CHOOSE WITH CARE HOW YOU BUILD

“Let each builder choose with care how to build.” – 1 Corinthians 3:10

Welcome to a new year at Spring Arbor University!*

There is an ancient prayer from the end of Psalm 19 that some of you have heard hundreds of times. Growing up, my pastor recited it each week, just before his sermon: “May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight, O LORD, my Rock and my Redeemer.” For thousands of years, those two things have naturally belonged together: the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart.

The words came from somewhere. They came from a mind that had wrestled with an idea; from a heart that loved, or grieved, or hoped. From a person who had something to say and searched for just the right words to say it.

And then, almost overnight, something dramatically changed.

We now live in a world where the words of my mouth do not necessarily have to come from the meditation of my heart. You can produce the words without doing much meditating at all.

An essay without wrestling with the question.

An apology without sitting long enough with the hurt you caused.

A note of encouragement without knowing what you actually want to say. Even – heaven forbid – a prayer without praying.

Words have never been easier to produce, which makes David’s ancient prayer sound remarkably contemporary. Perhaps the question of this technological age isn’t simply, “What words did I produce?” Maybe the deeper question is: What is happening in my heart while I produce them?

That is what I want us to think about this morning. Not whether artificial intelligence is good or bad; not whether you should use it. The tools are here, and some of them are remarkable.

So let me make you a promise at the outset. This is not a warning, and it is not a lament. I want to ask a much older (and what I would consider to be a much more important) question. What are you building with these tools? And what are they helping to build in you?

TWO CONSTRUCTION PROJECTS

Earlier this year, Pope Leo XIV published a letter about artificial intelligence. Now, we are not a Catholic university – we are a Free Methodist one. But John Wesley taught us to receive truth wherever we find it, test it against Scripture, and learn from it. And with great insight, Leo points us toward two construction projects in Scripture that have something important to say to us, since every one of us is about to spend a year building. Some of you have four years ahead of you here. Others have already given this community thirty.

The first project is the Tower of Babel.

A people gathered on a plain with one language, one technology, and seemingly unlimited ambition. And the stated mission is right there in Genesis 11: “Let us make a name for ourselves.” Notice what drives the project: not love of neighbor or stewardship, but self-exaltation. Babel may be humanity’s oldest branding campaign.

And notice the first thing they invent. Before the tower, before the city, Genesis 11:3 says “Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.” Babel runs on the brick: identical, interchangeable, produced by the thousand. And to build at that scale, the builders have to become like bricks: one language, no dialects. One method, no dissent. Uniformity dressed up as unity. And God comes down, and the whole thing collapses into utter confusion. A people who wanted above all to secure themselves and stay together end up scattered and, worse, unable to understand one another.

Babel is not a story about God being threatened by tall buildings. It is a story about what happens when a civilization decides that efficiency matters more than communion, and making a name matters more than loving a neighbor.

And here’s what I want you to notice: the technology worked. The tower was going up, but the project failed anyway, because the problem was never the tools and the bricks. The problem was the heart behind those tools and bricks.

Now consider another construction project. Centuries later, a man named Nehemiah hears that Jerusalem lies in ruins. The walls are broken and the gates are burned. And pay attention to what he does, because it’s comically countercultural (then and now). Before he plans anything, he prays and fasts. When he arrives, he doesn’t call a press conference. He walks the ruins at night, in silence, just looking.

And when the work begins, he gives local families responsibility for sections of the wall. Priests next to perfume makers. Farmers next to goldsmiths. Whole households building the stretch of wall in front of their own doors. And when Nehemiah’s enemies mock the project, listen to what they mock: “Will they revive the stones out of the heaps of rubbish?” Babel built with new bricks. Nehemiah rebuilt with old stones, pulled from the rubble, no two of them the same shape.

Look around and you are looking at Nehemiah’s construction site: professors next to freshmen. Coaches next to chemists. As a true community of learners, nobody here is a spectator, and nobody gets the whole wall. Each of us gets a section.

It’s the same activity as Babel: stones, mortar, an ambitious goal, and a skyline changed. But a completely different project: Babel built to make a name. Nehemiah built to restore a people. Babel required everyone to become identical. Nehemiah required everyone to become responsible. Babel needed bricks. Nehemiah needed builders.

One project reached for heaven and produced confusion. The other started on its knees and produced a city.

So, the choice in front of your generation is not technology, yes or no. That question is largely over. The tools are here. The real choice is the ancient one: Which project are you building? Because the same tools can serve either project. The question is never only what the tool can do. The deeper question is what and who you are becoming while you use it.

THE DANGER RUNS THE OTHER DIRECTION

When people worry about artificial intelligence, they usually worry that the machines will get too human. Hollywood has made that movie roughly four hundred times: The Terminator; The Matrix; and whatever came out this summer. But I want to suggest that the more immediate danger runs the other direction.

The pressing risk of this age is not that machines become more like humans. It is that humans become more like machines.

Here is what I mean. Babel didn’t just build with bricks. It needed its builders to become bricks: uniform, measurable, interchangeable. That is the oldest temptation of every powerful technology, and it’s back.

Machines are built around things we can measure: output, speed, efficiency, optimization. And we are quietly learning to measure ourselves the same way. Your GPA. Your followers and likes. Your résumé. Your athletic statistics. Your productivity. Your sleep score. Your biometrics. And if you accept that framework, if you begin to believe that your worth is found in your output, then I have difficult news for you: You have entered a competition you will lose.

The machine will always produce more than you. It will eventually be faster at more things than you are. If human worth is measured by output, the machines have already won. But that has never been the Christian account of your worth. And it never will be.

Scripture says you bear the image of God. Not that you perform the image of God, nor that you earn it. Not that you maintain it through consistent output. You bear it. In fact, you bore the image of God from the moment you were stitched together in your mother’s womb. Before your first “A.” Before your first goal. Before your first paycheck. Before anyone followed you. Before you had accomplished anything that would fit on a résumé.

You were already a person of immeasurable worth because you were created in the image of God and loved by your Creator. You are not your output. Which is why, at SAU, we will keep saying something the algorithm will never say to you: You matter, even when you fail.

You matter when the semester gets away from you. You matter when you’re injured and cannot compete. You matter when the audition doesn’t go your way.

When the experiment fails.

When you get the paper back and the grade isn’t what you hoped. When you aren’t sure yet what you’re good at.

And faculty, you matter, too…when the article is rejected, when the evaluations sting, when the class you spent a summer building doesn’t quite land the way you’d hoped.

Bottom line, to hammer this point home so we might believe it: we matter when we are unproductive, unimpressive, and unfinished, because the imago Dei does not disappear when your performance slips, and neither does God’s love for you.

WHAT THE MACHINE CANNOT DO

Now let me be fair to the machines, because I promised you at the start that this was not a warning, and I try hard to keep my promises. Used well, these tools can take real burdens off real human backs, like every good tool since the plow. But here is something our Wesleyan tradition has spent over two hundred years preparing us to say.

The Wesleyan movement began not with an argument, but with an affection. John Wesley had the arguments for years before the night on Aldersgate Street when he felt his heart “strangely warmed.” Ever since, our tradition has insisted that formation cannot be reduced to the intellect. The intellect matters; after all, this is a university, and we are going to ask you to think deeply. But God is also after your heart: your loves, your desires, your habits, and the deep orientation of your life toward what you treasure. The goal of grace is not merely correct thinking – it is rightly ordered loving.

Compare THAT with a machine: an AI can produce the words of empathy. It can generate comfort, counsel, and encouragement. Even something that reads remarkably like love. Fluently. Instantly. And it possesses none of it. It can give you love’s outputs, but it has no heart to order and no self to give away.

And sometimes what you need isn’t another stream of affirmation. Sometimes you need a friend who knows you well enough, and loves you deeply enough, to look you in the eye and say, “You’re wrong about this.” A machine can generate disagreement, but it cannot risk a friendship for your good. That isn’t an insult to the technology; it is a definition of it.

Everything in you that can be reduced to output, a machine will eventually become better at imitating. But a heart giving itself away in love is something else entirely.

So, the question for your education, and for your years here, is not simply: What skills will you acquire? It is what kind of person will you become? Because here is a temptation for some universities. An education that does nothing but transfer information trains you in the one arena where machines are becoming remarkably capable. Spring Arbor has never existed merely to do that; we are not a credential mill with a chapel attached. We exist to form whole persons; people capable of wisdom and sound judgment. People with ordered hearts and working consciences. People who know how to think, how to love, how to serve, how to create, how to disagree, how to repent, how to forgive, and how to live faithfully under the lordship of Jesus Christ.

That mission might once have sounded quaint, but for today, it sounds like survival gear.

THE THINGS THAT CANNOT BE AUTOMATED

So how does a heart actually get formed? Wesley had a name for some of the ways God does it: the means of grace.

Prayer.

Scripture.

The Lord’s Supper.

Fasting.

And what he called “Christian conference,” a wonderfully stuffy eighteenth-century phrase for people wrestling through real questions together, out loud, until somebody says the thing nobody could have come up with alone.

None of that is especially efficient, which is the point. Nehemiah prayed and fasted before he planned. That wasn’t a delay in the project – it was the first day of construction.

God so often forms us slowly, through attention, struggle, and relationship. And some of the most important moments of your education will happen precisely when you cannot shortcut them.

The professor who will not simply give you the answer. The conversation with a roommate that goes longer than you planned. The Scripture passage you have to sit with because you do not understand it yet. The coach who makes you run it again.

So use AI. Use it appropriately and use it without guilt. Let it organize information. Let it help you find the error in your code. Let it explain a difficult concept a fourth way when the first three did not land.

But do not outsource the struggle, because the struggle is often where you get formed. The assignment was never really the essay. The essay was the gym. The assignment is you. And guard the things that should cost you something. This is your stretch of the wall.

Nehemiah’s families did not send a substitute to lay the stones in front of their own doors, and neither can you.

Do not let a machine do the wrestling your professor assigned you to do; do not let it invent the person your résumé describes; do not let it summarize the friend sitting across from you, telling you about the worst week of her life. And be very careful about outsourcing words like: “I’m sorry.” “I forgive you.” “I love you.” “I’m praying for you.”

Some words should cost us something. Their weight comes partly from knowing that another human being paid attention, wrestled for the words, and chose to give them to you.

Convenience is a fine servant, but it’s a terrible spiritual director.

So, guard some spaces in your life from optimization.

Silence. An open Bible with no other tabs open. A meal with no phones on the table. Sitting with someone who is hurting when you cannot fix it. Prayer that lasts long enough for you to stop performing.

That is Nehemiah walking the ruins at night. He had not laid a single stone yet, but he was looking. You cannot rebuild what you have not taken the time to examine and truly see. The digital world may call some of that wasted time, but it is not. Formation runs at the speed of relationship.

To the faculty, staff, and administrators here, this charge lands on us first. Students learn what we model, not merely what we announce. We cannot form discernment in them while practicing convenience in ourselves. Some of our words should cost us something, too: the comment in the margin of paper, the recommendation letter, the email to the student who has stopped showing up to class. Our section of the wall is the stretch right in front of us, in full view of these students, and they are watching how we lay the stones. Let us build it well.

NEITHER PANIC NOR PARADE

Let me close with a word about posture. You will spend your adult lives between two loud choirs. One says AI is the end of everything, and the other suggests it is the beginning of everything.

Panic and parade. Our tradition offers a third way. Wesleyans believe in prevenient grace: the grace that goes before. God is already at work before we arrive. Which means when you walk into the lab, the studio, the classroom, the startup, the school, the hospital, the boardroom, or even the AI company, you don’t carry God in with you like a lunchbox. You join a work God started before you arrived.

Nehemiah did not bring God to the ruins of Jerusalem – He found God already there.

And we hold what I would call the optimism of grace: the settled confidence that grace truly transforms people, and that through transformed people, God changes families, institutions, communities, and cultures. That does not make us naïve: we certainly take sin seriously, including sin that gets written into code and shipped at scale. But our hope has never rested in our technology – it rests in the God who outlasts every tower.

So do not be afraid of this age. You were not born into it by accident. God knew the years your life would occupy, and this is where you have been called to live faithfully.

There is a wall in front of you. Your section to build is your studies, your friendships, your habits, your work, your worship, and your heart. The tools on your belt are more powerful than any generation of students has ever carried, so use them.

But remember: The tools don’t care what they build. Only you do.

Pray before you plan. Walk slowly enough to actually see. Take responsibility for the stretch of wall in front of your own door. Don’t outsource the struggle God may be using to form you.

You are not the generation that gets to opt out of the question. You are the generation that gets to answer it. Choose with care how you will build this season. And perhaps, in this particular moment, we could memorize and learn to pray David’s ancient prayer with new attention:

“May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight, O LORD, my Rock and my Redeemer.”

*This essay is adapted from the Convocation Address delivered by Dr. Corey Ross at Spring Arbor University on September 2, 2026.