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Now, one of the great problems are the thoughts that are going on inside my head.
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Um, I'm not a particularly good golfer at all, but I enjoy it when I hit a shot right.
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Folks that talk about golf very much will say, when you go to swaying, what you're thinking ends up being really important.
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And very often what happens is my default thought will be don't slice.
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And invariably, if my thought is don't slice, I will do things with my body that will cause me to slice.
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So having a swing thought, something real simple, could just be timing.
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You take it back, there's a beat, go forward one, two, three, something like that.
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Could be a good swing thought.
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I need a swing thought for my life.
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That's where we're gonna go.
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But I want to start by talking about the history of the seven deadly sins.
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We are dealing with the seven deadlies, and they are the primary obstacle.
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It's not what's going on outside there, it's not my job, it's not my situation, it's not money, it's not that hard person in your life.
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It's the sin inside my life.
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That's the problem.
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And the seven deadly sins is the uh very ancient uh summary of wisdom around the challenges that we face as we try to move towards the person that we want to become.
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We all know uh that's what matters most in life, to have a life that's characterized by love and joy and peace.
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So I want to say, as we get ready to walk through the seven deadly sins, I want to say a word about where this list came from.
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And it goes way back uh 1700 years or so uh as a list.
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The sins themselves go right back to the garden in Adam and Eve as long as people have been around.
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There is a man named uh Evagrius who really wanted to pay attention to Kiesol.
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In our day, we would think about this as psychology, uh, but they incorporated the moral and spiritual dimension of life.
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And he found these particular thoughts uh led to lots of other problems in other areas.
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And so, as the result of years of reflection, he wrote them down.
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Uh, a century or two later, one of the popes, known as Gregory the Great, he didn't give himself that nickname, by the way, if you're wondering if he had some pride issues, uh, actually wrote them down.
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And then I want to say a little bit more
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about the history of this.
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And this may take a few minutes, but it's worth it.
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This is from Peter Jones' book, Self-Help from the Middle Ages.
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Uh, over the centuries, people devoted themselves to thinking about this.
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And at one point, it became a um uh a guideline, a rule for the church that people had to uh confess to a priest at least once a year.
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So then priests need to know how do we help people do this?
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Jones Wright.
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Uh, how was this civilization in the Middle Ages geared to understanding the human mind?
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For one thing, a passion for analyzing thought and impulse dominated the top professions.
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The brightest and best of brains, as sharp as the sharpest today, didn't dream of becoming entrepreneurs or headfunge managers after they got their education.
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Hmm, what a weird world.
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Instead, the first university students traveled to Paris or Oxford to study theology.
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This is our history, which was then the most prestigious subject on offer.
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Armed with this degree, the best of these graduates competed to become bishops or cardinals where the job description involved analyzing the triggers of temptation and desire, giving lectures on fear and doubt, healing the anxieties of people in crisis.
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The whole point of the university.
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Ever wonder about that?
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As Pope Gregory IX announced in 1231, was to create self-aware citizens.
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So priests in those days were very thoughtful and they were in training to be very much like what we think about therapists today, helping people to pay attention to their interior life.
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By the mid-13th century, as universities began to expand across Europe, thinkers developed a deep philosophy of what this system, these thoughts about the deadly sins, were really about.
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Before then, people tended to see the sins in a harsh, one-dimensional way, cause and origin of all evils.
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But now writers find a more forgiving angle.
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Each of the deadly sins, according to the Parisian master of theology, Jean de la Rochelle, is a form of distorted love.
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So now I'll think about this as I look about sin and temptation in my own life.
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We all desire good things, Jean said, but this desire turns into sin when we feel it too strongly.
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Gluttony and lust are when we love lesser goods, food and sex to excess.
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Avarice and anger come when we love exterior goods, such as material objects or winning a fight too much.
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Our excessive love for two interior goods, the talents that bring us success, the joy of the success itself, is what produces pride and envy.
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And then this system goes on to inform things like The Divine Comedy by Dante, the landmark poem of the Italian language, arguably the greatest literary work of the medieval millennium, Jones writes.
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This was a trilogy that encouraged readers to confront their sins and reconcile themselves to the darkness inside us all.
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And as you may know, if you know that story, there is this mountain of purgation, and it's arranged around the seven deadly sins.
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And it's only as Dante's pilgrim uh learns to recognize all seven of the sins within himself.
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And the point of that, of course, is you and I, the reader, are to do that.
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Uh, and we've made peace with our interior life that we're able to reach the pinnacle of the universe, to feel the love that moves the sun and all the stars.
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Dante's template was one of compassionate confrontation.
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So this is the great history legacy of the wisdom of the seven deadly sins.
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But over the last century or so, they first got uh superficialized and uh uh moralized in real simplistic ways.
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Uh, and then eventually in our day, pretty much just dismissed.
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Uh you can now indulge them in seven ice creams, uh uh ice cream flavors, uh naming the seven deadly sins, were launched in 2003.
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Uh Martin Marty, Rebecca De Young writes it about this in her book, says that the French actually sent a delegation to the Vatican to get gluttony off the list.
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Because they felt like they had confused it with feasting.
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They didn't understand what it was really about.
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In the second decade of the 21st century, uh the spirit of the desert, where Evagrius went and reflected on the seven deadly sins, began to be resurrected in Silicon Valley as the California tech community braced the insights that understanding the seven deadly sins can bring.
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I'm not making this up.
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The resurgence began when Reed Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, made his speech claiming all his successes were thanks to his knowledge of this medieval system.
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Think of any top tech company, Hoffman said.
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Wasn't it true that they were only popular because they exploited at least one of the seven sins?
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Tinder Thrives on Lust, Yelp on
Gluttony, LinkedIn on Greed, Netflix on sloth, Twitter on anger, Facebook on envy, Instagram on pride.
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Many people in Silicon Valley, like the investor Tim Chang, believed Hoffman was onto something and began using what they called this 7DS system, seven deadly sins system of commercial development to build their products with those seven impulses in mind.
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All this might sound like just another ice cream style gimmick, but Hoffman at least seems to have been serious.
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He argued that the deadly sins identified the deep universal psychological structure of the human mind.
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And like John Cassian or Gregory the Tech, Gregory the Great, he wanted to be evangelical about it.
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Good tech companies shouldn't just feed the sins, he said.
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They should try to reform them.
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They should harness the urge for envy or anger and find a way to plug it into something that's better for society, better for the individual.
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Where would this design lead?
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Uh he later founded a company called Inflection AI with the stated mission of developing a more compassionate digital mind.
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It's possible he wanted to use the seven deadly sins as a guide for programming a new generation of artificial intelligence.
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And you notice we do not yet have a form of AW, artificial wisdom, or AV, artificial virtue, because we have to pursue that ourselves.
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So this is a very rich uh uh framework of thought looking at the human condition developed by the brightest minds of century after century after century, that has unfortunately been superficialized, largely lost in our day.
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This is what we explore as I look at myself and you look at yourself.
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Here's what I want to say today as we're thinking about how do I go through today?
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So today, what do I do?
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And I mentioned at the beginning that in golf, it's real important when you're when you're playing the game that you have a good swing thought.
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It's gotta be real simple because if I'm just trying to avoid um slicing or shanking or you know, whatever, uh inevitably those thoughts will lead me obsessively to doing the very thing I don't want to do.
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Kind of like Romans 7.
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Golf is a great example of Romans 7.
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Why do I do what I don't want to do?
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So I need another kind of thought that will bring God into the picture with me because I can't, he can, I think I'll let him.
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And there's a little thought that I have been living with and practicing for a while now.
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And it couldn't be simpler.
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Um, Brother Lawrence practicing the presence of God as a kind of mantra, very often in his letters or his thoughts about the human condition, he will suggest this.
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Just our life presents itself to us as a series of tasks.
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I get up, I get dressed, I fix breakfast, uh, I write emails.
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He says, at the beginning of each activity, here's one, at the beginning of each activity, invite God into it.
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You know, God, I'm gonna try to answer these emails right now right now.
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And I'm kind of irritated.
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I wish I didn't have to have them.
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I wish I didn't have to do this.
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So instead of approaching it with a sense of irritation or impatience, God, would you be with me and would you be working in my fingers to help me type just the right words?
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And then while I'm engaged in the activity, uh I keep asking God for help.
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God, could we do this together?
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Not sure what to say right now, not sure what to do right now.
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God, would you help me?
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Right now, right now.
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I'm talking into this camera.
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God, would you help me?
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And then when I get to the end of the activity, pause, thank God for a salp, offer it to him.
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And of course, this is all mirroring way back to Genesis 1, what God does with creation when he has an idea for something, and then he speaks, and it is so, and then there's a moment of reflection, contemplation where God looks at it and sees that it's good.
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So if I'm gonna defeat sin, uh I don't go through my day thinking I can't sin now, can't lust now, can't be angry now.
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It doesn't work any better than don't slice.
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Just one, two, three.
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I began this asking for God's help, do it, asking for God's help.
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Now it's done.
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Thank God.
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Go after it.
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Okay, did anyone else have a wow moment when John was talking about the correlation between some of our biggest tech companies and the seven deadly sins?
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I'm gonna have to go back and listen to that again.
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But here's the takeaway for today as you go into your day.
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Remember before each activity to invite God in.
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During the activity to ask for God's help in real time.
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He stands ready to help you.
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And then when that activity is complete, remember to just thank God, thank God, to bring him with you into each thing that you face this day.
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At Become New, you can spend 10 minutes every weekday with Dr.
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John Orberg to receive a clarifying, grounding perspective and thought on life in the kingdom of God, to get a scripture to take with you into your day to renew your mind with, to meditate on, and a practice to apply to your life as you grow in Christ's likeness one day at a time.
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The best way to never miss one of these teachings from John is just to text the word new to our number 51504, and I'll send you a link every time we drop a new video.
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I'm Tim, the channel host, and I'm so glad you stopped by today.
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Bye for now.