Daniel Im

Pastor + Author

Faith

AI, Google Assistant, Robotics, the Church, and Your Faith

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Are you paying attention to the rapid advancements in AI?

We often joke that Siri, Alexa, or Google are listening into our conversations to gather data and serve us up with targeted advertisements, but they know better and would obviously never admit to that (ask any one of those assistants if they’re spying on you to see what they say). So if they aren’t, then why does the internet increasingly feel personal and up in our business?

AI, or artificial intelligence

Recently, Google stunned the tech world (and everyone else) with their new Assistant. You can watch it in action here, but here’s basically what they showcased: the ability to call a human being and have it intelligently make an appointment for you!

Can you believe that? That wasn’t a human making the appointment for you!

Have you heard of Move 37?

A couple years ago, Lee Sedol and AlphaGo faced off in a historic Go match where the 37th move made history. If you’re not familiar with Go, it’s “an abstract strategy board game for two players, in which the aim is to surround more territory than the opponent.”[1] It was invented over 2500 years ago in China and is exponentially more complex than chess (fun fact: it’s one of the few games that I’ve yet to beat my dad in).

This match was partly so historical, not just because one of the world’s best Go players (Lee Sedol) lost, but because he lost to a bot. Okay, maybe “bot” isn’t the right word to describe AlphaGo, but the fact of the matter is that AlphaGo is not a human—it is an artificially intelligent machine designed by DeepMind, a London AI lab owned by Google.

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5 Ways to Find Your Way Back to God

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What happens when you search for God with all your heart?

According to Scripture and personal experience, you find God.

You will seek me and find me when you search for me with all your heart. (Jeremiah 29:13 CSB)

Is there a pattern for this journey back to God? Or is everyone’s journey unique?

The answer is a resounding, yes. Yes there is a pattern, but everyone’s journey is also unique.

In Finding Your Way Back to God, Dave and Jon Ferguson have uncovered five universal awakenings that humans journey though as they find their way back to God. And as you’ll see through the stories that I’ll share from the book here, everyone’s journey is truly unique. So buckle up and get ready. These stories will help you see that as much as we need to find our way back to God, “God wants to be found even more than you want to find him.” [1]

God wants to be found even more than you want to find him.

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1. Awakening to Longing: “There’s got to be more.”

Each of the five awakenings are summarized with a prayer. Here’s the prayer for this first awakening,

“God, if you are real, make yourself real to me. Awaken in me the ability to see that you are what’s missing from my life.” [2]

Let me share with you one of the stories from the book that perfectly illustrate the way that we can find our way back to God through this awakening to longing.

Several years ago I had dinner with my friend and mentor Bob Buford. For much of his life, Bob ran a successful cable television company. After his son, Ross, tragically died, Bob came to a point in his life he called “Halftime.” He wrote a book by that title that tells how he moved from focusing on success to focusing on significance. What Bob said at dinner has stayed with me ever since: “One of people’s great fears is running out of money, but that’s not their greatest fear. Another significant fear people have is the fear of dying, but that’s not people’s greatest fear either.” He paused and said, “Deep down, our single greatest fear is to live a life of insignificance, to come to the end of our life and feel like we never really did anything that mattered. That is our greatest fear.”

Are you feeling like you are stuck in the same old, same old? Do you have a gut feeling that there’s got to be more? Author and theologian Frederick Buechner points us in the right direction when he says, “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” [3]

The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.

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2. Awakening to Regret: “I wish I could start over.”

“God if you are real, make yourself real to me. Awaken in me the possibility that with you I could start over again.” [4]

In this second section of the book, there is a compelling story about Scott and Kirsten, and the changes they chose to make after awakening to regret.

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Sanctifying Your Ambition and Faith

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If you missed my last two posts on ambition, you might want to start there:

  1. The Paradox of Ambition and Faith
  2. Ambition, Faith, and Timing

Oftentimes God has to bring you through the desert before he can use you.

In other words, he has to sanctify your ambition and faith in order to use you for his purposes.

If you haven’t yet gone through a desert experience where your world has been turned upside down, then expect to. God uses these desert experiences to accomplish things through you that you would never be able to accomplish apart from them.

Oftentimes God has to bring you through the desert before he can use you.

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In fact, spiritual leaders find their greatest insights and contributions in these desert experiences.

Moving back to Canada from from Korea was definitely a desert experience for me. I felt like my world was turned upside down.

I knew that God had called us to Korea, but if that was really true, then why did he allow us to leave Korea the way we did? The ministry was multiplying, people were being transformed, and we had just signed a lease for a new place and bought all new furniture, only then to turn around and leave it all?

My wife, Christina, and I didn’t understand why God was allowing us to go through this, but by his unbelievable grace we did sense his presence along the way.

When we moved back to Canada, we were jobless, hopeless, and our savings were running out fast.

I was disillusioned with ministry and knew I needed a break, but I also knew my family needed to be fed.

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Ambition, Faith, and Timing

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Last week I covered the paradox of ambition and faith. Today, I want to add a third variable to the mix: timing.

What relationship does ambition and faith have with timing?

Although spiritual leaders can have ambition and God-placed faith, there’s still one major area they can mess up in—timing.

It’s easy for spiritual leaders to mess up in this one area–timing.

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Abraham had a significant calling on his life, and it was to be the father of a great nation, one that was intended to be a blessing to the entire world and one from which the Savior of the world would come. To even believe that this could be true, for him took a great measure of faith, and only a truly ambitious person would’ve even accepted this grand assignment.

The only problem was that Abraham was impatient.

I don’t blame the guy, though. After all, he was childless and seventy-five years old at the time God commissioned him (Gen 12:2–4). In the ensuing years Abraham moved, experienced a famine, lost his wife, then received her back, moved again, got into a fight with his nephew Lot, experienced war, experienced the destruction of a city, and moved again (did I already say that?), among many other things.

In and through these experiences, God reminded him multiple times about this calling that he had placed on his life.

God will often use your current circumstances to remind you about your calling.

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Eleven years later Abraham and his wife Sarah (their names were Abram and Sarai at that time) got fed up about continually hearing this calling and not seeing it come to pass, so they ambitiously took their faith into their own hands.

“Sarai said to Abram, ‘Since the LORD has prevented me from bearing children, go to my slave; perhaps through her I can build a family.’ And Abram agreed to what Sarai said” (Gen 16:2).

Spiritual leaders understand that there are two different ways to understand time in the Scriptures.

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The Paradox of Ambition and Faith

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ambition mountain

A 7-Eleven Vision for Church Planting

“What’s your vision for the orphanage and for Thailand?” I asked the pastor of the orphanage.

“You know, whenever I think about you Koreans and South Korea, I get mixed feelings.”

I was starting to think that I shouldn’t have asked this question in the first place.

The pastor continued, “On the one hand, I’m astounded as to the spiritual transformation God can accomplish in a single country over a short period of time. But on the other hand, I’m upset because 100 years ago, Korea and Thailand were basically the same country—rural, economically challenged, and spiritually lost.”

After giving a sigh of relief, I paused, wondering whether I should interject, but then the pastor continued.

“Have you noticed that there are 7-Elevens pretty much on every street corner in Thailand?” asked the pastor.

I nodded.

“I have this dream that God would do such a transformational work in Thailand that, instead of 7-Elevens on every street corner, we had churches. And I want that work to start here in the orphanage with these children,” explained the pastor.

As I walked away from that conversation, I thought to myself, now that’s ambitious.

The Paradox of Ambition and Faith

What does an entrepreneur dreaming up a new solution for the next greatest app have in common with that pastor in Thailand dreaming about planting churches on every street corner?

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