{"id":398,"date":"2018-12-05T09:49:05","date_gmt":"2018-12-05T17:49:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/migrate.bettersermons.org\/?p=398"},"modified":"2020-06-01T11:39:32","modified_gmt":"2020-06-01T18:39:32","slug":"your-eyes-and-ears","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bettersermons.org\/your-eyes-and-ears\/","title":{"rendered":"Your Eyes and Ears"},"content":{"rendered":"
Your Eyes and Ears<\/span><\/div>\n

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“There’s a billion people on-line, and another billion people coming on-line in the next\u00a010 years. Traditional media is in decline across the board. TV viewership, movie viewership, magazines, newspapers–in decline.”1
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\n–Marc Andreessen<\/em><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

All forms of media technology\u00a0(traditional and emerging) have one thing in common, they want our eyes and ears. It used to be easy to restrict\u00a0our media exposure to when we had a few minutes to catch up on the news, or listen to\u00a0a favorite\u00a0musical artist\u00a0on our living room stereos. Now, everything goes with us via cell phones, Ipods, and personal\u00a0media players.<\/p>\n

We are adrift in a sea of information, stimulation and data that demands our attention. Thanks to Blue Tooth,\u00a0many now walk around with\u00a0phone receptors\u00a0strapped to their ears talking with family members or business\u00a0associates as if they were in the same room. It used to be geography counted for something when it came to “bending someones ear” and\u00a0being able to have their uninterrupted attention. Not any more!<\/p>\n

I recently attended a church where, during a hymn,\u00a0the organist\u00a0stopped playing to answer\u00a0her cell phone, then abruptly left, while the hymn was still being sung. Obviously, there must have been an emergency, and fortunately, the pianist kept playing.<\/p>\n

The newspaper,\u00a0USA Today,<\/em>\u00a0is extremely popular because it’s easy to read. It offers\u00a0readers a\u00a0“lite” version of the news, with lots of graphics and charts.\u00a0Evidently we have decided\u00a0we\u00a0don’t have time to be bothered with details.\u00a0We are content with brief blurbs, summaries and\u00a0quotes. But even so, newspaper readership is on the decline. People are becoming more content to get their news via their PDAs and cell phones.<\/p>\n

The question is,\u00a0how does God fit into all of this? Does he get a piece of our uninterrupted time, or does our spiritual life amount to brief blurbs, summaries and quotes that\u00a0are continually subject to interruption.\u00a0In others words, do we treat God as just another information vendor, or do we\u00a0give\u00a0him the special preference he deserves?<\/p>\n

1. According to\u00a0Newsweek,<\/em>\u00a0Marc Andreessen helped\u00a0launch the Internet craze while enrolled at the University of Illinois. While there, he co-wrote the first big browser (Mosaic) and went on to co-found the first big web company (Netscape). He now serves as CTO of Ning (Newsweek,<\/em>\u00a0March19, 2007).
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\nComments by Rich DuBose.\u00a0BetterSermons \u00a9 2008. All rights reserved. Use of this material is subject tousage guidelines<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0View main index<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Your Eyes and Ears “There’s a billion people on-line, and another billion people coming on-line in the next\u00a010 years. Traditional media is in decline across the board. TV viewership, movie …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bettersermons.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bettersermons.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bettersermons.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bettersermons.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bettersermons.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=398"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/bettersermons.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":399,"href":"https:\/\/bettersermons.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398\/revisions\/399"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bettersermons.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bettersermons.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=398"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bettersermons.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}