How we spend our attention is worship…or idolatry
Issue #150
In the past couple of issues, I have especially focused on how we go where we look — and how sanctification therefore requires sustained attention on God.
When you fix your attention on something, you are caring about it. Looking is done with the eye; caring is done with the heart. Attention is what draws these two things together — and together, they transform us.
Yet when scripture speaks of the transformation of the mind, it often frames this in terms of sacrifice, or spiritual service. Paul famously does this in Romans 12:1–3
I exhort you, therefore, brothers, through the compassions of God, to present your bodies a sacrifice—living, hallowed, acceptable to God—your spiritual service; and be not conformed to this age, but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, unto your proving what is the will of God—the good, and acceptable, and perfect. For I say, through the grace that was given to me, to every one who is among you, not to think more highly of himself than is necessary to think; but to think so as to be sober-minded, according as God did deal unto each a measure of faith.
Our spiritual “service” in the Greek is latria, from which we get liturgy. It is translated in many Bibles as worship. We present our bodies to God in an ongoing spiritual liturgy of worship, sacrificing, obeying — and Paul places this prior to our being fashioned into the right shape, being transformed and renewed in mind. We conform our actions to reality — and our minds follow.
Right worship, for Paul, is the necessary prerequisite for being able to test and know God’s will in our lives.
Seeing it this way is useful for better understanding what it means to fix our attention on God in our daily lives. In Romans 12, Paul does not describe this in terms of attention, but in terms of service. What we do day-to-day matters, he says, because it produces either godliness, or ungodliness. The actions aren’t mere actions; they change us.
You have probably heard the expression, You become what you worship. Scripture tells us that those who worship idols “shall be like unto them” (Ps 115). What you fix your attention on is what you become like:
we all, with unveiled face beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are transformed into the same image from glory to glory, even as from the Lord the Spirit. (2 Co 3:18)
Our modern impulse is to see a dichotomy between looking and doing. Beholding, and serving.
We see Romans 12 and we see 2 Corinthians 3, and we want to know: Which is it?
Is it the eye or the hand? Is it attention or action?
Scripture says…yes.
Looking to Christ is not detachable from obeying Christ. Receiving Christ is not separable from serving Christ. The way scripture describes these things is frequently interchangeable, much as it upsets our modern mindset to atomize everything — a pathology we discuss here:
Becoming more like Christ is a process which begins with our beholding him, and is directly connected to — and in fact, dependent upon — our serving him.
In other words, the life of repentance, of the transformation of the mind, is one and the same thing with the life of worship.
Repentance is worship. Worship is repentance. Repentance is all day, every day. So worship is all day, every day.
We will always be serving and representing and magnifying something — because that is what we were made to do. And this worship will always be changing us into the image of the thing we are serving and representing and magnifying. Hence Paul tells the slaves in the church at Colossae:
Whatsoever ye do, work heartily, as unto the Lord, and not unto men; knowing that from the Lord ye shall receive the recompense of the inheritance: ye serve the Lord Christ. (Colossians 3:23–24)
In our work, our six days of labor, we serve the Lord Christ. And so Paul also wanrs the Colossians that covetousness is idolatry (Col. 3:5). Doug Wilson comments rightly on this passage:
It is a rare occurrence when such an idolater lights votive candles in front of his bank book, or leaves baskets of fruit in front of his investment portfolio. But service is still rendered, and that service is still idolatry. The idolater’s life is lived in the service of that god, and he does what that god demands of him. (Preparing for the Savage Gods)
Although it is easy to think that people who don’t engage in religious ritual are not worshiping, this isn’t how religion and worship works according to the Bible. There is no non-religious activity—not even even with money. Greed is idolatry, and idolatry is worship.
This is very disturbing to me, because it means that…
Attention can be idolatry
As I have been drawing these connections back to what I know about worship, and reminding myself of how religious our daily life has to be by nature, I have become even more troubled about the pressures that act upon us as modern men.
I touched on this last time, thinking about the attention we give to things like social media. Even when I was discussing this just in terms of attention, the implications were already fairly ominous. If you distill what you might call “digital attention patterns” down to their essence, it’s a kind of disintegration. Press these patterns to the very edges, and apply them exhaustively to a man, and you would end up with a disintegrated man: someone unable to focus his attention on anything for any significant amount of time, and so unable to understand anything well; a man whose interests and beliefs are always shallow and transient, who cannot meaningfully care for anything, nor have true regard for anything — and so he is unable to love anything or exercise any true virtue either.
Ultimately, you end up with a man who is unable to serve as the integration point between heaven and earth — which is to say, a man who is no longer the image of God.
You didn’t realize that binging Netflix while scrolling X was actually practice for hell, but it is. But it gets worse.
What if instead of thinking in terms of attention, we think in terms of religion? Instead of thinking about beholding, we do what scripture does, and swap that out for serving? Instead of looking, we say, worshiping?
That ought to produce a whole new level of fear about what we are doing with our time.
Let me emphasize that I’m not on a tirade against technology in general — or even particular forms of it like social media. What I’m wanting to emphasize is the nature of service.
If you can identify who is serving what, you can identify what religion is being acted out, and what god is being worshiped.
If you are the one who is being served, all well and good. If Netflix is serving you, for instance — which is to say, if you are the master rather than the slave — then I don’t think we have a problem. (We might have other problems, of course, but I don’t think we have the kind of problem that we’re currently thinking about.) Same thing with X. If you are the master, and X is the slave, then everything is okay — at least as far as we’re thinking about it right now.
But many people using technology — what Tolkien might rather have called The Machine — are manifestly not in control. The word binging comes up a lot, and tells you everything. Binging is not something masters do. It is not a lordly activity. It is an obviously fleshly one; it is really a kind of euphemism for acting on an addiction, which in turn is a secular effort to give a medical, non-moral name to what scripture describes as enslavement to the flesh: gluttony, lust, evil desire.
Give not thy strength unto women,
Nor thy ways to that which destroyeth kings.
It is not for kings, O Lemuel, it is not for kings to drink wine;
Nor for princes to say, Where is strong drink? (Pr 31:3–4)
We all understand that it’s not kingly to lack sexual restraint; to need women, plural. And we all understand that it’s not kingly to need wine, either. This isn’t a condemnation of having a drink; it’s talking about kings getting drunk. There are obvious applications here for any Christian. Don’t commit adultery. Don’t get drunk. But there is more than one way to get drunk. We can replace wine with drugs, for instance. But we can also replace wine with devices. They’re less damaging to the liver — and you get a way better dopamine hit.
In the modern day, drunkenness from alcohol is relatively rare; certainly it is not considered respectable. Yet we are all often drunk on devices instead, and think nothing of it. This is because it’s a lot harder to notice that you’re drunk. How often do we find ourselves seeking a little pick-me-up during a hard bout of work that requires sustained attention?
“I just need a drop man, just a quick fix. Just let me refresh X and I’ll be able to get back to work.”
In the church, it isn’t P we need to worry about. It’s X. It’s TikTok. It’s Netflix. That’s the hard stuff.
But I’m getting sidetracked. My point is much more specific right now. My point is about service and its religious nature. To paraphrase Doug Wilson, it is a rare occurrence when an idolater lights votive candles in front of his mobile, or leaves baskets of fruit in front of his TV. But service is still rendered, and that service is still idolatry. The idolater’s life is lived in the service of that god, and he does what that god demands of him.
We need to understand very clearly what is at stake.
Habits are our liturgy
The way we live is religious service, and religious service is always aimed somewhere — it is always worship.
Either that worship will be fixed upon the creator, who is blessed forever amen, or it will be fixed upon the creature. Either our god will be our belly (Phil 3:19), or it will be the Lord Christ. Either it will be pure religion that is undefiled before God (Jas 1:27), or it will be idolatry.
This is what is at stake. It’s not just a question of whether your habits are kinda holding you back from being as sanctified as you otherwise would be. I know this is how you think, because it is how I think:
“Well, it’s not ideal, it’s not great, maybe it’s kind of preventing me from being as holy as I could be, maybe if I changed some things I could grow in the image of Christ more quickly. But, you know, I’m still saved. And I’ll still be transformed into that image perfectly one day anyway. So it’s not like it makes a real difference…right?”
Not so fast.
What if it’s idolatry? It’s part of my daily liturgy, isn’t it? And liturgy is worship, right? And worship can be false, can’t it — even if you’re a Christian? Especially if you’re a Christian! What is 1 John all about? Why does he write it? He summarizes in the last line:
Little children, guard yourself from idols. (1 Jn 5:21)
We wouldn’t need a letter about this if idolatry wasn’t likely to be a problem for Christians, would we? And then John goes on to write Revelation, where he reveals the urgency, the utmost importance, the dire consequence of failing to heed his warning:
But for the cowardly, and faithless, and abominable, and murderers, and fornicators, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, their part shall be in the lake that burneth with fire and brimstone; which is the second death. (Re 21:8)
Yikes.
Am I saying that if you spend a bit too much time checking social media, you’re going to end up in the lake of fire? I am drawing your attention to the end of those who treat idolatry as a light thing; a thing that can be entertained without fear or consequences. Some of the people who end up in the lake of fire are going to be very surprised about it because they thought they were on God’s side. There are Christians alive today — I am not thinking of anyone in particular; I’m just telling you, there’s no question they exist — and they are going to hell if they don’t repent. Some of them are cowardly. Some of them are faithless. Some of them are secretly murderers. Some of them are harboring unconfessed porn habits. Some of them are even doing black magic. Some are just liars. And some — I dare say many — are idolatrous. They don’t even know they are. “Lord, Lord,” they will say, as the angels seize them.
Let me come at this from one last angle to drive the point home. Think of the connection between consumption and communion:
The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a communion of the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not a communion of the body of Christ? seeing that we, who are many, are one bread, one body: for we are all partake of the one bread. Behold Israel after the flesh: have not they that eat the sacrifices communion with the altar? What say I then? that a thing sacrificed to idols is anything, or that an idol is anything? But I say, that the things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons, and not to God: and I would not that ye should have communion with demons. (1 Co 10:16–20)
Paul tells us here that taking a meal with demons actually causes you to have some kind of participation with them, just as consuming Christ causes you to have communion with him. Both are sacramental; they follow the same pattern, the same symbolic mechanism, the same creational logic.
What this shows is that the Christian sacraments are not some kind of unique or sui generis ritual with no parallel anywhere. Rather, they are true and right uses of sacramental patterns that are built into creation — patterns which can also be used (or one should say, ab-used) to participate with demons instead of with Christ.
This is true of all liturgy. True liturgy is ordering the form and timing of our worship to “resonate” with spiritual realities; to embody them. So false liturgy is doing something as much as true liturgy is.
Obviously checking X is not on the level of sharing a meal with demons. It’s a lot more mundane. But still — if liturgy does mysteriously connect us to the spiritual realities that it expresses, then let’s take the idea of a “hellish liturgy” a lot more seriously, whether it is ritualized and religious, or merely habitual and mundane.
It is idolatry.
It is dangerous.
It could, perhaps, not merely fail to transform you into the image Christ — but succeed in forming you into another image entirely.
Notable
The Coming Judgment upon the Conservative Reformed Church — a sermon by Steve Jeffery
And we can’t blame the media for this; they’re just showing us what we want to see. It is ordinary people who have made being a public nuisance pay. Neotoddlerism needs nothing more than attention to thrive — it is physical clickbait — and we just keep clicking.
The more we share and comment on clips of people throwing soup over paintings, or graffitiing on memorials, or vandalizing mosques, or blocking roads, or spraying orange paint at airports, or pitching tents on university campuses, the more we’ll see such events recur in real life.
Michael’s notes from a conference talk:
Until next time,
Bnonn