WHAT ARE WE FOR?
Seven sermons for the Intelligence Age on received life, disordered capacity, presence, dependence, reconciliation, and the kind of fruit human life was created to bear.
What happens when technology can do more of what we once thought made us valuable?
Artificial intelligence can write, analyze, summarize, generate, imitate, remember, and optimize at extraordinary speed. That makes the technological question obvious: what can the machine do now?
This series starts somewhere deeper. Before we decide what machines should do, we have to recover what human beings are for. Scripture does not begin human life with usefulness, output, or competition. It begins with gift, relationship, vocation, limit, communion, and dependence on God.
What Are We For? follows that question through seven biblical images—breath, fig leaves, presence, body, tower, vine, and fruit. Artificial intelligence appears throughout the series, but it is never the main character. It is the mirror. The deeper subject is us.
God gave us purpose before we built capacity.
Each sermon asks whether our growing capacity is helping us live more faithfully with God, love our neighbors more fully, and bear the kind of fruit that reveals a life formed by the Spirit.
One question. Seven movements.
BREATH
Life received before usefulness demonstrated.
FIG LEAVES
What happens when good capacity starts serving the wrong things?
PRESENCE
The reminder is not the care. Love draws near, acts, and remains answerable.
BODY
Christian maturity is not self-sufficiency. The Body needs its members.
TOWER
Capacity becomes dangerous when it is organized around self-security and name-making.
VINE
We cannot ReHuman ourselves. Life is restored and sustained in Christ.
FRUIT
A machine can produce an artifact. Only life bears fruit.
BREATH
Your life was received before your usefulness was demonstrated.
Genesis begins the human story with dust receiving breath from God. That changes the terms of the AI conversation. If human worth depends on outperforming machines, we have already accepted the machine's measure.
Remember the breath.
BREATH introduces the series by recovering life as gift before achievement, capacity as vocation rather than identity, and creaturely limits as part of human truth rather than defects to be engineered away.
From received life to revealed life.
Receive
Human life begins as gift. Breath comes before usefulness, achievement, or output.
Abide
Human life cannot repair or sustain itself by optimization. Christ is the Vine; we are branches.
Bear
Life received from God becomes visible as Spirit-formed fruit in love, obedience, presence, and faithfulness.
You were never created to be the best machine in the room.
The goal is not human superiority over technology. The goal is faithful humanity under God—using our capacities, including our tools, in service of the purposes for which human life was given.
Made to be heard—and used.
Churches & small groups
Use each sermon with Scripture, discussion questions, and a weekly practice to move from listening into formation.
Universities & classrooms
Use the series to open conversations about personhood, formation, judgment, AI, responsibility, and the purposes technology should serve.
Leadership teams
Use the series as a theological and human-purpose lens for decisions about automation, efficiency, institutional mission, and human consequence.
Personal reflection
Listen slowly. Carry the refrain. Test your own capacity, habits, dependencies, and uses of technology against the life you believe God has called you to live.
Get the next sermon when it is released.
BREATH begins with received life. FIG LEAVES moves next into disordered capacity. Join the series and receive each new sermon, transcript, and discussion resource as the seven-week argument unfolds.
Continue the conversation beyond the screen.
Dr. James R. Andrews brings What Are We For? and the larger ReHuman framework into churches, universities, conferences, classrooms, faculty development, leadership teams, and institutional conversations through sermons, keynotes, workshops, and facilitated dialogue.
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