Did you know that birds are not actually real? In the nineteen eighties, the government killed them all and replaced them with spying robots. If it flies, it spies. I mean, they sit on power lines, they're charging themselves. And the poop that they drop on your car is actually a tracker for the government to watch where you are going and listening to you. This is a satirical conspiracy theory developed by a gentleman named Peter McKindo in 2017. And believe it or not, it did gain traction. To us, you know, some of us grew up on farms shooting birds and we felt them. We know, right? But not so with everybody. I don't know how uh many people actually believed this. Basically, he took on this persona in 2017 and owned it for four years. And people believed that he actually believed this. He promoted it, he had a van with propaganda on it. He would go around, he got in-person rallies going. And it started with a viral video. Uh, and it wasn't until 2021 where he came out and said, actually, I've been doing this as an experiment, essentially, to see how conspiracy theories develop. And his hypothesis was basically that when people feel excluded, like they don't belong, they are more vulnerable to believing suspect things such as this. Uh, after it didn't happen, his live stream was gone for 12 hours, it ended kind of awkwardly, and he recalculated the date to be October, I believe it was 6 and 7. And it was over two days because no man can know the day, but you can get pretty close, apparently. But this wrecked some people's lives. Some people believed this. They owned it, they sold their things, and gave one report of an Uber driver who got a hunk of cash from the people. They're like, We're gone. We're not gonna need it. Apparently, they thought he was not gonna be raptured, so he live in an information age. There's no shortage of information. Our problem is not a lack of information. If it was, uh, we would all be in shape. We would all be wealthy, we would just be living the life that we want. The problem is something else. The problem is something else. I'm gonna read some verses from Ephesians 5, just to kind of set the stage here a bit. For becoming a people of discernment, excuse me. Becoming a people of discernment in a digital age. Ephesians 5, Paul writes this. I'm reading in the in the NLT imitate God, therefore, in everything you do, because you are his dear children. Live a life filled with love, following the example of Christ. He loved us and offered himself as a sacrifice for us, a pleasing aroma to God. Let there be no sexual immorality, impurity, or greed among you. Such sins have no place among God's people. Obscene stories, foolish talk, and coarse jokes, these are not for you. Instead, let there be thankfulness to God. You can be sure that no immoral, impure, or greedy person will inherit the kingdom of Christ and of God. For a greedy person is an idolater worshiping the things of this world. Don't be fooled by those who try to excuse these sins, for the anger of God will fall on all who disobey him. Do not participate in the things these people do. For once you were full of darkness, but now you have light from the Lord. So live as people of light. For this light within you produces not only what is good and right and true. Sorry, I misread that. For this light within you produces only what is good and right and true. Carefully determine what pleases the Lord. Take no part in the worthless deeds of evil and darkness, instead expose them. It is shameful even to talk about the things that ungodly people do in secret, but their evil intentions will be exposed when the light shines upon them, for the light makes everything visible. This is why it is said, Awake, O sleeper, rise up from the dead, and Christ will give you light. So be careful how you live. Don't live like fools, but like those who are wise. Make the most of every opportunity in these evil days. Don't act thoughtlessly, but understand what the Lord wants you to do. Paul gives us an admonition here to be a cautious, discerning people, to exercise wisdom, and to know what pleases the Lord. What I'd like to do here today is talk through what I see as some implications for living in an information age, an age of information, what I mean by that. I want to define discernment. I want to give us a framework for understanding information and the different kinds of information, and then walk through six different principles for becoming a people of discernment in a digital age. And I'm using digital age and information age interchangeably here. So uh in our first session two weeks ago, we talked about the enormity of the scale of the amount of information produced. Uh, we looked at some graphs, some numbers, and so on. I'm not going to necessarily review that. We've discussed the inordinate amount of time that people can spend on screens. The general averages across the nation are very high. I believe they're over nine, 10 hours a day. Just the amount of time that people are spending in front of screens. And this has massive implications for the way the world operates. The ways that people find information, receive information, and digest it is rapidly changing. Think about the history, just a brief history of the world. So um pre-reformation, pre-printing press. So those two kind of corresponded and are connected. Uh think a lot of word of mouth. Like most people couldn't read. So word of mouth is the primary way that you are giving and receiving information. That changes with the invention of the printing press, where print media becomes massively available. More and more people learn how to read. Now you have newspapers and books and posters beside the streets. People receive information through reading. And then we have the invention of the radio and television. Now we have audio and visual inputs. And now it's largely digital. So much information is produced digitally and ingested digitally. The adoption of new technologies is increasing. This is a graph that comes from um Jonathan Haidt and the Anxious Generation. I think I mentioned that book last time. So this graph is basically showing us the speed at which new technologies have been adopted over time. And so the the first line, you know, pre-1930s radio, then you have color television. Um we've got the internet, smartphone, social media, and microcomputer. And notice that this only goes into 2010. So dates here are going to be really important. We're going to talk about this more later. It doesn't cover AI, for example. I was just talking to some friends last night about Chat GPT. I was in college when this came out in 2022, I believe, or late 21. And within a matter of months, the college is already talking about okay, what are what do we need to do in terms of student policies to ensure our students are being integrous with this new technology because everybody's using it. So I think there's there's a whole host of implications uh around this. So one is just a massive shift in traditional authority structures. So think about where information has come from in the past. It's going to be the established institutions, whether that's a university, whether it's a book produced by a group of editors. Think of peer-reviewed journals. We talked about that a little bit in our first session. Now the individual information, sorry, the individual person's perspective is gaining weight against the established authority structures. Like it's there's like a flattening happening where it actually doesn't matter if you have a PhD. You can claim that you have one without one, or you don't even have to claim it. You just have to have enough followers. Okay? So there's this massive shift in wait, who can be a trustworthy person and who has authority in this space? The scientific method that gave us an understanding of gravity, magnetism, planetary motion, and the heliocentric view of the world, but the sun is the center, not the earth, right? This is replaced by the influencer medias. We have rising rates of anxiety and mental illness. This is well documented by Jonathan Haidt in his book, The Anxious Generation. And he even uh explores alternative explanations. So if you're interested in that, I would highly recommend that book. Like, okay, so basically what I mean by that is some people say, well, because there's clear evidence that mental illness has increased dramatically in young people since the inception of social media and the adoption of young people or social media. So you could look at, okay, have unemployment rates gone up as well? No, they haven't. They've actually gone down. So you might expect to see a decrease in anxiety and mental disorders because there's overall better well-being, but that's not the case. Our brains are trained to flip from one thing to another rather than think deeply about a given topic. There's a trend towards polarization and dogmatism because it's easier to do that than it is to hold space for gray areas and nuance and different perspectives. Pornography is rewiring the sexual proclivities of an entire generation. One of the risks that we as a community run into is we can think we're immune to these things. I do not think we are immune to these things. Uh we're using them. And I'm not exactly sure why it is we can tend to think that. I think some of it's a kind of a superior attitude that we can kind of have about ourselves. Like we've got something here. We've been around a long time. And we've had tried and true whatnots, and you know. Um, I think it's hubris, it's pride to imagine that we are immune to the impacts of these things. We desperately need discernment. Our children need us to be a discerning people. Our young people need us to be discerning. Our peers need us to be discerning. So, what do I mean by discernment? Simply put, it's the ability to judge people and things well. Yes, we are called to judge, and we are called to not judge. Both are true. Jesus says, and we're going to reference this later as well, that you know them by their fruits. There is judgment happening in that. You are evaluating, you are discerning right from wrong, true from false, helpful from unhelpful, upbuilding versus harmful, and noise from signal. In 1 Corinthians 6, Paul is talking about Christian liberty. And he's largely in the context of food. And he makes a statement. He's like, you guys say, I'm allowed to do anything. But he says, not everything is good for you. I think the King James maybe uses expedient. Not everything is expedient. Like, as a Christian, I'm free to so many things. But that doesn't mean I should do everything. That doesn't mean I should adopt everything. Not everything is helpful. And again, think about that value analysis filter that we talked about. Okay, we've said, hey, this is the life that I want. As a Christian, I am called to live in this way. Are the practices that I am embodying contributing to me being true to those values that I've said that I have? Okay, so that's the process of discernment is saying yes and no to that question with nuance. And I think it's also worth mentioning here that, and I found this to be true in my life, Sam Joelman, an author, Christian author, says this most maturity involves leaving our black and white thinking to enter the gray and complex way that life comes at us. Most maturity means becoming less black and white and acknowledging the complexity. I've seen this, I'm only 33, and I've seen this in my life, where I used to be really dogmatic on X, and I have become less and less so as I've lived more. I've seen it in older men that I trust and respect. And it's not a mellowing, it's not a uh a lethargy, that's not what I'm describing. I'm describing a thoughtful ability to discern truth and error right from wrong with nuance. So, how do we begin to understand the different types of information flooding our headspace and how to interact with it in a discerning way? Several years ago, I came across an image, a figure from uh an author named Brett McCracken called the Wisdom Pyramid. So take a look at this and just kind of familiarize yourself with it here, focusing on the words inside the pyramid. How many of you remember the old food pyramid? Yeah. So we learned about this in school, and basically what it's doing is trying to give us an image, a visualization of what a balanced diet looks like for a healthy body. Brett McCracken thought, hey, we need something like that for the digital world, for all the information coming at us. So he developed this. I think he first published it in a blog post in 2017, and in 21, it got published as a book. I have not read the book. I have read the blog post. So, but basically the gist is like primary diet, primary foundation, scripture. The church, local church, the tradition of the church, nature and beauty, grounding ourselves in reality, books, the internet, and then social media at the top. For our purposes today, we're talking about the two top uh levels of the pyramid. We're not talking about biblical interpretation here. We're not talking about, you know, church tradition, how to decide what church tradition is right, wrong, all that. We're just talking about the top two primarily. There may be some overlap, but primarily the top two. Brett intended for this diagram to illustrate the going from the most enduring on the bottom to the least enduring on the top. Most enduring to least enduring. Okay, so this kind of makes sense, right? Have any of you written a book and published a book? Yes, Sherry. It's a lot of work, isn't it? Yeah. There's a reason that only one person in this room has done that. Alright? How many of you have posted to social media in the last month? Come on. Yeah, there's a lot of us, right? It's a lot easier to produce the things at the top. They're also less enduring. What I find really interesting is that in terms of influence, I think this pyramid is largely inverted in modern society. He intended this to be what ought to be. But I think it's inverted in terms of influence. And largely because of the glowing rectangles that we hold in our pockets and we carry with us wherever we go and the podcasts we listen to and all this stuff. So much influence comes from those top two uh levels of this pyramid. So we need guidance. We need some principles for being a person and a people of discernment. So we're gonna look at six different principles here, and these are not in any particular order. These are Austin's principles as of what is today, October 12, 2025. They might change in a few years. These are not, yeah, I just want to be clear, I'm not laying out some kind of guidebook. Okay. These are principles, these are not black and white do's and don'ts. I would highly encourage us all to think about how we can incorporate these into our thinking as we engage the internet and social media in particular. And digital media, I guess, in general. So let's look at the first one here. The first one is simply to educate yourself on the risks and the harms associated with using the tools that you use and also what's out there. I think of this a lot as a parent. I have three children, one on the way, and it kind of frightens me sometimes to think about the world that my children are growing up in. It's here to stay. It is here to stay. And it's up to us to learn how to respond. And a part of that is getting up to speed ourselves. And I'm not saying uh get up to speed in terms of adoption. What I am saying is get up get get up to speed with respect to research on how these things impact us. I'm simply going to refer to the resources document that I'll share with you all. I think that's a starting point. It's not an ending point, it's a starting point. There's a lot that could be said here. Even with respect to artificial intelligence. Unfortunately, I am not an expert on artificial intelligence, on AI. And I don't know that there's anybody here who feels like they are. It's this ever-evolving domain that just like almost weekly we hear these new things like oh, OpenAI is releasing this now, or Gemini came out with X, or like it's just persistent, persistent. And I don't think we need to get caught up in the um the leading edge of the technologies. Think about what's relevant for your circle, for your family, what's going on for the youth group, what's going on for your peer group. Uh, we do need thinkers at the leading edge who are understanding these things and how they work and what's happening and so on. But I don't necessarily think everybody has to be at the leading edge. So educate yourself. Number two, implement a digital ethic. Implement a digital ethic. The riptide of the digital world is stronger than your willpower. It is stronger than your willpower. Willpower is insufficient. And like I said earlier, it's only those who act with agency and intention who will avoid drifting out to sea. So I'm gonna introduce a starting point for that, some baseline practices that I think would be great for all of us to implement. And here they are. First is no phone in bed or at mealtimes. No phone in bed or at mealtimes. Mealtimes are a place for connection, socializing, interacting with real people, learning how to love well. And the phone is like I don't know if you've seen these images, it's been a long time since I've seen them, where uh somebody has a picture of a picture of a couch. On the one side side is a child, the other side is a mother, and there's this like oversized smartphone between them, right? And that's like a great image for what happens when I'm at lunch with someone and I pull out my phone to check. What I'm saying is something on here, somebody who's not even in this room, is more important than face-to-face connection with you. I'm still guilty of this. I'm starting to implement this more and more. Uh, it's hard. And sometimes we forget. No phone in bed or at meals. Number two, weekly no phone time, 12 to 24 hours. Take a start. If that's too much, start with three. Over the last quarter, I had a goal of my phone being either off or on a shelf for 45 minutes every day. And it was lovely. Like, I didn't miss it. I didn't miss it. And this coming quarter, one of my plans is to start, and I'm putting myself on the hook, I guess, in front of you all, is putting it on do not disturb mode when I get home from work. I don't need you all texting me and buzzing and putting scheduling something on my calendar when I'm with my family. Yeah, it will be harder to reach potentially, but people survived for a long time without that instant accessibility. We've already talked about number three here, but setting specific times to access social media if you use it at all. Cal Newport published an essay soon after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, in which I think the title was Is It Time to Quit Social Media? And addressing this, the utter chaos that erupted online post this tragic event. His conclusion is it's time to quit. We've we're done with this experiment. It's time to be done. Delay smartphones for children until high school. Delay social media for children until 60 years of age. The last two come from Jonathan Haidt. Those are not original with me. He's got a four-step plan in his book on how in the Western world, the developed world, we need to implement changes around smartphone usage, largely around childhood. Children see, children do. So the change starts with me, the change starts with you. So the principle there is implement a digital ethic. Some way of guiding, putting healthy boundaries in your life around phone usage. Number three is be aware of your own weaknesses. We we talked about this briefly in our first session around how so much of the digital discourse around technology has been at what point does it replace us? So at what point does it surpass our strengths? But there's this leading indicator that got missed, and that's at what point does it hijack our weaknesses? That's already happened. Okay. There's other people who can speak with a lot more authority, authority on some of that stuff. But that's something to be aware of. Like billions of dollars have been invested into these social media platforms to keep your eyeballs glued to the screen. Like that is what's happening. Okay. Do you default towards trust or skepticism? Trust or skepticism? Are you by default a trusting person? Like when you hear a tidbit from somebody, you just believe it? Or you tend to be skeptical? I would argue that if you tend to be trusting, especially of the digital world, try to pedal it back a little bit. With the rise of AI, one of the things we're going to see is an increase of information that is AI generated. It's not generated by a person. Both in images, videos, written text, you name it, it's out there. There's some really horrific kinds of content as well. But what's not happening is generated by AI footnote. We're not typically told this was generated by AI. So I think it would serve us well when it comes to digital information to be more skeptical. Especially if you tend to be trusting and believe that gullible is not in the dictionary. It is, by the way. I want to talk a little bit about some biases. So a bias is an inclination towards a certain way of viewing the world. We all have biases. It's a part of being human. The point is not to eradicate them from our lives, the point is to be aware of them. I'll give you some examples here. There's a whole host of them. Confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is what is just the human tendency to seek out information to confirm a view I already hold. And to filter information through that lens. Nobody likes to be proven wrong. And so a default position going out into the world, going online, looking for answers to something or researching something is if we already have a conclusion in our head, we're gonna, by default, filter information through that lens. That's a confirmation bias. Another one is conformity bias, where I will tend to change my opinions. Or my beliefs in order to fit into a group. I am guilty of this. It's something that is a significant weakness of mine. I've called myself a cultural chameleon. I go into a group of people, I read the room, figure out what they want, and I give it to them. And this has gotten me into trouble in the past. An anchor bias is when I have an over-reliance on the first piece of information I hear about something. There's something about that first piece. It's more impactful or something that lodges itself in the brain. And it's hard to consider views that are alternative to that initial piece of information over time. And then there's something called the Dunning-Kruger effect. So on the vertical axis, we have level of confidence from low to high. And on the horizontal axis, we have competence also from low to high. So basically, what happens here is when I start learning about, actually let me summarize it this way. People who have low ability in a particular field and low knowledge in a particular field often have a higher confidence in their competency in that field or around that topic. Versus the people who've been in it a long time and have studied it a long time, they recognize the nuance. They don't have that same level of confidence without the experience. Okay? The place where that crown is, that's called the top of Mount Stupid. You think you know a lot. You have this level of confidence, like, wow, I can really do this. When in reality, you don't. I've been there. There was a particular belief that I was introduced to a number of years ago that I got really dogmatic about. I went to the top of Mount Stupid really quickly. I had not studied this in depth, but what I had heard sounded really compelling. And there's a I think I still believe most of it, uh, without getting into the details of it. Uh and yet at the time, I became like this kind of dogmatic proponent of this thing. And it was a bit of the um conformity bias kicking in, where it's like, well, this is what the group believes, so I should believe this too and promote this too. And and I can do this because I I can, you know, whatever. Top of Mount Stupid. It's easy to get to. Interesting example of this. Uh in 1995, a gentleman named MacArthur Wheeler heard that lemon juice has some really peculiar properties, including acting as a sort of invisible ink. So he put some on his face and proceeded to rob some banks, even smiling at the security cameras. He thought he knew a lot about what lemon juice could do. He was wrong. He was still seen, he was not invisible as he had hoped. One of my professors who happens to be sitting here in the room today, Michael Miller, I don't I should have asked him about this quote if it's original with him. But really, really helpful idea. As the body of your knowledge increases, so does the shoreline of your ignorance. Am I on track there, Michael? What was that? Close enough, okay. Ask Michael for the original afterwards. So think about what you know as an island and an ocean. As you learn more about a topic, as you learn more in life, the shoreline also increases as well. And we call that ignorance. You realize how much more you have to learn, how much more you don't know. So recognize your weaknesses, be aware of your own weaknesses. Number four is to value character over platform. Value character over platform. I've already alluded to this, but we live in an age of influencers where people online with large followings garner a lot of attention and have this element of authority. Like whatever they say, people just kind of, oh, it must be true. It's really hard for me to imagine being in a space where if I type something on online that a million people or two million people are gonna read that and do something with their life. Like, I cannot imagine being in that place. We're on the receipt, I don't know of anybody in here who has millions of followers anywhere. Uh so we're kind of on the other end here where we might be the follower. We might be following somebody. I have newsletters I subscribe to, I have people I follow, and so on. But I've got to pay attention to, okay, just because this person has a platform doesn't mean that they have the character needed to hold that platform up. Like they might not deserve this platform at all. And so I need to be careful about platforming that person to other people. It's tempting to take their word for it. After all, millions of other people do. Presumably. Prioritize a track record over nice sounding ideas, prioritize experience over good intentions. This was something that I came to in my own addiction recovery, where I stopped leaning on advice from people who didn't have experience and who didn't have training. It didn't work. And I turned to people who had both the training and the experience to help. And that's when the breakthrough really started for me. Be inspired by actions rather than words. Mentioned this passage already in Matthew 7. Jesus says this beware of false prophets who come disguised as harmless sheep, but are really vicious wolves. You can identify them by their fruit, that is, by the way they act. Can you pick grapes from thorn bushes or figs from thistles? A rhetorical question. The answer is no. A good tree produces good fruit, and a bad tree produces bad fruit. So every tree that does not produce good fruit is chopped down and thrown into the fire. Yes, just as you can identify a tree by its fruit, so you can identify or discern people by their actions. Character over platform. Principle number five is to investigate information sources. Think back to the wisdom pyramid again. Okay, most enduring to least enduring. Not all information sources are created equal. We should match the source with the query. What question am I asking? What problem am I trying to solve? What's the appropriate source to do that? The more serious the implications of the information or whatever you find, the more investigation required. One simple example of this is just to think about online a URL, a web address. So www worldwide web dot such and such dot, and then pay attention to the next three letters. Usually dot com. It's the most common. Basically, it's for like basically anybody can get a.com site. Then you have other ones like a.org, maybe a j a hoop or two to jump through, often a nonprofit organization. A.gov is a government website.edu, educational institution. And that's hard to get, by the way. So being at Sattler, a new college, I don't remember what year it was, two or three years in, maybe even longer than that, until we got a.edu domain. We had to jump through hoops to get there. Not just anybody can get a.edu domain. Military, dot M I L, dot int international, and so on. So just pay attention to those things. Um there's probably others that that are there as well. Uh there's country subdomains yet, dot us, dot en dot so on, ca for Canada. Just getting kind of educating yourself on some of these things. They're not all created equal. Another important thing to consider here with information is when was this published? The date. So usually on a blog post, the top right-hand corner, there'll be a date of some sort. Any social media post is going to have a date associated with it. A study, if you're looking up research on a topic, check out the date. Okay. Depending on the topic you're looking at, you might want more recent, the most recent research on this information. Depending on the topic, it may be beneficial to have an older resource and so on. But just pay attention to that. I'd like to give you two uh quick examples here from my own life. So in the past, I used a chart that I had found online called the knowledge doubling curve. Some of you might remember it. Um I looked into it this weekend, and wouldn't you know, the source is dubious. I could not find in particular one piece of information. Basically, this curve, this guy, Buckminster Fuller, he was inventor and futurist. So that should have told me something. Uh he published this in a book, basically positing that like the speed at which information in the world doubles. And it was, you know, increasing, increasing, faster and faster, faster. The most recent, he said, every 11 to 12 hours, the total sum of information is doubling. And it quoted IBM, which is a popular computer company. I'm not sure. Anyway, I could not find that anywhere. The IBM source does not exist. I don't know where that number comes from. So I'm not using that chart anymore. I'm updating my thinking around that. Another one is actually this birds aren't real conspiracy. I didn't believe it. My friend told me about it the other morning. He just he was talking about Reddit, and there's subcommunities for everything, including this birds aren't real community. You know, people believe X, Y, and Z. I did not investigate the source. And what happened is I I, without really consciously thinking about it, I created this caricature in my mind of what? Like, there's these crazy people out there who actually believe this. That is bizarre. So this morning I look it up. This guy literally has a TED talk where he describes what he did. Okay, so like this is not a real thing. It's a satirical conspiracy theory. It's not a real thing. There might be people who actually believe it, but I had jumped to conclusions. I was like, hey, oh, there must be something. There must be this crazy group of people out there. All right, uh, number six here, and perhaps the most important, is to anchor yourself in meaningful community. Anchor yourself in meaningful community. True belonging is found in the real world, not in an online community. Belonging that's found online is susceptible to fringe beliefs, to fringe ideas, to the new and the novel. Ground yourself in the real. I don't know about you all, but I need eyeballs on my life. I need people in my life over an extended period of time who could say, Austin, a year ago you said this, or even three months ago, you said you were gonna do this. I don't see that happening. Or you have this stated value, but I see it shifting over time. I had a friend recommend a book. He said, Man, you need to read this book about money. I think he was sensing something in my life, a need that I had. Anchoring yourself in meaningful community requires basic human interaction skills. We have to learn how to hold space for people who believe differently than we do. We can't run at a moment's notice when, oh, somebody said something that I don't like or I don't agree with. We need to learn to hold space for that. Gives us the opportunity to practice getting curious instead of assuming or jumping to conclusions, like I did about the birds aren't real group of people. It's a critical space for giving correction and receiving correction. One of the aspects of a community is having age differences, multiple generations. I love seeing people with gray hair. I can't wait to have a head full of gray hair. Might be overstating a little bit, but like it's it's such a good thing. And I love that we've got men and women in this room who have gray hair, white hair. It tells us they've got a life lived, a life of experience, and they have perspectives, they've seen things that I have not seen. They've seen things that Emerson will probably never see. We need the age, aged among us. Prioritize the wisdom of the elders. Anchoring yourself in community provides that space to make the weighty decisions in community instead of in isolation. So we've talked through the age of information, what that means, why we need discernment, a little bit about what it is, and then six different ways that we can start becoming a discerning people. To educate ourselves, to implement a digital ethic within our households, to be aware of your own weaknesses, to value the character of people over the platform that they hold, to investigate the information sources, where does this come from? Even pushing each other. Wait, you said research shows. I said that earlier. Push people on it. Where did that come from? What's your source? And anchor yourself in meaningful community. To close this out here, I believe that as we exercise discernment, we will become the kind of people that the Apostle Paul prays that the church becomes in Colossians. He says, We have not stopped praying for you since we heard about you. We ask God to give you complete knowledge of his will and to give you spiritual wisdom and understanding. Then the way you live will always honor and please the Lord. And your lives will produce every kind of good fruit. Your lives will produce every kind of good fruit. All the while you will grow as you learn to know God better and better. That is my hope for this community. That is my hope for you as fathers, as husbands, as mothers, as wives, as young men, as young women, as grandparents, that we could be a discerning people so that our lives, our community bears every good fruit. Let's pray. Father, we live in a world that has gone mad in so many ways. We need your wisdom. We need your discernment. Please give us each wisdom and discernment for our particular lot in life. Help us to live as those who have the spirit dwelling within, as those who are marked by discernment and wisdom, Lord. We want this. We want to bear the kind of good fruit that Paul writes about. So help us, God. Amen.