The Heart of Screen Addiction
00:00:00.000 | It is not a comfortable subject to talk about, but it is essential that we
00:00:09.080 | understand sin. How sin works, what it does to us, and how the gospel heals us
00:00:15.120 | from its damage. In his first message at the 2015 Pastors Conference, John Piper
00:00:20.640 | offered a brief survey of sin from the book of Romans, and we jump into that
00:00:25.040 | message in the following clip as John Piper addresses Romans chapter 1 verse
00:00:30.080 | 18. Here's what he said. Verse 18, "The wrath of God is revealed from heaven
00:00:35.720 | against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their
00:00:40.600 | unrighteousness suppress the truth." So here mankind in general is described as
00:00:46.920 | ungodly and unrighteous. John, 1st John 5 17 says, "All unrighteousness is sin." So
00:00:55.020 | we know we're dealing with here. "To all unrighteousness and ungodliness of men,
00:01:01.280 | who," what's the first thing they do? They suppress the truth. Our ungodliness and
00:01:11.880 | unrighteousness inclines us to suppress truth. We repel the light. We run into
00:01:25.100 | darkness. Jesus said in John 3 that we are guilty sinners, not because we're
00:01:31.180 | victims of darkness, but lovers of darkness. John 3 19, "Light has come into
00:01:38.940 | the world, and people loved darkness rather than light." So right off the bat,
00:01:46.340 | I'm getting the feeling, okay, deep down in me issues are love issues. I love the
00:01:55.020 | dark. I can suppress the truth so much more easily in the dark, and that's what
00:02:03.020 | sin does. It suppresses truth. What truth does it specialize in suppressing? Verse
00:02:13.660 | 19, "Because what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown
00:02:24.660 | it to them." Knowledge of God is the truth that sin wants to suppress. So he says,
00:02:32.380 | "Therefore we have no excuse." Verse 20, middle of the verse, "So they are without
00:02:38.380 | excuse." Verse 21, "Why? Because although they knew, they knew God, they did not
00:02:45.660 | glorify Him or give Him thanks." So the root of why we suppress the truth is
00:02:58.020 | that we don't want to glorify or thank God, and the truth is always testifying
00:03:07.380 | to His glory and His beneficence, and so it has to be squished down, put out of
00:03:13.940 | our mind, lest we feel guilty about not glorifying and thanking Him. We don't
00:03:20.020 | want to do it because we're sinners, and sin doesn't thank God. Sin doesn't
00:03:28.860 | glorify God. Sin loves darkness, which conceals the glory of God and the
00:03:35.940 | beneficence of God. Sin is not just a hater of the light and of the knowledge
00:03:44.380 | of God desiring to suppress it. Sin is a lover. When the hated truth is suppressed,
00:03:51.580 | the loved lie is embraced. Verse 22, "Claiming to be wise, they" — that is, those
00:04:00.900 | who suppress the truth — "have darkened hearts. Claiming to be wise, they have
00:04:07.900 | become fools, and they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images."
00:04:15.860 | They don't just bury truth, they embrace alternative lovers. There's no vacuum in
00:04:24.260 | the human heart, ever. When the real God is rejected, images are embraced. They
00:04:31.420 | exchanged the glory of God for images. Sin hates the true God, and sin loves
00:04:43.340 | God-substituting images. And we, more than any culture in the history of the world,
00:04:50.700 | live in an age of images. We spend almost all our leisure time looking at images.
00:05:01.140 | Quite irrelevant, I think, that for Paul those images were stone or wood along
00:05:07.900 | the side of an Athenian road, and ours are on our phone or television or
00:05:13.380 | computer. Irrelevant. The issue is substitution. They exchanged the infinitely
00:05:21.220 | valuable glory of God for the glory of that show of images coming off the
00:05:28.080 | screen. Yes, amen. This clip was taken from John Piper's message, "What is Sin? The
00:05:35.980 | Essence and Root of All Sinning," from the 2015 Pastors Conference. The full
00:05:40.940 | message is on our site, along with all the conference media and over 1,200
00:05:45.060 | other messages from John Piper. See our archive at DesiringGod.org. Tomorrow,
00:05:50.740 | Ray Ortlund will join us to talk about Bible reading, specifically, what are we
00:05:54.740 | doing when we read the Bible, and how does the Bible ground us and stabilize
00:05:59.140 | us. I'm your host Tony Rehnke. We'll see you tomorrow.
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