“Teach Us to Pray”

/in /by

Here is the sermon from Mr. Rod McNair we mentioned in the most recent podcast discussing prayer and meditation. If you want to learn some of the fundamental elements of prayer, based on Jesus’ own instructions, this sermon teaches you exactly that. We highly recommend giving it a listen.

In fact, the sermon is available in podcast form, as well, for those who would prefer that. And it struck us in putting this post together that we’ve heard lots of folks say they did not even know the Church had a sermon podcast. We do! At least on Apple Podcasts!

So below the YouTube version of the sermon, we’ve added access to the podcast recording of the sermon. If you don’t have time to watch, you can listen! We’ve added a link to the broader LCG Sermon Podcast, as well.

In Search of the Eternal (Dopamine) Buzz

/in /by

Some of us have noticed a lot of podcasts talking these days about dopamine—the neurotransmitter your brain uses to “reward” behavior—and how our current society is addicted to triggering it in so many unhelpful ways. (For example, social media is like a dopamine-triggering machine training you to keep on scrolling and scrolling and scrolling…) One neurologist said in a podcast recently that, in a way, the only real currency in the world is not the U.S. dollar, the British pound, the EU’s euro, or what-have-you. He suggests the only real currency in the world is dopamine, and that is what everyone in the world is “trading” in. And, in a similar sense, triggering our reward centers through dopamine hits is how many in the world—social media corporations, marketers, entertainment companies, etc.—are “reprogramming” our brains without our even realizing it.

All the talk reminds us of two articles by Mr. Gerald Weston that are very worth your time.

One that is very old but, ironically, increasingly relevant: “In Search of the Eternal Buzz,” from a 2006 TW magazine issue. It’s a short read—less than 10 minutes. Give it a shot.

The other is Mr. Weston’s article on the influence of social media, “Tame the Social Media Monster!”—the cover article of the 2018 March-April issue.* Of course, social media is not the only arena in which people are using our neurology against us (which Mr. Weston makes very apparent in the article, with comments from tech experts, themselves, who helped design it all), but reading about it—and equipping yourself—is a great place to start. It’s a longer read, but should still take most readers under 20 minutes.

Here are the two links again. Check them out!

* Unnecessary Behind-the-Scenes Comment™: We loved the cover on this issue. It was an early experiment more than four years ago in doing something a little different, and we were glad Mr. Weston let us play with it!

Biohacking and Thankfulness

/in /by

Here in the U.S., Thanksgiving Day is tomorrow, and while not all of our teen and young adult readers are in the U.S., many of you are—and even for those who are not, when does thankfulness go out of style?

In the spirit of that, consider enjoying this short read from Mr. John Robinson titled “Hacking Thankfulness,” initially published in our January 2021 Tomorrow’s World. Mr. Robinson highlights how secular science and “biohacking” advocates have come to understand the power of gratitude and how we improve our health and our lives, in general, and the benefit of actively cultivating a spirit of thankfulness—an attitude the Bible has recommended for centuries.

We refer to this article in the podcast we plan to publish later this week, and we wanted to make sure we gave you a link so you could read it for yourself! Just click below—it’s only a 4-minute read, and worth the time!

And for those who do observe Thanksgiving Day, we pray yours is a happy one that brings to mind the many, many things in your life for which you can thank your Creator!

“Is it clean, or unclean, that is the question…”

/in /by

[Apologies to Mr. Shakespeare, there…]

We received a question from a young adult out there on matters of clean and unclean animals, and it prompted us to post this great Tomorrow’s World Whiteboard which some of you may not have seen. It does a great job of summarizing Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14. We hope you like it!

P.S. The question we received was about ducks and swans. In the list of unclean birds, “swan” is a mistranslation in some Bibles (like the KJV). Best evidence (including internal evidence in the passage) suggests that the Hebrew word concerns a kind of owl, completing the list of owls in the passage. Many other translations (NKJV) get that right.

P.P.S. Unlrelated to the topic, but, hey, why not here? We apologize that there was no podcast last week! Our podcasters were very focused on getting a new literature item ready for final review, and there just wasn’t time. We’ve thought about putting out two podcasts this week to make up for it, but we’re also in the middle of the Council of Elders meetings. So, we’ll see! But please forgive us! Now, the video (which was the whole point of this post)…

Three Questions from Down Under!

/in /by

We don’t want to distract anyone from reading Thomas White’s inspiring and thoughtful post “One Hundred Billion Eternities” by pushing it down further on the front page, so click here to open it up in a separate tab and read it later!

However, a nice email from our Regional Director in the Australasia region, Mr. Rob Tyler, has reminded us that they do a great job putting articles for youth on their regional website. After checking it out, we thought the recent short article from Mr. Paul Kearns, “Three Questions That Can Change Your Life!” was worth passing along. So, check it out, then follow up with a read of Mr. White’s brief but excellent essay. (And, God willing, now that the Feast is past us, podcasts should resume this week!)

One Hundred Billion Eternities

/in /by

… And we’re back!

Whoever you are and wherever you’ve been, we hope you had an outstanding Feast of Tabernacles and Last Great Day this year. We hope you “caught the vision” and deepened your appreciation for the amazing plan that God will soon bring to fulfillment. The understanding of God’s Holy Days is a blessing that so very few in human history have been given, and the more we value it, the better we grasp the “big picture” of Christ’s return and the soon-coming eternal Kingdom of God. 

But whoever you are, when you’re young, even the “small picture” seems enormous. Learning to drive a car is terrifying when you’ve previously only driven—and crashed—a Mario Kart. Getting married is mind-breakingly immense when the whole of your existence has been not married. Let’s be realistic here: Young adults doing their best to meaningfully visualize eternity will probably be about as successful as preschoolers trying to ponder the theory of relativity, and I say that as a young adult.

God reminds us to “seek first” His kingdom (Matthew 6:33), and He does that because, let’s face it, we’re going to forget. This might apply even more when you’re young, because as a teenager or young adult, it’s difficult to focus your life on the Kingdom of God while also… you know, managing all the really important earthly milestones young people naturally have to deal with. Because you have to finish school. You have to get a job. You’d really, really like to marry someone and have children, and then you have to make sure you don’t neglect that spouse or those children. And in the midst of all of this, you have to remember how temporary everything is—even though right now it’s legitimately important—so you have to keep talking to God. You have to keep pondering His ways and commands. You have to keep fasting, you have to keep spending time with the Bible, you have to keep examining yourself.

That really is a big picture, and it’s legitimately difficult to keep up with everything. But it’s also a tiny picture—because it’s only about you. While you’re trying really hard not to make a physical mess of your life, and doing your best not to make a spiritual mess of it either, it can be all too easy to miss the fact that you’re just one person. Yes, God cares so very deeply about you, and you should never, ever forget that—but even your eternity is just one eternity. 

You know what’s bigger than an eternity? Read the title again.

According to that nifty little internet we’re all using these days, it’s estimated that around 100 billion people have lived on Earth up to this point. And hey, you’re one of them! Congratulations. That means the Kingdom of God is 0.000000001 percent about you. That’s how big a part of the picture your one eternity is.

As we’re annually reminded on the Last Great Day, the world needs God’s Kingdom. It’s about so much more than your personal salvation or mine, and it’s even about so much more than the collective saints of God being transformed in the first resurrection. It’s about rescuing everyone in the entire history of the world. It’s about redeeming not just our time, but the whole of time itself. It’s about one hundred billion eternities.

That’s a big picture. And if our first thought of God’s Kingdom is usually “Oh boy, I sure hope I make it there,” we’re forgetting 99.999999999 percent of that picture. 

We should never stop striving to enter God’s Family, because that’s literally the entire point of human existence (Ecclesiastes 12:13), but when we’re trying to think of the big picture, let’s at least remind ourselves that the vast majority of that picture isn’t about us—and let’s thank God for the fact that, regardless of any one of us, His Kingdom will come, creating an unfathomably joyful universe of one hundred billion eternities.

A young Queen Elizabeth’s inspirational words to other young adults

/in /by

After recording our last podcast, I was prompted to watch the full version of a short clip of a speech Queen Elizabeth gave on the occasion of her 21st birthday. In it, she comments on the “great joy” of being a young adult, having grown up in “terrible and glorious” years, and entering the time when one can begin to take some of the burden off of those who have gone before. It is a remarkable speech, and I hope it resonates with all of you.

It is quaintly raw, with pauses for the camera to be repositioned or focused or for a redo. But at less than 8 minutes, we believe it is worth your time, listening to Queen Elizabeth when she was closer to your age—the exact same age as many of you, in fact—and hearing the advice she has to give.