Avoidance of Sin

How old should a child be before getting their first cell phone? There’s only one correct answer if you want them to lead happier, more successful lives, says Yale University psychology professor Laurie Santos: “Wait as long as possible. I think the more we can hold off on giving kids technology — the longer, the better.”

A recent report found that children ages 8 to 12 who have phones spend just under five hours a day glued to their phones, and teenagers rack up nearly eight hours of screen time per day. That screen time is seldom used for creative activities like coding or making digital art. Rather, young people spend most of their phone time on social media or watching videos. This is likely to encourage poor mental health—in ways that affect kids differently than adults.

Social media use exposes many kids to cyberbullying, hate speech, and discrimination. Even YouTube videos meant for children can contain malicious, disturbing, or inappropriate content.

Just the sheer number of notifications a child might get from social media—probably more than their parents do—can be overwhelming. Santos says, “Teenagers are getting on the order of 200 notifications from their phones today. These are brains that are forming and trying to pay attention in school [while their phones are going] ding, ding, ding.”

Halting smartphone use for children and young people until they’re in 8th grade comes with benefits, including: Less risk of anxiety and depression, increased quantity and quality of sleep, and more time for physical activity and the outdoors

Parents should also lead by example, Santos adds: “If you’re constantly on your cell phone, it’ll be harder to justify why your child can’t have one. They’re not going to want to do as you say, they’re going to want to do as you do.”

On the afternoon of August 4, 1949, a lightning storm started a small fire near the top of the southeast ridge of Mann Gulch, Montana, a slope forested with Douglas fir and ponderosa pine. The fire was spotted the next day; by 2:30 p.m., a C-47 transport plane had flown out of Missoula, carrying 16 smoke jumpers. Fifteen men between 17 and 33-years-old parachuted to the head of the gulch at 4:10p.m. Their radio didn’t make it. Its chute failed to open, and it crashed. They were joined on the ground by a fireguard, who had spotted the fire. Otherwise, the smoke jumpers were isolated from the outside world.

The smoke jumpers were a new organization, barely nine years old in 1949. To them, the Mann Gulch fire, covering 60 acres at the time of the jump, appeared routine. It was what they called a “ten o’clock fire,” meaning that they would have it beaten by ten o’clock in the morning of the day after they jumped.

The rest of the story is long and complex, but only three men survived. Two of them managed to run for their lives and made it to the top of a nearby ridge. The young men at Mann Gulch had been trained to never, under any circumstances, drop their tools.

One of their tools was a Pulaski, a combination axe and pick that is very useful in fighting forest fires. It’s not useful to carry it up a 76 percent slope when a grassfire is racing toward you at 610 feet per minute. And yet, the reconstructed journeys of the victims of the fire show that several carried their Pulaskis a good way up the hill as they raced for their lives.

In short, more of the men may have lived if they had been trained to drop their tools—tools that worked in normal circumstances but became unnecessary baggage in a crisis.

Possible Preaching Angle:

In the race of life, we need to drop the sins that so easily entangles us (Heb. 12:1). Such as: the love of money (1 Tim. 6:10), resentment (Eph. 4:31), envy (1 Cor. 13:4), and pride (Prov. 29:23). We are to take hold of self-denial (Matt. 16:24), what is good (1 Thess. 5:21), our progress (Phil. 3:16), and wholesome teaching (2 Tim. 1:13).

In a series of interviews for The Washington Post, writer Ellen McCarthy spoke to parents who are bucking the trend of supplying internet-accessible smartphones to their children.

Adriana Stacey of Fayetteville, Arkansas said, “I’ll never buy a smartphone for any of my children.” Stacey is a psychiatrist who works primarily with high school and college students, many of whom are regularly dealing with anxiety, depression, and a lack of focus. She says it’s rare for any of her young clients to admit to less than nine hours of daily smartphone use, which means that they spend more time on their phones than they do sleeping.

Adriana’s daughter, Annalise, admits that it’s hard being one of the only girls at her dance competitions without a smartphone. She said, “I was frustrated because I felt like I was definitely getting left out of things and I didn’t really know how to get included … I’d try to talk to people, but they’d just kind of go on their phones or on Snapchat or whatever.”

Emily Cherkin of Seattle, Washington understands the struggle. Cherkin spent twelve years teaching seventh graders, and now works as a coach and activist, counseling parents on appropriate developmental boundaries for smartphones.

What really troubles me is that we are giving devices and products and apps that are designed to be addictive to children (referring to algorithms designed to maximize user engagement). And then we’re expecting them to self-regulate and getting upset when they do stupid things. Middle school was a safe place, for the most part, for kids to screw up and learn how not to do it again the next time. We’ve just taken away the safety net of messing up without being blasted or shamed across a digital platform.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Part of loving our children is regulating their access to opportunities and situations until they are developmentally ready to show good judgment.

LifeWay Research and Ligonier Ministries have once again examined the theological awareness, or lack thereof, of American evangelicals. This time, instead of defining “evangelical” by whether participants identify as such, they used a definition endorsed by the National Association of Evangelicals. Below are the areas where believers have most gone astray in their theology:

People have the ability to turn to God on their own initiative. 82% Agree

Individuals must contribute to their own salvation. 74% Agree

Jesus is the first and greatest being created by God. 71% Agree

God knows all that happens, but doesn’t determine all that happens. 65% Agree

The Holy Spirit is a force, not a personal being. 56% Agree

God accepts the worship of all religions, including Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. 48% Agree

My good deeds help to earn my place in heaven. 39% Agree

God will always reward faith with material blessings. 37% Agree

Throughout the coasts of the Caribbean, Central America, South America, and even in south Florida, there can be found a pleasant-looking beachy sort of tree, often laden with small greenish-yellow fruits that look like apples.

You might be tempted to eat the fruit. Do not eat the fruit. You might want to rest your hand on the trunk, or touch a branch. Do not touch the tree trunk or any branches. Do not stand under or even near the tree for any length of time whatsoever. Do not touch your eyes while near the tree. Do not pick up any of the ominously shiny, tropic-green leaves.

The aboriginal peoples of the Caribbean were familiar with the tree and the sap was used to tip arrows. It is believed that the Calusa people of Florida used it in that manner to kill Juan Ponce de Leon on his second trip to Florida in 1521.

This is the manchineel, known in Spanish-speaking countries as “la manzanilla de la muerte,” which translates to “the little apple of death,” or as “arbol de la muerte,” “tree of death.” The fruit, though described as sweet and tasty, is extraordinarily toxic.

Nicola Strickland, who unwisely chomped down on a manchineel fruit on the Caribbean Island of Tobago, describes what it was like:

I rashly took a bite from this fruit and found it pleasantly sweet. My friend also partook (at my suggestion). Moments later we noticed a strange peppery feeling in our mouths, which gradually progressed to a burning, tearing sensation and tightness of the throat. The symptoms worsened over a couple of hours until we could barely swallow solid food because of the excruciating pain.

Over the next eight hours our oral symptoms slowly began to subside. Recounting our experience to the locals elicited frank horror and incredulity, such was the fruit’s poisonous reputation.

Possible Preaching Angle:

God also warned Adam and Eve about the far deadlier physical and spiritual consequences which would come from eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Sadly, just as in this story, Eve not only ate but shared the fruit with Adam.

According to Tik Tok user Allison Wit, her recent dream honeymoon had a surprise ending. Unfortunately, it was not a good surprise. In a series of videos that racked up tens of thousands of views, Allison explained that she and her husband took a vacation to Barbados and had a great time. Only after they returned did they realize something was wrong when her husband’s feet started showing signs of a strange itchy rash.

After being referred to a doctor specializing in infectious diseases, they found out the awkward truth. Apparently, the combination of new flip-flops that gave his feet blisters and a beach with a number of cats created an opening for a type of hookworm that’s normally found in cat feces. The man went on vacation and came home with worms in his feet.

Nevertheless, Allison and her husband’s saga came with a happy ending--their insurance covered the $5,000 treatment. On reflection, she still loved her time in Barbados and wouldn’t mind going back. Many of her fellow Tik-Tok users, however, were less than enthused about the prospect of a tropical vacation. For example, Chloe Amerson wrote: "New fear unlocked."

Possible Preaching Angle:

Sin can burrow its way in to our habits and motivations, even in situations that seem innocent and harmless. Only with consistent watchfulness and cleansing can we free ourselves from these unwanted spiritual parasites.

In her book American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers, researcher Mary Jo Sales reports a conversation with a teenage girl at a mall in LA who told her, "Social media is destroying our lives." Sales told her, "So why don't you go off it?" Nancy replied. "Seems reasonable, doesn't it? If something is destroying you, let it go. Smash it. Get rid of it." The girl's response was instant: "Because then we would have no life."

Trevin Wax comments: "If I were to cast that conversation in spiritual terms, I'd put it this way: My idol is destroying me, but if I smash my idol, then I disappear."

New York Times writer Ross Douthat wrote an article warning people about what he called "the real threat to the human future." What is it? Douthat explains: "the one in your pocket or on your desk, the one you might be reading this column on right now." Douthat explains:

Search your feelings, you know it to be true: You are enslaved to the internet. Definitely if you're young, increasingly if you're old, your day-to-day, minute-to-minute existence is dominated by a compulsion to check email and Twitter and Facebook and Instagram with a frequency that bears no relationship to any communicative need.

Compulsions are rarely harmless. The internet is not the opioid crisis; it is not likely to kill you (unless you're hit by a distracted driver) or leave you ravaged and destitute. But it requires you to focus intensely, furiously, and constantly on the ephemera that fills a tiny little screen, and experience the traditional graces of existence—your spouse and friends and children, the natural world, good food and great art—in a state of perpetual distraction.

Used within reasonable limits, of course, these devices also offer us new graces. But we are not using them within reasonable limits. They are the masters; we are not. They are built to addict us … madden us, distract us, arouse us, and deceive us. We primp and perform for them as for a lover; we surrender our privacy to their demands; we wait on tenterhooks for every "like." The smartphone is in the saddle, and it rides mankind.

Most people have heard of the "five second rule"—that if food spends just a few seconds on the floor, dirt and germs won't have enough time to contaminate it. Parents sometimes apply the rule to pacifiers (after their first child of course). The history of the five-second rule is difficult to trace. One legend attributes the rule to Genghis Khan, who declared that food could be on the ground for five hours and still be safe to eat.

But a 2016 experiment should permanently debunk the five second rule. Professor Donald W. Schaffner, a food microbiologist at Rutgers University, reported that a two-year study concluded that no matter how fast you pick up food that falls on the floor, you will pick up bacteria with it. You can check it out for yourself in his journal article "Is the Five-Second Rule Real?" found in the always exciting journal for Applied and Environmental Microbiology.

Professor Schaffner tested four surfaces—stainless steel, ceramic tile, wood, and carpet—and four different foods: cut watermelon, bread, buttered bread, and strawberry gummy candy. They were dropped from a height of five inches onto surfaces treated with a bacteria. The researchers tested four contact times—less than one second and five, 30 and 300 seconds. A total of 128 possible combinations of surface, food, and seconds were replicated 20 times each, yielding 2,560 measurements. So after those 2,560 drops they found that no fallen food escaped contamination, leading Professor Schaffner to conclude, "Bacteria can contaminate instantaneously." In other words, they debunked the legendary five second rule.

Possible Preaching Angles: False Teachings; False Doctrine; Doctrine—We suggest a tongue-in-cheek retelling of this study (after all, the five-second rule is kind of a joke anyway) and then asking, What other biblical, theological, cultural, or lifestyle legends we've adopted without critical study.

Can we be guilty for sinful responses that seem to erupt in us automatically? Can we really consider sin voluntary if it is not consciously chosen? Consider the following illustration of how unintentional sin works:

Trained instincts—that's how fighter pilots can react immediately to rapidly changing situations as they operate multi-million dollar war machines. When a threat aircraft is closing in, there's no time for pilots to reason through what to do. They have to rely on instinct—but not just natural instinct. They need instincts shaped deep within then through years of regiment. The countless little decisions they make in the cockpit are automatic, but that doesn't mean they're involuntary. The pilot voluntarily trained for them, and in the cockpit he reaps the instinctive benefits of that training.

Like the fighter pilot's hours of training, our hearts are under a regimen of beliefs and values that don't align with Scripture, drilled into us through what we put in our heads, what we receive as wisdom from other sources, what we accept as normal from culture. All of these shape our unintentional sin.

Before walking out of jail a free man in February, Albert Woodfox spent 43 years almost without pause in an isolation cell, becoming the longest standing solitary confinement prisoner in America. He had no view of the sky from inside his 6 foot by 9 foot concrete box, no human contact, and taking a walk meant pacing from one end of the cell to the other and back again.

Then in April 2016 he found himself on a beach in Galveston, Texas, in the company of a friend. He stood marveling at all the beachgoers under a cloudless sky, and stared out over the Gulf of Mexico as it stretched far out to the horizon. "You could hear the tide and the water coming in," he says. "It was so strange, walking on the beach and all these people and kids running around."

Of all the terrifying details of Woodfox's four decades of solitary incarceration … perhaps the most chilling aspect of all is what he says now. Two months after the state of Louisiana set him free on his 69th birthday, he says he sometimes wishes he was back in that cell.

"Oh yeah! Yeah!" he says passionately when asked whether he sometimes misses his life in lockdown. "You know, human beings … feel more comfortable in areas they are secure. In a cell you have a routine, you pretty much know what is going to happen, when it's going to happen, but in society it's difficult, it's looser. So there are moments when, yeah, I wish I was back in the security of a cell." He pauses, then adds: "I mean, it does that to you."

The owner of a kebab shop in Egypt became an internet sensation after security footage of an armed robbery at his shop made its way online. The video shows a masked man with a gun demanding cash from the register, but instead of listening, shop owner Said Ahmed simply ignores the man and continues to serve a customer the food he had ordered. He then calmly turns around and, in no apparent hurry, walks away to call the police. Unnerved, the would-be robber simply walks out.

Ahmed, who has since earned the internet title of "chillest chip shop operator" said he simply was keeping the wellbeing of his family in mind and thought that walking away would avoid something more serious from happening. He was right.

How do Silicon Valley tech gurus design a successful app, an app that will hook consumers and then keep them hooked so they keep coming back to the app? Some app designers call this process "captology," or the art of capturing people's attention and making it hard for them to escape. In his book Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Product, Nir Eyal, a game designer and professor at Stanford, explains why applications like Facebook are so effective. A successful app, he writes, creates a "persistent routine" or behavioral loop. The app both triggers a need and provides the momentary solution to it. Eyal writes:

Feelings of boredom, loneliness, frustration, confusion, and indecisiveness often instigate a slight pain or irritation and prompt an almost instantaneous and often mindless action to quell the negative sensation. Gradually, these bonds cement into a habit as users turn to your product when experiencing certain internal triggers.

Possible Preaching Angles: Spiritual bondage; Sin; Temptation; Idol; Idolatry—Is this not a description of sin? We feel a deep need, then we turn to some sinful behavior to meet that need. When we do it often enough it becomes a habit and then we're hooked.

In states where it's not illegal, it's relatively inexpensive to buy and keep a baby lion or tiger—generally comparable to the price of a fine pedigree dog. Tiger cubs are incredibly cute and fun, except that in the space of just a year or two they become adult tigers weighing several hundred pounds and capable of ripping to shreds—and eating—their owners. What's more, tigers are notoriously untamable, fickle beasts, playful one moment and deadly the next, making no distinction between human friends and human enemies. When casual big-cat owners realize they can't control their now-adult tigers, they call Joe Taft, founder of the Exotic Feline Rescue Center in Indiana.

Joe's sanctuary for abandoned wild animals is the second largest in the nation and provides a habitat where lions and tigers and such can live out their days peacefully. Although Joe and his team try to avoid letting the big cats reproduce, sometimes, well, accidents happen. Cats will be cats, I guess. When there's a new cub born on the grounds at EFRC, it's hand-raised by humans until it is ready to live in the wild.

In 2002, Joe was raising one of these cubs in his own home. It was a boisterous, wild thing, growing bigger and bigger every day. Still, Joe was fully capable of controlling his tiger … until the man had a heart attack and subsequently underwent quintuple bypass surgery. As you can guess, having a tiger for a roommate—even a young one—was quite dangerous for a cardiac patient. Suddenly, Joe's own home became a very real threat to the weakened and recovering man. There was only one thing to do: Joe had a steel fence built around his couch. And Joe Taft spent the bulk of his recovery time caged in his living room, eyeing his things from behind bars while the tiger roamed freely through the rest of the house, pacing and roaring and keeping Joe a literal prisoner in his own home.

Possible Preaching Angles: Now, metaphorically speaking, guess which character in that story is you and which is the tiger. Sin is like a tiger, prowling 'round your life as if it owns you, threatening your very existence with its mere presence, staring at you through the cage that imprisons you—a cage of your own making. And you're the man on the couch, seeing freedom beyond the wire but too weak to master sin by yourself.

In 2009, a German scientist named Jan Souman took a group of subjects out to empty parking lots and open fields, blindfolded them, and instructed them to walk in a straight line. Some of them managed to keep to a straight course for ten or twenty paces; a few lasted for 50 or a hundred. But in the end, all of them wound up circling back toward their points of origin. Not many of them. Not most of them. Every last one.

"And they have no idea," Dr. Souman told NPR. "They were thinking that they were walking in a straight line all the time." Dr. Souman's research team explored every imaginable explanation. Some people turned to the right while others turned to the left, but the researchers could find no discernable pattern. As a group, neither left-handed nor right-handed subjects demonstrated any predisposition for turning one way more than the other; nor did subjects tested for either right- or left-brain dominance. The team even tried gluing a rubber soul to the bottom of one shoe to make one leg longer than the other.

"It didn't make any difference at all," explained Dr. Souman. "So again, that is pretty random what people do." In fact, it isn't even limited to walking. Ask people to swim blindfolded or drive a car blindfolded and, no matter how determined they may be to go straight, they quickly begin to describe peculiar looping circles in one direction or the other.

At her rental house, which she named "The Critter Café," Christine Bishop was a well-intentioned rescuer of stray cats, dogs, and lost ducks. Then someone dropped off a cage of pet rats. Soon neighbors were complaining of a stench from the house, and could see rats running outdoors.

When officials entered the house, they found the rats had totally over-run the house. They initially removed 1,500, and estimated that at least a 1,000 remained. The property-owner, Dale Carr, says the rats are feral, so "they'll bite, carry ticks and fleas, and are susceptible to rabies and disease." Township Supervisor Brian Werschem says this number of rats "… can breed 1,500 rats every three weeks, so if they're not removing them at a rate of 100 per week, they're not making progress."

The next step in the plan is to wrap the house and fumigate it, which "could cost the owner nearly $30,000, not including cleanup and disposal cost."

Researcher Dan Ariely did a massive study to try and understand why some people lie, cheat, and steal. Ariely and his team went to college campuses and offered to pay students for every math puzzle they could solve in five minutes. At the end of the five minutes, the students were asked to grade their own papers and shred them in the back of the room. Then the students stood in line and received money for every right answer. But the students didn't know that the shredder didn't actually shred their papers so the researchers could check to see if they were telling the truth. Ariely found that, on average, students reported solving six problems, when in fact they solved only four.

Over the course of their research, after testing 30,000 people, Ariely found only 12 "big cheaters," compared to 18,000 "small cheaters." The big cheaters stole a total of $150, while the small cheaters stole a total of around $36,000—just one or two dollars at a time. Ariely did this research project all over the world—in the United States, Western Europe, Turkey, Israel, China, and many other countries—and the results were always roughly the same.

Ariely concluded that most dishonesty happens among ordinary people who think of themselves as basically honest. But when added together, all this "little" dishonesty has a huge impact. Most of the problems faced by the human race are not rooted in the lives of outliers and psychopaths—life's big cheaters. Our problems are rooted in the lives of typical, ordinary people who find ways to rationalize their own bad behavior. In other words, we want to think of ourselves as honest people while enjoying the benefits of dishonesty.

On August 11, 2014, the actor Robin Williams took his own life. The 63-year-old actor, who was loved by many fans and fellow actors, was an admitted abuser of cocaine—which he also referred to as "Peruvian marching power" and "the devil's dandruff." In 2006, he checked himself into a rehab center to be treated for an addiction to alcohol, having fallen off the wagon after some 20 years of sobriety.

He later explained in an interview with ABC's Diane Sawyer that this addiction had not been "caused by anything, it's just there." Williams continued, "It waits. It lays in wait for the time when you think, 'It's fine now, I'm O.K.' Then, the next thing you know, it's not O.K. Then you realize, 'Where am I? I didn't realize I was in Cleveland.'"

"Be sure your sin will find you out," Numbers 32:23 tells us. But in the case of this story, we could also say "Be sure your Cheetos will find you out." During the early morning hours of January 6, 2013, county deputies were called to the Cassatt Country Store in Cassatt, South Carolina to investigate a burglary. The deputies determined that someone had broken into the store and stolen beer, cigarettes, snack foods, and energy drinks. The burglar only stole $160 worth of goods, but caused about $2,500 in damages.

The store manager, Howard "Buck" Buckholz, said, "He knocked out our front door, he knocked out the beer cooler, and stole beer, cigarettes, Slim Jims, and in his haste, he punctured two or three bags of Cheetos." That was the burglar's undoing. Buckholz said, "Cheetos were all over the parking lot, at the place where he parked his car, and at the residence." The police followed the trail of cheesy dust right to the house where the burglar was staying with a friend. As investigators approached the front door of the home, they observed more fresh Cheetos on the front porch. Buckholz added, "He was very easy to catch. It was a very quick deal."

Possible Preaching Ideas: Our sin may not be revealed this quickly, but our sin and our actions will leave a trail. Like this burglar, we aren't near as clever as we think we are.

The story is told of a certain African tribe that learned an easy way to capture ducks in a river. Catching their agile and wary dinner would be a feat indeed, so they formulated a plan.

The tribesmen learned to go upstream, place a pumpkin in the river, and let it slowly float down into the flock of ducks. At first, the cautious fowl would quack and fly away. After all, it wasn't ordinary for pumpkins to float down the river! But the persistent tribesmen would subsequently float another pumpkin into the re-gathered ducks. Again they would scatter, only to return after the strange sphere had passed. Again, the hungry hunters would float another pumpkin. This time the ducks would remain, with a cautious eye on the pumpkin, and with each successive passing, the ducks would become more comfortable, until they finally accepted the pumpkins as a normal part of life.

When the natives saw that the pumpkins no longer bothered the ducks, they hollowed out pumpkins, put them over their heads, and walked into the river. Meandering into the midst of the tolerant fowl, they pulled them down one at a time. Dinner? Roast duck.

Possible Preaching Angle: Wayne Cordeiro adds, "If we don't correct our hearts back to Jesus, it won't be long until we start tolerating "pumpkins." They have a seductive way of sneaking into [certain areas of our lives]. They creep in one by one until we sink beneath them and enter a watery grave."