By Name · Week 1 · Sunday · SCREENS

Before we talk about screens, I want to read you two verses in the order Jesus said them.

You hypocrite! First take the beam out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.Matthew 7:5 (BSB)

Do not give dogs what is holy; do not throw your pearls before swine. If you do, they may trample them under their feet, and then turn and tear you to pieces.Matthew 7:6 (BSB)

I have heard the second one quoted on its own plenty of times, and almost every time it was to explain why somebody was not worth talking to anymore. They are the dogs, they are the pigs, and I am done throwing my pearls at them.

Read the two together and it is a lot harder to use that way. Jesus puts the beam first. Before you decide who the dogs are, deal with your own eye. Then, and only then, he says there are things that are holy, and you do not hand them to whoever will trample them.

The pearls are yours, not just your arguments

One way to read the pearls is as truth you are trying to get across to someone who will not hear it. That reading is in there. But a pearl is also just something precious. Your kid’s hard day. The fight you had with someone you love, and the making up after. Grief. Your faith, the real version, not the one you post. The way you actually feel about yourself at eleven o’clock at night.

A screen will take every one of those. It will take them gladly, and it will hand you back a crowd’s opinion of you. Some of that opinion will be kind. By tomorrow the crowd will have moved on, and you will be the one left holding whatever you gave away.

The crowd has an opinion on who you are. It does not get a vote.

I am not above this one

I work in technology. My wife and I both do a lot of our work on our phones, and I know that from across the room it can look like we are on them more than we should be. Sometimes it is work. Sometimes it is not, and the phone does not tell you which.

So I am not writing this week from above the problem. I am writing it from the middle of it, with a phone in my hand, which is probably how you are reading it.

Four voices, one question

This is the first week of a four-week series called By Name. Each week a different voice tries to tell you who you are. This week it is the crowd. Next week it is somebody who is against you. The week after that it is your own voice, which can be the meanest of the three. And the last week is the one voice that actually knows your name.

The gatekeeper opens the gate for him, and the sheep listen for his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out.John 10:3 (BSB)

But they will never follow a stranger; in fact, they will flee from him because they do not recognize his voice.”John 10:5 (BSB)

Notice how Jesus describes the sheep in that passage. They are not experts. They do not out-argue the stranger. They simply do not recognize the voice, so they do not follow it. I would like to get there. I am not there yet, and I suspect you are not either, which is why we are going to spend a month on it.

This week

Monday through Friday you will meet five people. A mom in a hospital parking garage. A man three comments deep at midnight who is right and knows it. A widow on what would have been her fortieth anniversary. A college sophomore who did something cruel with a screenshot. And a sixteen-year-old with a paintbrush and a phone propped on a paint can.

None of them get out of it for free. That is sort of the point.

Monday, the mom has four paragraphs typed out about the worst day of her son’s life, and her thumb is over the button.