Gabe Fluhrer

And I said, so you kind of half in, half out.

I said, nah, probably 80-20.

I still love having a book in my hand and making notes in the margins and underlining and everything else.

But he said, you know, I think it's getting so hard for people to even read because of the amount of distractions that

We have all around us all the time.

Endless amusement, social media.

What else takes away our hope?

What about endless access to plenty?

One of the reasons that we don't see hope as vibrant as it was for our parents' or grandparents' generation is we have so much here.

We have such material abundance and plenty here.

And in one sense, we need to rejoice in that.

I would argue that directly because of Christianity do we have such material abundance and plenty today.

Plenty of other scholars have argued that as well.

But for Christians, all of these things can combine to deaden our hope of heaven.

All the advertising, all the social media, it has a goal to make us discontent constantly.

And instead of a holy discontentment of not being with the Lord,

We have a discontentment with not having all that we want.

And that deadens our hope of heaven.

One final thing, as one author points out, there's been a shift in the past 50 years from naive optimism to cynicism.

And we all know what the cynic is, right?