolutely will be the case, yup.
Isaac Dagneau:
Well, I think this is a great place to end this conversation, so Tony I just want to thank you so much again for taking the time to chat with us.
Tony Reinke:
Oh, it’s my joy. Let’s do this again.
Kourtney Cromwell:
It’s so good that we could have Tony Reinke join us, and I hope that through this episode you’ll be able to take some time to think about what kind of person you’re trying to be in culture, or what spectacles draw you away from Jesus. If you’d like to find out more information about Tony’s book that we talked about, you can go to his website at TonyReinke.com or check out wherever books are sold. And if you’d like to follow Tony on social media, we’ll have his links up on the episode page online along with anything that we’ve talked about in this episode.
Check back with us for next week’s episode where Daniel will be talking with Peter Yoon, who’s a Next Gen Pastor. The two of them are discussing the impact that summer camp can have on kids, youth, and young adults alike, so I hope that you join us for that episode too.
Kourtney Cromwell:
Thanks so much for listening. If you want to hear more, subscribe on iTunes and Spotify or visit us online at indoubt.ca or indoubt.com. We’re also on social media, so make sure to follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.
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Who's Our Guest?
Tony Reinke
episode links
Tony Reinke:
- 12 Ways Your Phone is Changing You
- TonyReinke.com
- @TonyReinke
- Desiring God
- Ask Pastor John Podcast
Luke 18:9-14
Grape Nuts – Hot or Cold? | Ask Pastor John Podcast
How to Survive a Zombie Apocalypse | Ask Pastor John Podcast
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
Isaiah 54
Isaiah 28
1 Corinthians 6:12
1 Corinthians 10:23
Why We Must Digitally Fast | Tony Reinke