Today's reading: Exodus 38; Philippians 4
In a time of endless social media and 24-hour news, Paul’s admonition to be proactive in what we think about seems especially pertinent.
Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, dwell on these things.
On the one hand, I don’t know that we dwell on much of anything these days. We have trained our brains for immediate distraction, jumping constantly from one thing to the next. Between Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, SnapChat, phone games, news, and I’m sure dozens of other things that I’m not thinking of or haven’t even heard of yet, we fill every moment of silence or stillness with a continuous stream of entertainment. We have lost the ability to just sit quietly, present in and to the world around us, and resting in the peace of God that Paul says we should be enjoying.
On the other hand, in those moments between technological distractions and entertainments when we do hear our own thoughts, those thoughts are driven and informed by what we are soaking our minds in all day, and social media, news, and games are not really known for being bastions of truth, honor, justice, purity, love, commendability, excellence, and praise-worthiness.
Maybe I’m wrong on this one, but I think we need this so much more today than they did when Paul wrote it. Yes, they had plenty of negative things to dwell on, and they could spend their time thinking about the local gossip, the wrongs that had been done to them, their difficult financial situation, the bad weather for crops, and 1000 other things, but at least they were thinking. They were not so distracted by a constant IV drip of entertainment that they needed to reclaim the ability to think, they just needed to reclaim what they were thinking about and focusing on for the Lord.
But for us, I think Paul’s words take on extra layers of challenge.
First and foremost, we have to learn to dwell again. We have to put our phones down, turn off the tv, walk away from the computer and the video game systems and practice sitting quietly. We have to fight through the technological withdrawal and retrain our brains to not need a constant flow of content if we ever hope to be able to “dwell on these things.” And this is no small challenge. Smartphones and streaming services have literally re-wired our brains, and it will take an intentional, sustained effort to start to undo that wiring and turn our minds back over to the Lord.
Then, as we reclaim the ability to sit quietly with our own thoughts, we have the added challenge of an entire world of negativity and drama available for us to dwell on. Yes, there were plenty of negative things for the Philippians to be stewing over, but those things were really limited to the personal and the local. They didn’t have the internet. They didn’t have the connections we do to the rest of the world. And whether you want to admit it or not, the content you consume isn’t innocuous. Controversy, negativity, drama, etc. drive views and clicks much more than anything positive, so all of these content providers are incentivized to give us all of the exactly wrong things to dwell on. We are constantly drinking from a global firehose of all that is directly opposite of what Paul says we should be dwelling on…
We have to fight for this. The Philippians had to be told to fight for this, and we are starting way behind them, so we cannot afford to not fight for this.
I challenge anybody reading this to start today. Out of the busyness and distractions, turn it all off, walk away from it, and spend just 5 minutes actively thinking about whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, whatever is excellent and whatever is worthy of praise.
It’s time we reclaim our thoughts and our minds for the Lord.
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