Reformed experiential preaching explains how things ought to go in the Christian life (the ideal of Romans 8), how they actually go in Christian struggles (the reality of Romans 7), and the ultimate goal in the kingdom of glory (the optimism of Revelation 21–22). This kind of preaching reaches people where they are in the trenches and gives them tactics and hope for the battle.

Perhaps you have heard preaching that fills the head but not the heart. You come away better informed and educated, but little moved by God’s glory to do God’s will. In the worst case, such preaching puffs people up with knowledge. At its best, it is light without heat. You may also have heard preaching that touches the heart but not the head. Hearing it can be an emotionally moving experience. People leave the service excited, fired up, and feeling good. But they have zeal without knowledge. Like cotton candy, such preaching has lots of flavor but no nutritional value. It might bring people back for more (until they get sick), but it will not nurture life or develop maturity.
The greatest tragedy about these two abuses of preaching is that they sever the vital connection between truth and love in Christ: “But speaking the truth in love, [we] may grow up into him in all things, which is the head, even Christ” (Eph. 4:15). It’s not just that we need both truth and love.
Therefore, the truth of Christ must be brought home to the heart by the Holy Spirit in order to produce love. That’s the kind of preaching we need.
Reformed experiential preaching is not merely aesthetic, causing people to walk away thinking, “What a beautiful idea!” It is not merely informative, imparting knowledge about the Bible and theology. It is not merely emotional, warming hearts and producing strong feelings. It is not merely moralistic, instructing and exhorting in what is right and wrong. All of these elements are present in good preaching, but none of them is the heart of the matter.

It breaks us and remakes us. It is both exhilarating and humbling. Such preaching brings us face to face with the most glorious and delightful Being in the universe, and also face to face with our own profound wickedness.
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Taking disciplined time away from screens may not be the only way to live in the digital world without being conformed to it, but it is one good way. Over time, the gravitational pull of our phones may grow weaker, and we may find ourselves drawn into a different, far better orbit: the bright, life-giving sun of God himself.

A few years ago, a group of cognitive and behavioral psychologists took five hundred college students, split them into three groups, and gave them two tests. The groups were alike in every way except one: the placement of their phones. The first group had their phones screen-down on the table; the second had their phones in their pockets; the third didn’t have their phones at all. You probably can see where this is going.
Though the phones of all three groups were on silent, and though few students said they felt distracted by their phones, the test scores followed an inverse relationship to the nearness of the device. On average, the closer the phone, the lower the grade. Nicholas Carr, who discusses this study in the 2020 afterword to his book The Shallows, summarizes the psychologists’ troubling conclusion:

Smartphones have become so tied up in our lives that, even when we’re not peering or pawing at them, they tug at our attention, diverting precious cognitive resources. Just suppressing the desire to check a phone, which we do routinely and subconsciously throughout the day, can debilitate our thinking. (230)

The finding — corroborated by similar studies — gives clear expression to the vague sense many feel: our phones shape us not only, perhaps not even mainly, by the content they deliver to us, but also by the mere presence of something so pleasing, so undemanding, so endlessly interesting. Smartphones, though small, exert a (subconscious) gravitational pull on our attention, drawing our thoughts and feelings into their orbit, even when their screens are dark.
Which means, if Christians are going to heed the summons of Romans 12:2 in a smartphone age — “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind” — we will need to do more than resist the false content on our phones. We will need to resist the false gravitational presence our phones so subtly exert upon us.
And to that end, we might find help from an ancient practice: Sabbath.
Our Intimate Companion
Before considering what the Sabbath might mean for our screens, take fresh stock of where we are. The smartphone entered the world in 2007; by 2011, most of us had one. Now, just over a decade later, most of us have a hard time remembering life without one. Screens have become ubiquitous, seemingly inescapable — digital Alexanders who conquered our consciousness overnight.
For many, our phones are the first face we see in the morning, the last at night, and by far the most frequent in between. We have become a sea of bent heads and sore thumbs, adept at navigating sidewalks and store aisles with our peripheral vision. Phones have become so thoroughly embedded with mind and body that many feel phantom vibrations and find their hand repeatedly twitching, unbidden, toward the pocket. As of two years ago, the average American spends at least half his waking hours on a screen (The Shallows, 227).
Where shall we go from this digital spirit? Or where shall we flee from its presence? If we ascend to heaven, airplanes offer WiFi. If we make our bed in darkness, something buzzes on the nightstand. If we take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there 5G coverage will keep us within reach.
The stupendous prevalence of our phones may not be a problem if we knew a screen-saturated existence improved our quality of life and helped us follow Jesus more faithfully. Unfortunately, we have many reasons to think it doesn’t.
Digitized, Dehumanized
The irony has not escaped me that I am currently staring at a screen, and so (most likely) are you. Lest I saw off the branch I’m sitting on, let it be said: Our phones and other screens are gifts to thank God for. So much good can be done by them and through them. The need of the hour is not to shoot these wild stallions dead, but to tame them and harness their power.
But oh how they need taming. Jean Twenge, in her carefully researched book iGen, includes a graph that shows how much certain screen activities (like gaming, texting, and social networking) and certain nonscreen activities (like exercising, reading, and spending time with friends) contribute to teens’ happiness. She writes,

The results could not be clearer: teens who spend more time on screen activities…are more likely to be unhappy, and those who spend more time on nonscreen activities . . . are more likely to be happy. There’s not a single exception: all screen activities are linked to less happiness, and all nonscreen activities are linked to more happiness. (77–78)

And as with happiness, so with other categories of mental health: “More screen time causes more anxiety, depression, loneliness, and less emotional connection” (112).
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Written by Bruce A. Little |
Monday, November 14, 2022
This is where accommodation leads; start down the path of cultural relevancy and one will soon be entangled by an accommodation to the spirit of the age.  In addition, it leads to a most catastrophic move by evangelicals to reimagine Christianity which follow a weakened view of Scripture. In the end, not only is the Christian witness compromised, but the true nature of the Christian calling is lost as it is not by might nor by power, but by God’s Spirit (Zech 4:6). The sacred is camouflaged so the world will not be offended as evangelicals accommodate the spirit of the age.

Francis Schaeffer in his concluding remarks of chapter one of the Great Evangelical Disaster, wrote: “Here is the great evangelical disaster—the failure of the evangelical world to stand for truth as truth. There is only one word for this—namely accommodation: the evangelical has accommodated to the world spirit of the age.” He goes on to say, “and let us understand that to accommodate to the world spirit about us in our age is nothing less than the most gross form of worldliness in the proper definition of that word.”
Accommodation was a logical conclusion of the growing evangelical commitment to sounding culturally relevant, which in time morphed into acting like the world while trying to maintain a moral difference. In the end this has proven neither to impress the world, nor maintain the moral distinction.
Furthermore, most evangelicals have little or no understanding of the philosophical scaffolding supporting the cultural response to which they attach themselves. Schaeffer calls accommodation the grossest form of worldliness. There was a time when worldliness (a word we seldom hear in sermons anymore) was when Christians engaged in activity such as playing cards, going to dances or to the cinema and so forth. If you did these things, you would be considered a worldly Christian thus confusing the distinction between Christianity and the world. The thought was by condemning such activity would keep the world out of the church. This was called legalism. Good intentions, just ineffective and wrong.
In fact, this thinking committed two mistakes. One: thinking that such activity was the main threat from the world against Christianity. Two: thinking that avoiding certain questionable activity would make a Christian spiritual.  However, the real threat of worldliness is thinking according to the spirit of the age. This was Schaeffer’s understanding of worldliness, and it is why he called accommodation the “most gross form of worldliness”.
He meant that evangelicals had brought the world into the church by their worldly thinking which came about because of a weakened view of Scripture and a softening on moral issues of the day. A little later, in the same chapter, Schaeffer noted that all of this led to some evangelicals (some in his day, but many more in our day) “to talk about a wider, richer Christianity and to become more deeply involved in culture, but at the same time to accommodate to the world spirit about us [evangelicals] at each crucial point.”
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