Love must always be our boundary.
“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.” - Mark 12:30–31 (New International Version)
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When I think about AI and all its potential, I keep coming back to a single truth:
Love must always be the boundary we place around it.
I spent nearly an entire afternoon recently, going back and forth with a peer on Threads about whether AI is okay for Christians to use. Her fervent questions led me to Bible study chyle! I needed to sit and let the Word speak to to me on this issue because I was starting to wonder if I was leading people astray by talking about all this AI stuff.
I landed in 1 Samuel 21, where Ahimelek the priest gives David and his hungry men consecrated bread. Technically it was unlawful, but David was desperate to help his starving men. Later, in Mark 2, Jesus references this very moment when correcting the Pharisees about Sabbath laws, saying, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.”
In other words, the spirit of the law is always to preserve human life.
And as I sat with that, my heart turned toward AI’s environmental impact. Data centers use massive amounts of energy, heating up our planet in ways we can’t afford to ignore. If AI destroys human life and communities in any way, we’re not loving our neighbors as ourselves.
It was comforting for me to learn that things are being done by key stakeholders to address the growing environmental concerns associated with AI, albeit not quite fast enough. But I believe that we, God’s innovators, can add our divine power tools to the effort because there has to be a solution.
So here’s my call to us both today:
Let’s pray for God to reveal creative solutions to this environmental crisis.
Let’s strategize with integrity to steward these technologies well in the mean time, and
Let’s leverage AI itself to help fix what it’s breaking.
Because love must be our boundary. Always.
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Still hungry? Eat more //
I have one more AI message to share next week (for now), what are your thoughts on this series so far? Reply back and let me know!
1 Samuel 21:3-6 → context around the David story
Matthew 12:2-4, Mark 2:25-26, Luke 13:10-16, Mark 3:1-6 → Jesus’ multiple teaching on the principle of the Sabbath & priority of human life over Sabbath law.