(upbeat music) Well, after you write a book and the book gets published, what follows is a season of travel. You get asked to speak at churches and speak at conferences on the topic of your new book. That's generally how it works. And I wrote a little book on life inside our media culture.

It's called "Competing Spectacles" is the title. And once that book was out, I got asked to speak on the topic, to explain what it means to live out the Christian life inside this age of viral video, addictive gaming, blockbuster movies, and endless feeds of new social media. And as I labor to summarize my main points into one message, I returned over and over again to what has now become for me the most important verse in the whole Bible on why we have attention.

Why did God make us to focus on things? Why do we have an appetite for media? Why are we the only creatures who can be glued to a screen all day long? The answer is in Hebrews 2, 1, a verse that follows right after Hebrews chapter one, an entire chapter full of the supremacy of Christ.

And following that chapter on Christ's supremacy comes the first verse of chapter two, which says this, "Therefore," so in light of all the crisis for us in chapter one, "Therefore, we must pay much closer "attention to what we have heard, "lest we drift away from it." It's an incredibly relevant and important text for us inside the attention economy, as it's now called.

Well, my friend Dan here at Desiring God was listening through the John Piper Sermon Archive, and he recently sent me Pastor John's sermon on Hebrews chapter two, verse one, a sermon I had not heard before until recently, and lo and behold, in his sermon, he connects Hebrews 2, 1 to our media diets.

Here now is Pastor John. - It's a remarkable thing to me that in chapter one of Hebrews, there's no command to us. We are not told to do anything in chapter one. Chapter one is all celebration, all declaration to this effect. In former times, God spoke in a lot of different ways through the prophets.

Now, in these latter days, he has spoken to us by a son, and then the rest of the chapter is to describe the son. He's the heir of all things. He upholds the universe with the word of his power. He created all things. He's the radiance of God's glory.

He's the exact representation of the father's nature. He made purifications for sin. He sat down at the right hand of the majesty. He is over all angels, dispatching them to do his bidding among the saints. He is worshiped by everything in the universe except his father. He is God.

That's chapter one. No commandments, no duties, just truth. Just glorious, Christ-exalting revelation of God's final decisive word, Jesus Christ. You remember a couple of weeks ago when I called it the final decisive word because it says, in these last days, he has spoken to us by a son, and that the reason it's the last days is because there's no third chapter of revelation.

You got an Old Testament period of revelation, then you've got Christ in the last days, and then eternity in glory. There's no third era by which God does a new thing besides Jesus in speaking to the world. It does not mean that subsequent to Jesus, God can't communicate with us.

It means all of his communication flows from Jesus, points to Jesus, is measured and proved by Jesus, orients around Jesus. Jesus is God's decisive word to the world. It's the last word that he has to say. Do you see the logical connecting link between chapter one, the revelation of God's decisive final word in Jesus, and the first commandment of the book, verse one of chapter two, we must more closely listen to, or take heed to, or attend to what we have heard.

And the logical link is for this reason. All of chapter one is designed to buttress the first commandment of chapter two, namely listen. Everything he said about Jesus in chapter one was meant to say, "Wake up, listen, listen. "Don't drift, listen. "Take heed, look, zero in." That's why that little connecting phrase, and if you have an NIV, your little therefore, five words into the sentence or so, says the same thing.

Therefore, that is because of all that you've seen in chapter one, for this reason, or therefore, we must pay closer attention to what we have heard. So if you boil down all of chapter one, and the first verse of chapter two into one simple sentence, it goes like this.

Since God has spoken in these last days by a son, therefore, we must give close heed to what we've heard. The dignity, the majesty, the glory of the word spoken, Jesus, increases the sense of seriousness of the command. Listen to him, listen to what he has said. Now, it may seem strange to you, I don't know, where you are in your listening to Jesus, that so much weight would be put on the simple command, give heed to Jesus, listen to Jesus.

Pay close attention to what you've heard in this final decisive word that God spoke in Jesus. But it isn't surprising to me, because I know my bent not to listen. Let me ask you this, what are you listening to? Everybody's listening. Even deaf people listen to something. Everybody's listening.

If you wanna listen to a music group, you make provisions. You have a tape deck in the car, and you have a tape. If you wanna listen to the news, you make provisions. You have a radio in the kitchen, or you make sure the TV is on at the right time in the evening.

You make provisions, you take steps, so you can listen to what you want to listen to. If you wanna listen to the latest tale told by John Grisham, think of this, 'cause I walked into the Gatwick Airport in London, and in the London Airport bookstore, there's walls of John Grisham novels, with big signs that says, "The most popular author in the world." So I saw every other person had Rainmaker, and on the plane it looked like.

If you wanna listen, if you wanna listen, you buy, you move, you get, you position yourself, you take steps, you make provisions, so that you can listen if you wanna listen. And everybody's listening to something, and I'm asking you, what are you listening to? If you wanna listen to a missionary, who's in a hard place, like Liberia, or Sierra Leone, or Zaire, or Congo, you buy a computer and get on email, you download a couple times a day to make sure you don't miss it more than a couple hours worth.

You take steps, if you wanna listen, you take steps and you listen, and everybody's listening, and I'm asking, what are you listening to? What are you listening to? The first commandment, the first commandment in the book of Hebrews is listen. Listen, please listen to Jesus. Don't drift away. Don't turn the radio up so loud.

Don't turn the TV on so long. Don't read the novel so consistently that you don't tune in over and over and over to see and consider and hear Jesus. That's what he's pleading, and that's what I'm pleading this morning. The whole first chapter is written without any command in order to make the command light and easy.

This is not hard, folks. Listening is easy. That's why we do it all day long. It's easy. Having the radio off in the car is harder than having it on. Test yourself. Listening is easy. God is not a meanie. God spent 14 verses describing the spectacular superiority of his final word, Jesus Christ, over all angels and all television and all radio and all novels and all business and all commerce and all leisure and all education and everything in the universe so that when we get to this easy command, it would feel easy.

Only one thing makes it hard, if you don't wanna listen. - Having the radio off in the car is harder than having it on. There's a need for silence for sure, a relevant point for the digital age drawn from Hebrews 2.1 in a clip taken from Pastor John's sermon on April 28th, 1996, titled "The Danger of Drifting from the Word." You can find it online at desiringgod.org.

And if you have a sermon clip to share, email me, give me your name, hometown, the sermon title, the timestamp of where the clip happens in the audio, and make a note of what stands out to you in it. Put the word clip in the subject line of an email and send it to me at askpastorjohn@desiringgod.org.

Askpastorjohn@desiringgod.org. Well, speaking of a culture as pop media, the Apostle Paul was opposed to the cultural myths of his day. So in light of what Paul said against ancient mythology, how do we view our current cultural myths today? Are captivating novels and superhero movies and long running TV series, does Paul's concern apply to the fictional media of our culture today or not?

I'm your host Tony Renke. We will find out on Friday. We'll see you then. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)