“What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices?
says the LORD;
I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams
and the fat of well-fed beasts;
I do not delight in the blood of bulls,
or of lambs, or of goats. | Isaiah 1:11
At our men’s breakfast on Saturday, I had conversations about church planting, self-driving cars, and ChatGPT. On Sunday, I preached on Paul’s thorn in the flesh and his statement: For when I am weak, then I am strong. Am I going to attempt to tie all of this together? Yes, I am.
To start, let me explain what ChatGPT is (to the best of my ability). This is a self-learning AI that uses existing content to create new products. For example, I could ask it to write a sermon on 2 Corinthians 12, based on the style of my previous sermons, and it could give me a preachable text (roughly the same length of my sermons and most likely opening with: ‘grab your Bibles and open them up to 2 Corinthians 12). Students have discovered that it can write their essays and even art shows are being overwhelmed by AI-produced works. This is a game-changer to how writing and creating is done.
Same is true of self-driving cars. As we develop the technology for cars to detect other cars and road signs – the safety of self-driving gets better. As a matter of fact, the way that it gets safer is for more and more people to let go of the wheel and let the computers take over.
The conversation that I had about church planting was in reference to the best way to start a new church. Technology offers us a number of new options, including: video venues, campus models, and mega-churches. As we develop new churches, we have more choices of how to structure these new expressions of Christ’s church. We should plant churches, because there are some unique benefits to starting new congregations (outlined well in THIS article by Tim Keller). Many of these benefits are born out of the challenges. People grow when they face the adversity of building something new. Some of the options are more effective in quickly establishing a church, but they do so at the expense of spiritual growth.
Which brings me to the sermon Sunday. We looked at God telling Paul that his hindrance was for his benefit. Whatever the ‘thorn’ was, it kept Paul from being as effective as he could be without it. Paul learned to be content with this, because God made it clear:
“My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” | 2 Corinthians 12:9a
Paul has been forced by God to view his ministry through the lens of process over product. God’s power is being ‘made perfect’ in Paul through weakness; it is the journey that produces the benefit, not Paul’s impressiveness. God is doing His most important work through human failures. Which has an impact on the other topics addressed here.
If church planting is about creating a church that can rival the other churches (because we want people to choose one over the other), then it will always be about the product. Whatever it takes to draw people and meet their needs will be where to put time and money. If the church is a sanctification factory, that exists to mature people in the faith, then struggle and failures are not a bad thing. Impressing people takes a back seat to elevating God!
The path to self-driving cars produces people who do not drive well (in the same way that smart phones are making us far worse with directions and remembering details). When the technology fails (because it always does) an unprepared populace will not be ready to take over the controls and steer to safety. We will be at the mercy of our technology.
The brings us to the newest tech, ChatGPT. There are certainly a number of places that having AI fill in the gaps can be useful (writing computer code is one of them). To replace the artist with a good picture, minimizes what an artist is doing. To have ChatGPT write your college paper robs you of the learning what you are paying the college for. To produce a sermon via AI, cuts the work of the Holy Spirit on the heart of the pastor from the process. In all of these instances, the work of formation is sacrificed in order to get an easier (and potentially better) product.
As Christians, we need to remember that God is not ultimately interested in product. If He wanted this world fixed, he could do it in a moment. He could have created the New Heavens and the New Earth right from the start and avoided all of the sinful messiness of humanity. He didn’t do this because He works through process. The quote from Isaiah at the top is an example of this. God is telling Israel that He hates the sacrifices…that He told them to do. The reason is because they are going through the motions, focusing on the product, when He is interested in what the process is there to reveal: His grace and goodness.
It is only when we recognize His ends and stop spending our lives on perfecting product, that we can learn to appreciate the process. The reason why Paul can be: content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities is because he sees these as part of the process that God uses to shape us. When shaping becomes the goal, then we can start looking at everything in this world as either helping us to become more dependent on God or keeping us from this power. Sometimes this means not taking part in things that make life easier. While this may hinder your ability to keep up with others in the rat race, and may cause you to look weak in the eyes of your peers, weakness is not something to be afraid of. It is actually the means to finding a power that no technology or human being can produce, because it comes from God.
Let me end with a quote that came up in another conversation I had this week:
Our greatest fear should not be of failure … but of succeeding at things in life that don’t really matter. | Francis Chan