It's pretty hard to overstate how the computer altered all of our lives. And as I listen through old sermons, I'm struck by how quickly John Piper knew that they would, knew that the microprocessor would change all of our lives, bringing computers into our homes and then eventually bringing smartphones into our pockets.

He saw the implications of this computer revolution decades ago, way back when he was shopping for his first computer in the early years of his pastorate. He explains some of those implications in a sermon from the spring of 1984. Our new digital powers would be bewitching, he says. Our gadgets would take hold of our affections.

Computers would bring tremendous blessings to our lives, but they could also corrupt our hopes and our affections. Here's Pastor John explaining how from 36 years ago. Last Thursday, the day I usually take off, Noelle and I took about three hours out of our day off to go visit computer shops downtown Minneapolis.

Thought I would poke around to see if there might be some kind of word processing equipment I could someday afford, and it was an amazing experience. My first foray into the big world of computer life. Went to the library first and read the latest Consumer Reports on word processing, and then we visited four stores and came home with a big sack of colorful brochures.

Computers are like sex, I discovered. There's something in us that they can hook into and hold onto. Computers are like a romance or an epic or an adventure which has come true right before our very eyes. They combine mystery and power and precision and beauty. They're exciting, they're new, they've got open-ended possibilities.

Our culture is going to be irreversibly transformed by the microcomputer revolution. Every one of you will have one in your home by 1994 because prices are going to fall, the uses are going to expand, it'll be as common as the telephone, I don't doubt. But for now, they are strange and wonderful things.

And one of the effects that they can have on Christians is to make Christians begin to feel that spiritual things aren't very real or exciting. They can't compare to these wonders. You can touch a computer, you can see a computer, it'll talk back to you, it'll solve your problems instantaneously.

It is a powerful fascination. But the Bible speaks largely of unseen things. They don't force themselves onto your senses. They talk about things often way off in the past or way off in the future sometimes. You've all experienced it, haven't you, with a new gadget or toy or appliance.

Either you bring it home or you come home with a bundle of literature all about it, literature half-read about word processing. How easy is it to take it and lay it aside and with all your heart open the Bible and listen to the voice of God? Let me ask another question to put beside that one.

If you were laid low with kidney failure this week and a congested heart and were told by the doctor three days at the most, unless we use extraordinary measures and we don't think that would be wise, which would you prefer? Would you ask your family to sit by your bed and read the latest program developments of IBM or the Bible?

What's happened? What happens in those minutes after the doctor walks out of the room and leaves you with the imminency of your death? What happens to that gripping fascination of RAM, ROM, CPU, CPM, PC DOS, multicolor monitors and perfect writer and profit plan? What happens? What happens is that here at the end of your journey through the valley of life, the haze of the computer craze just gets blown away.

And all of a sudden you see, perhaps for the first time in your life, the lucid reality of the mountains of eternity just ahead. You look back on that fog falling away into the valley and you wonder how you could have been so entranced, so captivated, so swallowed up in the mechanical functions of a man-made machine.

You look ahead and you see the spectacular peaks and the awful ravines and the unapproachable crags of those mountains and you wonder how that could have played such an insignificant role in your life. But not only the mountains ahead, in this short distance that you have to traverse between your hospital bed now and those mountains, you look off to the side.

And on this side you see thick green grass and trees with luscious fruit and crystal streams and darting fish and a huge white dove hovering midair over it all. Then you look to this side and you see a wasteland of half-eaten corpses and cracked riverbeds and dry ashes and lurking in the midst of it a huge, gaunt, hungry lion with his shoulder blades sticking up through his mangy fur and his big eyes looking you right in the face.

And all of a sudden in one immeasurable moment you discover what life has been really all about in the midst of all the hazes of computers and trinkets and toys and cars and houses and business. The real issue of life becomes real clear, namely a battle for your soul between the dove who gives life and the lion who destroys.

So this morning I've come to proclaim to you that whatever has entranced you, whatever has captivated you, whatever enthralls you, if it dulls your sensitivity to the mountains of eternity, if it somehow encloses you with a haze so that you don't feel what is really at stake every day in your life between the lion and the dove, it's an illusion from hell.

I want us to see Christ in combat today so that our lives can be cleared away of whatever haze is blinding us to the combat that we face. People sometimes ask, "If Satan is real, why do we see more demon possession and exorcisms in America? How come we just hear about that from Indonesia?" I've got an idea.

Satan holds American Christianity so tightly in the vice grip of comfort and wealth that he's not about to tip his tan with too much demonic tomfoolery. What Satan fears most, Bethlehem, is an outpouring of the Holy Spirit that causes you and me to say with Paul, "I count everything as refuse in order that I might know the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of his agonies becoming conformed to him in his death." Paul's statement is relevant for the smartphone age and for all the bewitching technologies of our age today.

This sermon was preached 36 years ago on March 18, 1984 in a sermon titled "Christ in Combat – Defense by the Spirit." You can find it and listen to the entire sermon at DesiringGod.org. Thanks for listening. If you haven't done so, get our new episodes as we release them by subscribing to Ask Pastor John in your favorite podcast app in Spotify or by subscribing to DG's YouTube channel.

To find all 1,500 of our past episodes or to submit a question of your own, go online to DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn. Well, I'm recording this in the midst of a pandemic shutdown of our cities and our states. I haven't gathered with my own church in weeks. But the next question on the docket is one about church dress codes, and I trust that we'll eventually gather together and be reunited again and dress codes will be an issue.

To prep for that reunion, we have a question up on how we should best dress for church, and it's a good one. It's a good episode. It's up next time. I'm Tony Reinke. We'll see you on Friday. Friday.