I recognize that it’s been some time since I’ve written and in case you are wondering why I am on hiatus, refer to here.

For those who care, you may be wondering, “What have I been up to?”

Well, here’s a quick snapshot of what my life has been filled with instead of writing:

• Clearing more space for faithfulness in areas I feel strongly called to. 
  Part of the problem of writing is that it takes quite a bit of energy, time, and focus. Until I can healthily handle more, I feel more at peace about devoting mental energies and time into the people I can see in front of me here in Los Angeles, including discipleship relationships, evangelism, Life Group leading, worship leading, intercession, schoolwork, and other important relationships.
• I’ve been traveling
  One of the things that this frees me up to do is to travel. I recently came back from a great trip to Tokyo, Japan.
• I’ve been growing!
  Maybe frequency of posts is indicative of life, maybe not. But rest-assured, I am still growing in my relationship with Jesus. I am more and more in awe of his goodness, his greatness and his worthiness of our lives!

So those are some things that I’ve been doing. Also I’m still tweeting.

I pray that wherever you are in reading this, you will be growing in your love and zeal for Jesus!

Phil

There is nothing lukewarm about the God of revelation. Always radical and total, never does He reduce what He expects of us to fractions. Our communion with Him is to become a blazing fire, a perpetual ecstasy. These strong words will sound strange and exaggerated only to those who have not tasted that the Lord is good. They may have studied and read, but they have not drunk deeply.

Fr. Thomas Dubay

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Them Catholics know what they’re talking about…. that’s a hot quote…

Because the Lord hated us he brought us out of the land of Egypt. – the people

You have seen how the Lord your God carried you, as a man carries his son… – Moses

Deut 1:27, 31

In Deut 1:26-33, in recounting the entrance in the land of Canaan, the people rebel. And the difference of responses between Moses and the people is pretty fascinating and convicting.

The people respond, “”Because the Lord hated us that he has brought us out of the land of Egypt.” Moses responds by saying, “The Lord will fight for you..you have seen how the Lord your God carried, as a man carries his son, all the way that you went until you came to this place.’

What a difference of perspective!

I notice primarily the difference in the understanding of God’s love.

To the people, God hated them and so they disbelieved whether God will carry them further. To Moses, he wanted to convince the people of how God carried them like they do a son, and therefore he is worthy to be trusted.

The convicting thing about this passage is the connection between knowing God’s love and our ability to believe.

When we lack a revelation of God’s love, such as the people did, they operated in disbelief. When we have a revelation of God’s love, we our more apt to believe great things from God.

Love is the power for belief. And without a history of knowing God’s love for our lives, we will always make decisions of unbelief.

Unbelief is solved by a knowledge of his great affections. Belief is a choice we make out of love.

This is so beautiful:

I disciple my guys about premarital sex, porn, and sexual temptation because if I don’t, the world will.

And this is what world they are walking into:

I have some unfortunate news.

I began writing in this blog some years ago. And as I have put more time into pushing inspirational posts, thousands of readers from around the world (literally) have visited, commented, and (hopefully) been blessed by my writing.

However, it has come to my attention in the last few months that it has been increasingly difficult to write.

It is not that I am growing in my walk with Jesus–I am falling more in love with him all the more. However, the pressure of writing new content frequently became a greater source of motivation than my passions for writing and communicating.

In other words, I feel more pressure to write just to maintain this blog, than I feel the passions from my walk with God overflowing in a writing medium.

I have mulled over this place for some time and realize what a difficult place this was. Does one keep going on in ministry simply because there has been momentum even when his/her heart is not in it?

For this reason, I feel comfortable in saying that, while I am not giving up The Black Box, I am slowing down the pace at which I write.

I feel much better about writing a few powerful, impactful, and passionately written posts a month than writing 15-20 posts that I’m just rattling off.

I thank everyone for understanding and I hope that this will help us all grow in our love for Jesus.

-Phil

I’m not sure if I’ve posted this before, but I continually listen to this..

I took a personal retreat last winter to Kansas City where I got a lot of revelation about my life and my relationship with God. One of the things that he spoke really loudly to me, to my surprise was: “Fix your relationship with technology/internet”.

Wow! You care about me and the internet God?

It was then that God gave me a picture of myself. I saw myself sitting down trying to meditate on the presence of God but two walls were crashing in on me imposing on my precious time with God. One wall was the busyness of my life. The other was..the internet.

These walls served to symbolically show the things which were pressing dangerously in on my life, affecting my relationship with God in ways I didn’t understand.

It was then I began a series of praying and meditating on my own relationship with technology, internet, and Jesus. I’ve always prided myself in being technologically savvy–I was present when the internet first came out, learned web language and website making skills by junior high, made computers in high school, then finally switching to a Mac post grad (my most proud moment.. j/k ). iPads, smart phones, eReaders, apps, Macbook Air’s later, I was living on the edge of technology, but woefully unaware of that I was in over my head in being addicted to these things.

I began noticing such things as…

• why is that when I get home, the first thing I do is turn on my computer?
• why is that during my times with Jesus in the morning, e-mail checking is also part of that?
• why is that I am used to and want to be inundated with information thrown at me all at once?
• why is that my eyes are so used to screens and resist the idea of living outside the city?

I found that I was a little addicted to the internet.

2 months of praying, instituting boundaries for myself, and seeing myself grow, I’ve compiled some thoughts to any other user of technology and internet some thoughts on how I grew out of technology/internet into a better relationship with God and hope that these will be helpful to you:

• The internet/social media is inherently designed to make me addicted
  to the question of why I’m on Facebook all the time, the answer is…because it’s designed for us to be on it all the time. As with the vast majority of other websites/web apps out there. Be it Facebook, Twitter, games, news sites, sports sites, YouTube, I realized that these guys have designed their site to make it addicting. 

  When I realized this, I realized that addiction to anything is an impediment for my relationship with Jesus. When my mind is used to these things and almost “needs” it to function, it takes away from my devotion to Jesus

• The Internet is not my god…
  …then why do I commit so much time to it? Why is it in my habits, and mind that I cannot live without a computer or the internet? If I paid as much homage/time to the internet as I do to the Holy Spirit who lives in my and wants to speak to me….
• It’s not just about the time I spent on the internet, but the affect it has on my mind
  I remember how some days in the height of addiction how I would come home and, in my boredom (and need for entertainment), would go on YouTube and watch random basketball videos. I would sit there and the time would just go…before I knew it I had just spent 45 minutes in front of a screen, having learned nothing, done nothing, and become no one better.

  But the devastating thing was that I had not just lost time. But the mental state of my mind was in a much different place than when I first started watching.

  I was unable to focus afterwards. My ability to be productive went down. And strangely, being in a place of prayer was so hard. It was hard to enter into the flowing revelation of God’s presence I was used to.

  When I pulled out of the internet, I finally felt really free to focus and get things done.

• Being on the internet is not restful
  Being inundated with information is not restful, nor a good way to spend my Sabbath, or for me to connect with God.

  ESPN.com is not restful.
  Facebook is not restful.
  A walk outside is restful.
  Reading Google News is not restful
  Playing basketball is restful
  Having a ton of tabs open on Chrome is not restful.

• Incessant email checking is not normal, nor fun
  Why do I have to check my email so often? Most responses don’t need my immediate response. It perplexes me (now I have come to the realization) how new technologies are always boasting about their capabilities to check email. I remember just seeing a commercial with a car with email-reading capabilities built in, to which I replied, “Why would I want to check my email in my car?”

  Am I so addicted that I need something coming in my inbox to feel alive or connected to the world?

  I think if I checked my email as much as I spent listening to the Holy Spirit, I’d be a much better person for it.

• Being on the internet in class is…dumb.
  I used to be that guy. Yes, that guy in class who, after the first sight of boredom would log onto Chrome and just surf the web, be on Facebook, etc..

  I would look up occasionally, pretending that I was tuned into what was going on, or that I was actually learning, but my mind was in another place.

  It’s only this quarter that I officially have the internet turned off during class. It’s only then that I look around and see people that I used to be like, to which I say, “we’re spending this much $$$$ to be on the internet in class??” I also learned that I learned a lot more without the distractions of email or Facebook. My enjoyment of the class and the professor went way up.

• Creating boundaries for internet use has been helpful
  I made rules for myself for this year.

  No Facebook during the day (only morning and before bed), no internet during class, no internet during time with Jesus (how would you like your time communicating with someone be distracting? Imagine how Jesus feels..). No YouTube, at all (it’s rarely ever helpful). Uninstalling apps on my phone. (I allow Twitter because I’m usually just sending Tweets, not reading them..)

  I only say these to give some idea of what has been really helpful for me to pull from this addiction.

So those are my thoughts on ways that I have been growing out of being addicted to the internet. I seriously hope that this will bring any addictions that those who read may have.

I seriously hope that this will turn on the light so that we can see how the increase of internet usage, and technology in the hands of the common-folk affects our spirituality and our relationship with God.

God is spirit (John 4), not on a computer screen.

Light is better seen than heard

Unknown

When Jesus used analogies to describe who we were, he often tells us that we are light. And thing about light is that it is seen, not heard.

In fact, of the only few times that scriptures use an analogy of sound to describe what the people of God can be like is in 1 Cor 13, where our lovelessness makes us like a “clanging symbol”. But other than, we are a visible specimen.

We are better seen than heard.

It is the way we radically live our lives which testifies to the gospel of Jesus. I’m not negating the importance of proclaiming the gospel. But without a life lived for the gospel, the message will mostly fall on deaf ears.

American Christianity faces unique challenges as it battles disinterest, relevance, and a fading religious generation. Yet with this decline, we don’t see much decline in the amount of Christian literature being published.

It is as if the more we decline, the more books, studies, and sermon series we try to push.

Yet I want to suggest that our problem is not a bad theology of God; it’s that our theology of God is divorced from an encounter of the God we study.

Having people know facts about God is insufficient for the day of trouble. At the end of the day, people must have an encounter of the presence, the power, the holiness, the love of God in order to be transformed and begin making changes for him.

Theology is not reading books, it’s experiencing the living God.