Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Are You the Main Character of Your Life? | Torah | Exodus 2:23-25

Episode Date: May 10, 2022

Social media makes you the center of every story. Is this the result of technology, or was it already a natural desire? Tanya uses Exodus 2:23-35 to discuss how God works to make himself the main character of every story. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so others can find it too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Facebook, and Twitter @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passages: Exodus 2:23-35 Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now.

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life in the time it takes to get to work. I'm Tanya Wilmeth, and right now we're in the book of Exodus. So would you sign up for something that promised to make you more stupid? Is that what we're doing when we pick up our phones? Grocery line, living room couch, bleachers, walking trail, kids' bedrooms, restaurant tables. Are we addicted to something that's eating away at wisdom and intellect we've invested years to build? There's a YouTuber with 32 million viewers and an estimated 32 million in net worth. And he's 10 years old.

Ryan from Ryan's world. Ryan or somebody in his world has a full-time job making videos where Ryan lives his life as a kid. He plays with toys. He goes to the grocery store. He plays board games. He does silly challenges. Ryan is probably a genius. What about the millions of kids watching Ryan?

Jonathan Haidt recently published an article in the Atlantic called Why the Past Ten Years of American Life have been uniquely stupid. In comparing America to the 2010 version of ourselves, he says, we are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth, were cut off from one another and from the past. What's to blame, according to Haidt, for this disorientation and disconnection and isolation? Well, we've been trained by social media. Notice that word trained. We're not using social media. It's using us. It's doing to us rather than vice versa.

He says social media has, among many things, trained users to spend more time performing and less time connecting. Now, I think what social media also does is make us the center of every single story. We live in a world where we always get to be the main character. the protagonist, the hero, the victim. For kids, it means they watch other kids play instead of playing with each other. In a social media world, there are no battles over who's going to be the king and who's going to be the royal subject or who gets invited into the clubhouse or not.

They miss out on opportunities to work out conflict and get pushback on their budding personalities. And for teens, it means you know where everyone is all the time because of the snap map. and it also means you always know when people are together and you're not invited. For adults, it means we can promote a brand that may or may not really exist or a family, a relationship that may not be what it appears. It's also a place where your news and events are specially curated according to what you like. Your narrative gets smaller and smaller as the algorithms shrink your content to things that only supports your opinions and preferences.

Alas, you are the main character. character of your story or your pity party. We become people seduced by our own curated narratives. We cling to what we believe because our egos don't want to be proven wrong. But is this a social media problem? Has social media done this to us or has it just given us easier access to something that we already wanted? Well, we already like to be the center of our universe and social media only feeds and makes that desire culturally normal and consistently accessible. But God's word rewires that desire we have to be the center of our story. It casts a broader stroke where we see ourselves in a larger continuum of real life and space

and time. We see our true limitations and our mortality. We place ourselves inside something bigger than us and discover the truth about our importance and our worth. We see what we are and what we aren't. what we're capable of and what God enables us to do, even though we're incapable on our own. And in the Bible, our story is constantly changing. We're not the main characters, God is. God is the consistent one. And this is the first time I've ever read Exodus and paid especially

close attention to how quickly the narrative changed, literally flipped upside down for the Israelites and Egyptians, and who was on top and who was on bottom. See, when we were in Genesis, the Israelite mother Sarah was on the top of the power dynamic, and she used her Egyptian slave Hagar to conceive a son with Abraham, and then she mistreated Hagar and sent her away. But in Exodus 2, the narrative is flipped, and now it's the Israelite mother of Moses, who places her baby in a basket in the Nile to be saved by an Egyptian woman. The Israelites are crying out to God because they are suffering under a king who's using slave labor and genocide to try to wipe them out. Listen to Exodus 2, 23 to 25.

During those many days, the king of Egypt died, and the people of Israel groaned because of their slavery and cried out for help. Their cry for rescue from slavery came up to God, and God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. God saw the people of Israel, and God knew. See, in the Bible, we get to be God's creation, and he gets to be God. There is no competition for that rule because it so clearly lets us see what we are not and what he is. So the king of Egypt, he was dead, he'd been replaced, but there was no relief in that for the Israelites.

This new one isn't just brutal, but we'll soon see that he's even worse. This bit of information about the king tells us that even if the Israelites had placed their hope in a king to save them from their oppression, there was none to be found. and the people of Israel were groaning, crying out. They were doing crushing hard labor in the fields and in primitive brick factories. This first doesn't even tell us they specifically cried out to God, but whether they cried out and God heard or their cry came up to God. In a chapter full of oppression, slavery, this is the first mention of God. And these verses are pivotal to the rest of Exodus,

because a story of oppression turns into a story of redemption. into the main character of the greatest and truest story of all time. God heard. God remembered. God saw. God knew. In 1961, when Russia put a man into orbit, Nikita Khrushchev said,

we have sent a man into space, and we didn't see God. So we have proved there is no God. Is this the view you have of God? That it's like a downstairs, upstairs relationship, where his existence, is dependent on your ability to see him. This isn't what the Bible teaches.

Rather, there is nowhere we go that God is not present. There is no space or time where he doesn't exist. There is no knowledge that he doesn't have. God isn't the character of our story. He's the author of it. We use words available to humans to describe him, but they don't confine him or his character. And when the Bible says God remembers,

it's not that he's ever forgotten, but his remembering compels him to action. Psalm 105 says God remembers his covenant forever, and it is a word that he commands for a thousand generations. We are part of something bigger, something greater, but we need each other to put the pieces together. We need the Bible to put our minds on the right trajectory. We can't choose bits and pieces that make us feel like the God of our little universe

because, well, that's just not a true story. Jonathan Haidt is calling us to do something because he, He believes in the greater good of humanity. He believes we're people of responsibility and intellect, and we need to use it to make good things happen and prevent bad things from happening. So how has social media made you stupider? Has it sucked away your time when you could have been reading

or getting to know someone? Has it made you an expert on everything but yourself? Has it kept you from seeing the leaves butt out on the trees or from playing tic-tac-toe at the restaurant while you wait for your food? It's not like we have more time than we did 10 years ago. So where does all that time we spend on social media come from? What is it taking from us?

I knew I needed to make some changes. And you know what I realized? When I made changes, the younger people in my life already had. See, they are way ahead of this game. They know what it's doing to them because they see it in us and they don't like it. Our kids were all in on little sis not having these. social media until high school. This is one of height's suggestions, by the way. And we'll see how that goes. Maybe you could ask your kids. Is Facebook making me stupider? Maybe you could ask your

small group, what are you doing about social media? Or what are you doing about it with your kids? Maybe you could ask your coworkers. Am I the person in the office you see on Twitter? Which version do you like better? See, we can hear that feedback. And we can and experience feelings of being loved at, because our reality isn't based on the things we see on social media. It's based on the true story of God. It's okay not to have it all and not to know it all here, because to be honest, we're just human. We can be inconsistent and harsh and even stupid, but it doesn't change who God is. And the really cool thing is that he consistently steps into our lives with his attentiveness and he hears us, sees us, knows us, and remembers.

And he actively reshapes our desires and our thoughts and gives our lives meaning and purpose that lasts much longer than a video reel or a day in the spotlight. Before you forget, sign up for the brand new TMBT newsletter. Hit the link in the show notes and you'll get an email every Wednesday that will help you beat the midweek slump and go deeper in your walk with Jesus. Thanks for listening.