Thank you for being a free subscriber here at Sacred & Secular.
You are welcome here. Free members receive a full reflection every Sunday, while paid membership unlocks daily reflections like this one and full access to an archive of more than 300 searchable reflections.
You may also be interested in my book, Sacred & Secular: Find God in the Ordinary (USA Link), which brings together some of the most popular and thought-provoking reflections from this journey so far.
There are a lot of things I do every day that nobody in the Bible could possibly have imagined. I use way too many Apple products and spend more time than I probably should looking at a small glowing screen in my hand. I communicate with people I have never met through the power of the internet, buy things without leaving the house, and can discover almost anything I want to know within seconds.
None of this appears in Scripture.
There is no verse telling me how much time I should spend on Facebook. Paul never wrote to the Corinthians about whether Christians should use ChatGPT, and Proverbs contains no warning about scrolling through your phone at midnight when you really ought to be asleep.
Yet these things still raise moral questions. They profoundly affect how we use our time, how we treat other people, what we consume, what we believe, and even the sort of people we are becoming. Sooner or later, when we want guidance, we might find ourselves asking a familiar Christian question:
What does the Bible say?
Sometimes there is a clear answer. There are things Scripture repeatedly and unmistakably calls us towards, and other things it warns us against. But sometimes the honest answer is not so clear because the Bible does not directly say anything about it.
I am beginning to think that what happens next tells us a lot about what we believe the Bible is actually for.
