This is one of six video sessions are designed to help young men understand some of the basics necessary for their lives as providers and churchmen. They cover areas of time and money management and matters of career selection. The teachers in this series are local church members who are. experienced in their areas of instruction.

Music So Jason, when folks threw out their television sets, they had no idea what was coming behind it, a new technology. And that's really the problem with technology. There's always a new one behind it. And new technologies always present new problems. A lot of times you don't know what the problems are until it's too late.

So we're always adapting to new technologies. You know, when the railroads came, when the automobile came, when, you know, central air conditioning came, televisions, all these things caused rethinking of how you do life. And now we're in the midst of this mobile device slash Internet revolution. And there are enormous challenges in dealing with it, and Everybody's trying to figure out how to use their time when there are these new challenges that they've never faced. Quite in exactly the same with the same you know kind of technology that we have today.

So you know we're here to talk about how do we adapt? How do we function in the midst of the use of a new technology? We're not Luddites. We don't think technology is evil, but we think technology can be used for evil. We don't think the technology is evil, we think we're evil.

That's the problem. So let's help us frame the discussion that we want to have tonight about technology. So we've got a title on this session called Taking Dominion Over the Internet. And by way of introduction as we get started with this I'd like to make two preliminary remarks. The first one is this.

What we're really addressing in our discussion tonight is technology, so I'm glad you started it off the way you did because it really goes beyond just the internet. We're talking about really the uses of the internet as well and the devices that take you to the internet. So we're talking about email, we're talking about texting, we're talking about internet usage, we're talking about smartphones, laptops, all the devices that connect with it. When we're evaluating technology, I think one of the first questions we should ask is, should I have this at all? This can be email texting, any of that, okay?

Should I have it at all? Sometimes the answer is no. Sometimes Something related to technology has been such a constant snare and a hindrance that the best answer is just to eliminate it. So I'm not saying that no one can have a laptop or a smartphone, No one can have an email address, no one should be texting, but I'm just saying before we get in to talk about optimizing any of these things that have a relationship to technology, we should just ask the question, has this been such a problem that I should even worry about optimizing it? Maybe I should eliminate it.

Years ago I had a customer who had a mantra and this was the mantra. Don't get caught doing well something that shouldn't be done at all. And I think sometimes in life we do that. We're trying to optimize things in life that we really shouldn't be done at all. So that's the first question.

We're talking about technology and we should ask the question with this thing, has a relationship to technology in front of me, should I have it at all? The second preliminary remark I'd like to make is that this is an ongoing challenge for everyone. Meaning no one's excluded and no one's ever going to be done with this struggle. So we're not going to lay out brilliant principles tonight and then people will grab on to our brilliant principles and that will be the end of the matter. Everyone who hears and everyone who doesn't hear has a relationship to technology.

It's always going to be changing and this is always going to be a struggle where there will be ebbs and flows. There will be times where you do better and times where you do worse and we all need to be vigilant all the time because of this. It's not like we whip this and then we're done with it forever. So I'd like to talk about three different categories and let's just take them one by one. I'll just state them first.

The first category is content and what I mean by that is what are we absorbing into our lives, our hearts as a result. The second category is use of time and the question there is what about stewarding time? How does this help me to be a good or a bad steward of time. And the third category is productivity. What impact does this have on our productivity?

Because we're Christians, we believe that our lives should be bearing fruit. That means there's increase. That means that there's progress. That's what bearing fruit is all about, and the Lord Jesus gives us parables about being fruitful. We should be fruitful in every area of life.

So those are the three basic categories. So let's start with the first one. What are your thoughts about content and the things that we absorb? So when we're talking about content, we're talking about what we absorb through the portal of technology. That's what technology is for us.

It is a portal that takes us to places that we used to have to leave the house to get to. Now we don't have to leave the house to. You used to not be able to slip into these things, but now you can slip into them because there's a portal that brings things in and takes you out to them. A lot of times when we think about technology and content, we go immediately to pornography. Technology takes you to pornography, that's bad.

We shouldn't be dabbling with pornography. And what pornography is, is it's a devastating end point. And it's just that, the end point. There are many stop signs. There are many things that should have stopped us short that have been disregarded and run through before you get to this devastating end point.

So when we talk about content, I think we need to talk about addressing the things that take you gradually there. People don't end up in pornography on day one usually. They end up here that takes you to here that takes you to here that takes you to the devastating end point. I want to consider Proverbs chapter 7. This is really interesting.

You wouldn't think that Proverbs would have so much of a bearing on technology, but Proverbs actually has a bearing on everything. So I'd like to consider Proverbs chapter 7 verses 6 through 10. Here's what the writer of Proverbs says. For at the window of my house I looked through the lattice and saw among the simple. I perceived among the youths a young man devoid of understanding, passing along the street near her corner.

And he took the path to her house in the twilight, in the evening, in the black and dark night. And there a woman met him with the attire of a harlot and a crafty heart." And I'm going to stop there, but it goes on to talk about the undoing of this man, the disastrous end of this man. But there are places that if you go there, you will meet the harlot. And the Internet actually has become one of those places. And if you go there at night, it's sort of like what Proverbs 7 is saying.

If you go in certain places and you go there at night, you'll be met by the harlot. The truth is, it only takes a very little to put you on a slippery slope that leads you to this disastrous end point. And it only takes tantalizing images. You go to a site with tantalizing images. You don't go to a site with pornography.

You go to a site that has a little that awakens lusts within you and click leads to click leads to click leads to the disastrous endpoint and you find one thing leading to another. So this thing about content is that we go somewhere else. We're taken to another place and then another place and another place and that's one of the great challenges with the Internet is that it takes you out of the world that God put you in to another world. And remarkably that world is vast. Every category of knowledge, experience, personality is out there, and that's one of the great temptations that you cultivate an affection for a world that you're not in.

I saw it just a couple hours ago. I was walking down the street here and I was walking by a store and there were like five guys out front. They were obviously friends and they were all just doing this. They were in a different world. They were totally disconnected from one another and what was going on, but this world that you get transported into can go a long way.

That's a real danger. So the Bible has a couple of really clear points of counsel for us. The first is this, pluck out the eye. In other words, if there's something that takes you in the direction of sin that's been leading you into sin, you don't spare it no matter what it is. If it's your eyeball, you don't spare it.

The second thing is this. Christians have been set free by the blood of Jesus Christ and they are to stay untangled. So I want to read the two texts of Scripture that give us this counsel. The first one is Jesus and what he's teaching in Matthew chapter 5, verses 27 through 30, and it couldn't be more directly applicable to what we're talking about. Jesus says, You have heard that it was said to those of old, you shall not commit adultery.

But I say to you that whoever looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and cast it from you. For it is more profitable for you that one of your members perish than for your whole body to be cast into hell. So you have clear counsel from Jesus about what to do if something's leading you into lust, and yet So many Christians have not applied this to technology and the use of technology and they've been ruined by it. There's a second text that I think is important which is Hebrews chapter 12 and I'll read verse one and part of verse two.

Here's what Hebrews chapter 12, the beginning of it says. Therefore we also, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight and the sin which so easily ensnares us and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith. So Hebrews 12 tells us that it's really easy to get reentangled. Being justified is the unentangling from sin. It's being cleansed, but Hebrews warns us that Christians don't automatically stay that way, that there are weights that are wanting to weigh us down and we're to throw those off so that we remain unentangled and we keep our eyes on Jesus, not on things that dishonor Jesus.

So the counsel of Scripture is that we be ruthless, that we not spare anything. I mean I think that implies limitation. When you think about content and places to go, a Christian has to think really carefully about how much he should limit himself. And so with such a vast resource, a Christian first of all has to recognize that there must be a limitation process in where they go, how often they go, how long they go. Those are really critical matters, and if you don't work through that, you're pretty much open to go anywhere, anytime, and find anything.

And so there has to be discipline with this new technology. So Jason, tell us about some of the things that you do to try to regulate content in your normal life with your tools. As the head of a house on a very aware that there are dangers and that I have a direct responsibility to do my best to address the dangers and to protect our family against those dangers. And so there are stop signs, there are protections that we've put in place in order to try to address this. So let me mention some of them.

I have a smartphone. Smartphones can be very dangerous, So I have an app on that smartphone called Ever Accountable. Now there are many apps that do the same thing and I'm not sure whether Ever Accountable is all that special. I'm not sure it has features that you can't get on the others. But I know this app sends a weekly report.

There's nothing I can do about it. Now that I've installed it, I'm stuck with it, which is how I like it. And a weekly report of everywhere I've been on the internet and every app I've used goes to my wife. It shows up in her email inbox. And so I have total transparency with my wife with how I've used my smartphone.

Now here's what the total transparency does for me. It removes the temptation. I don't spend one second of any day or any week agonizing over whether I'm going to go somewhere where I shouldn't go because the report is going to Miss Janet. It's going to show up in her inbox. And so it just relieves the pressure that can build when when temptation besets you because I know I'm not going there.

It's ruined if the wrong report shows up in my wife's inbox. And so transparency can and should be working for us. I also have, we have lots of devices in our home that connects to the internet. So we've got a couple of iPads, we've got a couple of iPods, we've got a number of laptops all that connect wirelessly to the internet. So as the head of a household, the way I've chosen to address that is through a software tool called OpenDNS that you put on the router, so not individual devices, but it restricts where you can go and it just won't let you go to the bad places.

So it's a filter. Is any filter perfect? Does any filter keep you from going to websites where you might not find something pornographic but find something that's tantalizing, that awakens the lust? No, there's not a filter that's like that. But again, it's a stop sign.

It's a protection. It's a measure that can and should be taking. And it's a measure honestly that frustrates my family sometimes. How so? It can be draconian.

It can keep you from going places that are actually good in an attempt to restrict from places that are bad. Here's my posture towards that. I don't care. A little frustration is a small price to pay to put stop signs in place, to put protections in place so that you don't go somewhere worse. I wish that a perfect filter existed.

It doesn't. And So the fact that I might be frustrated from time to time by the actions of the filter in my house or that my family might is a small price to pay. So what do you like about your filtering system? So we've chosen OpenDNS. One of the things I really like about it is it's free.

Okay, free things are good. Another thing I like about it is that this filter will allow you to do different things at different times of day. In other words, I have a moderate filtering system that keeps us away from a lot of things on the internet, all during the course of the day, but at 1030 at night, it switches to an extreme filtering. Sometimes we can't even get emails through it. And it stays that way from 1030 at night until 6 o'clock in the morning.

Why is that? Well, experience tells anybody who's been through the loop a couple of times that when you get tired, you're more vulnerable. When everybody goes to bed, there's more temptation because solitude, you can find solitude. And so we make our filter go on hyper speed at 1030 at night and that doesn't cut off until 6 o'clock in the morning. I like that about our filter.

That's a great idea. Yeah, I tell men, hey go to bed with your wife. Don't sit up. Don't sit up afterwards. Amen to that.

Go to bed. Don't work. You put yourself in a vulnerable position. So the way we handle technology in our families, it builds a kind of a culture. I mean, technology always changes culture.

It changes the way people relate and things like that. And talk about the culture of a home where technology is under control. One of the things we try to do in our home, Janet and I, is to build a culture, meaning to cultivate it, to work towards having a certain kind of culture where honesty is a great virtue and dishonesty is a great vice. So a dome-ism, a phrase that has come out of kind of trying to build this culture in our home is a dome would rather have five spankings than tell one lie, meaning domes don't lie. Domes would rather take the consequences for honesty five times rather than tell one lie.

And so from time to time, we've tried to build that culture and from time to time I ask, okay, I ask the embarrassing questions. Have you been to places on the internet that I wouldn't have wanted you to go? Have you seen things on the Internet that you shouldn't see? You build the culture so that in the moment when you ask the question, they have a sense built into them that they'd rather take the consequences five times from telling the truth than they would to lie to their mom or dad once. We had a circumstance unfold in our church last year, and when I saw that happen in a home in our church, I resolved that that would never happen in the dome home unless one of the members of our home had lied to me right to my face.

In other words, I didn't want those things to be able to develop under cover of darkness and me never have asked about it. So that's what we try to do. Build the culture and then ask from time to time the embarrassing questions. So there's scripture that leads us about content. You know I think of Psalm 101 verses 1 & 2 where David says, I'll set no unclean thing before my eyes or Philippians 4-8 you know whatever is pure whatever is true whatever is lovely you know all these things how do you apply that in controlling technology in your home yeah so I think it goes back to something you've already said which is Christians have to be willing to restrict themselves.

Their unbelieving neighbors are going to allow themselves freedoms that Christians don't allow themselves because they don't want the impure before their eyes because they know that sets a trajectory that bleeds into different parts of life. When people get caught up in internet sin, They're fooling themselves that it won't bleed over into other areas of life, but that's not true. That can never be true. It always bleeds over into relationships and other areas of life. Okay, so We've been talking about content, so let's talk about the use of time because this technology has really encroached in the whole way that we use our time.

It's completely transformed the way people use their time. So it's a matter of stewardship. God has given everybody a certain amount of time, and he expects us to use it well, to use it for his glory. And I don't intend to belabor this point because we've already had a life skills session devoted to just stewardship of time. But definitely applies to technology.

Technology gets used in time, in increments of time, and sometimes in tremendous increments of time. So I think we are bound to always have an awareness of how much time is being devoted to our engagement with technology. Recently, I've been planning my day on a page. So it's just one page per day and it just gives me a place to put. I think today I've got five things checked off and three things left to check off and I'm hoping I can knock one or two more off before bedtime.

But the point I'm making here is at the very top of this page I have the title and the heading which is Use of Time as Worship. That's for me. As I'm planning my day I want to have an awareness that the use of my time during the day is going to be worship. It's going to be good worship or bad worship, but it's a stewardship how we use our time. And this comes from a text of scripture, 1 Corinthians chapter 6 verse 20, where Paul says this, 1 Corinthians 6 20, For you were bought at a price.

Therefore glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are God's. So the argument that the Apostle Paul is making is that we're not our own anymore. If you're in Christ you've been bought with his blood. He paid, he bought you with his blood. So you're not your own.

Your body, your spirit ought to be a living sacrifice. And really that's not a nebulous, cloudy concept at all. That is a very concrete concept that has to do with hours. Your hours are his. He bought them by dying and so then we should give them back to him.

Scott, I'll never forget, I was talking to your dad, it's probably two or three years ago, I was talking to your dad, Bill Brown, and he had just started reading a book by Tim Challies by this title, The Next Story, Life and Faith After the Digital Explosion, a great title for a book and it was dealing just with managing the monster of technology. Tim Challies was taking that on from a Christian perspective. How do we not get dominated by the technology but actually use it in ways that is good stewardship, that is good worship of God with our time. And then after he told me about the premise of the book, he asked me this question, which I thought was strange at the time. Here's the question.

How much time are you spending keeping up with what's going on in Alaska? And I thought, none or a little or I'm not like, what are you getting at here? But the point is that we can spend time on interesting curiosities like harmless content. This is not pornography. This is not tantalizing things that awaken the lust.

This is news in Alaska. Well, we live in North Carolina. It really doesn't matter what's happening to Alaska to us, but you can invest time in knowing things about other parts of the world, and it really has no benefit, and what he was jabbing at is how much time are you spending like that on things that are harmful. Everyone would consider harmless and lawful, but it's just not profitable. Yeah, that's so true.

That's a real Bill Brownism right there. Has he asked you that question? Questions like that, yeah, absolutely. Our curiosity about harmless things can take us to places where we're misusing our time. I think that's what you're saying.

Technology has changed work life a lot, especially if you're on salary. Employers, if they're employing you hourly, they probably have zero tolerance for you spending time checking personal email, things like that, but if you're on salary our lives have become very integrated, meaning the lines between work time and not work time are blurred and employers are expecting you to check email at night and things like that. This is an environment where Christians have a lot of temptation to use work time because their lives are integrated and we're not sure exactly when is work time and when is not work time because we're working late at night and early in the morning and other times as well. It makes it easy for us to justify using work time to do non-work things because our lives are so integrated. I'm actually trying to go in the opposite direction.

I'm trying to disintegrate my time and have clearer lines between work time and non-work time and go really hard and be really focused on work things and work time. I would encourage everybody to think in those terms as well. You know that really is a radical transformation that most people, the younger people don't really appreciate because it really did used to be that you went to work and then you came home and you weren't tied to any technology at all. If you walked outside of your house, nobody could catch up with you. You know, when Deborah and I were first married, that's what it was.

We had a telephone that was hooked to the wall. If somebody wanted to get a hold of me, they had to come to my house or catch me at home while I was inside the house and the lines have become so blurred that people don't have the ability to have focused relationships anymore because they're just a jumble of everything in their life rather than the way that you talked about it in terms of the blurring of the lines. Jason, is there scripture that helps us to think through the impact of being able to go to all these different places whenever we want. I was just studying 2 Thessalonians chapter 3, and in that chapter in verse 11, the Apostle Paul brings us to a term, busybody. So when you look at the Greek for that term, you find that it has two meanings.

The first meaning is it's a nosy person. It's somebody who's in everybody else's business. And that's how we normally think a busybody is that. You're messing in my business, you're a busy body. The other meaning though is active and trivial things.

The other meaning is active and trivial things. So in other words, you're scurrying about doing meaningless things. So you're busy, you're a body in motion, you're a busy body, but there's no productivity coming out of it. And I think technology makes this easy to do. It makes it easy to scurry about and be a body in motion, but actually not be productive.

You work a minute and then you check email. And you work a minute and you reply to a text. And then you work a minute and you check a blog. And you are a body in motion. It's not like you're lazy in the sense that you sit back and stare at the ceiling and do nothing.

You're always busy, but you're almost never productive, or you're not as productive as you could be. So Scott, I'd like to offer a solution to that problem of work, email, work, text, work, check a blog, and it's this, and I actually learned it from you. Load up with clear meaningful objectives. So this, the use of time as worship, planning the day on a sheet of paper, is my attempt to do that. Okay, make a list of things that are meaningful and deprive yourself of the time to do that.

In other words, When you've created a list, whether you meant to or not, you're putting pressure on yourself to check the items off. It builds an internal pressure to squeeze out the baloney so that you actually work on the things that are objectives for the day. It's incredibly valued. Load yourself up with deadlines even during the course of the day and it keeps you from feeling like you have the time to do these other things, which are really time-wasters. Yeah, one of the reasons we waste time is because we have time to waste.

And the answer for many people is that they need to create a more productive life. They need to set higher goals. They need to do more. I find that when I have a heavier load, I get far, far more done. Right now, I'm in a season where I'm doing an enormous amount of teaching every week.

And as that has happened, what I found is that I waste a lot less time. I go to news sites less. I just can't. I can't. I cannot get done what I am supposed to do by wasting the amount of time that I used to waste.

And so, If you're struggling with the internet, I think, and your use of time, I would just say, get a life. Get a life that's far, far more productive than you have now. Get more to do. Load it up. I like the way that you said that.

How is it that we had so much time to waste? How is it that a person can find themselves an hour or two hours having really done nothing going from one click to another? They don't have enough to do. We have a very low bar of productivity and activity in the way that we work in our culture today and people tolerate it. And now you have an industrial environment where people just expect you to waste hours a day and so you do.

So my advice to people who are struggling, get more to do. Fill up that time so that you don't have a rational reason to go and waste that time. So you talked about being immeasurably accessible. There's a blog, there's an email, and you're just always accessible, you know, moving things around kind of frenetically. How do you balance accessibility and productivity?

Because we want to have some level of accessibility, but often that destroys our productivity. So how do we work with both of those together? So you brought us right to our third category. We started with content and then we went to use of time. Now we're at productivity.

And I do think those exactly are the two things that we're balancing, productivity and accessibility. Productivity being how much you accomplish and accessibility being how easy it is for people to reach you. And these are both important things, right? You need to be accessible and you need to get stuff done. But I think we should acknowledge that they take from each other.

Here's what I mean. To get more done, you have to be less accessible. Or to be more accessible, you have to get less done. And I think because of both of these things are important, and you can't do one to the total neglect of the other, what we're doing is we're looking for the sweet spot, right? We're looking for a reasonable level of accessibility where we can still get a lot done.

And so I want to make a couple of assertions. The first assertion is this. Too many people are over-prioritizing accessibility. And I'm one of them. I think this is really an area where I need to make changes in my life.

There are people who answer every phone call on the spot, you know, by the second ring. If the phone rings, the phone is sacred and they answer it. They'll interrupt anything that they're doing to answer it. There are people that if an email comes in they know immediately, ding, okay, the device dings. So an email is there and they'll drop anything, they'll break their train of thought, they'll stop whatever task they're working on and they'll respond immediately.

There are people who if they get a text, their device dings, again they know immediately and they'll drop whatever they're doing. Even if they're talking to you. Has this happened to you in a conversation where you're midstream in a conversation with someone and the device dings and they break off their conversation with you. Like, what, do I need to text you or something so that I can get you back into the conversation that we're personally having. This is insanity.

You cannot be highly productive and always answer the phone on the second ring. Always immediately attend to the email. Always immediately answer the ding of a text coming in. And so I think we need to consider the impact on productivity that the amount of accessibility we're allowing other people to have to us has. It just needs to be assessed.

So you might decide there are certain hours of the day that you are completely accessible and you're going to do that, but if it's every hour it's a mistake because the price to pay in the category of productivity is too high. Sure, and there are good suggestions that people make about that, particularly controlling email. Check it twice a day, check it three times a day. Whatever it is, whatever works for you, there should be some kind of limitation so that you're not just constantly going back and forth and breaking your concentration. You know, there's enormous degradation of productivity when you're being interrupted all the time, and I think we've seen all kinds of studies about that.

So here's the second assertion I'd like to make about productivity. From a temporal perspective, okay, I'm making a distinction here, I'm saying you can be a Christian, really be born again, and not do well at this, but I'm saying this is going to have an impact on your earthly existence. Okay, so from a temporal perspective, this will separate winners and losers. Absolutely. Like never before, technology has the ability to make us massively productive.

Tools are at your fingertips that we've never had at our fingertips before. And it has the ability to make you massively unproductive. There are more time wasters knocking at your door than there ever have been before. Some will use technology well and they'll be incredibly productive. Some will use it poorly and be distracted by everything and they'll become massively unproductive.

And one of the results of the environment is that we're losing the ability to have focused attention, sustained attention, and careful attention, because we're always being jerked out of the moment into another world. And it's very very bad for a man's productivity. And you know if you're a young person and you've grown up in this frenetic, you know, jerk around world just to recognize if you don't break that, you will not be the productive man that God intended you to be. Scott, I think this is the central question. Who's the slave and who's the master in this relationship we have with technology.

If you're the master and technology is the slave, then you'll be very productive and you'll be the winner from a temporal perspective because The target for the Christian is this. Christ is the master. We serve Christ. We're under him, and then technology serves us. So really, technology serves Christ.

We're in the middle there. Christ is our master, technology is our slave, and so it's Christ, us, technology, where if you are the slave and technology is the master in this relationship we have with technology, then you'll be very unproductive, you'll be the loser, and the pecking order will be technology, and then you will be its slave, and then that you have to ask the question, where does Christ fit into this picture? If technology's the master and I'm the slave, Where is Christ? Is Christ over the technology then? There's a lot at stake with how we relate to technology.

Because of the challenges that are upon us right now, if you don't have a strategy, you'll become roadkill on the Internet highway. And it happens to us. And there has to be an approach, there has to be a discipline. And whether that discipline means you need to just start doing more and working harder, whether that Discipline means you need to eliminate the distractibility that you have in your life. If it means that you need to create a culture in your own inner world where you're not going to other worlds, you're living in the world that God is giving you.

If we're not able to manage those kinds of disciplines, we will be forever jerked around by the internet. It'll destroy our productivity. It'll harm our relationships. It'll have a dramatic impact on our income and it could you know lead to defilements, broken marriages. The stakes are high and so those who don't take dominion over the internet it will take dominion over them.

That's true. And so we have a very serious matter. We have a whole culture of people who don't know how to work anymore because they're just they're just moving from one thing to another. It's a very very serious thing and I think the next generation needs to be very clear about all the things that we just talked about, and I really appreciate the time talking about it. I know we're not done fighting this battle, and guess what?

There's another technology around the corner that'll present even greater problems. So we have to learn how to deal with this one that we have right now. It's like Leviathan, and somehow we have got to slay that dragon and find ourselves with lives that are highly focused to glorify God, to fulfill the commands of productivity and fruit-bearing that are only right in a world where God is Lord of everything. In the lead up to this, I found myself just in preparing, thinking through what the best practices are so that we could talk about them. I found myself acknowledging that I needed more than in-course corrections.

I actually needed to repent in certain areas. I needed to repent before the Lord, and I did repent before some of my family members because honestly there are areas of my life where I have not followed the best practices that I can prepare to talk about them. People watching may need some in-course corrections, but they should ask themselves that too. Is there something more that's needed? Do I need to actually repent because there have been sinful practices?