Who is your biggest influence?
Who do you listen to and take advice from?
What are the voices that impact your life the most?
It may be a family member or sports icon, or maybe you aspire to be like
a scientist, a celebrity, or perhaps the person sitting beside you right now.
Influence is Influence is more than just people though.
It can come in the form of trends, challenges,
and what we see everyone else doing around us.
Every person on the planet is influenced by something.
In our digital world, this is seen in who we follow online.
We like and we subscribe because we value what they do, what they say, who they are,
and the things that they show us.
Influence our lives and the things that we do.
That's why we talk about social media so much and why we often link it to our
mental health, because it is so influential.
Now, if we took a step back and asked ourselves who our biggest influence was,
I wonder what we'd say.
Let's find out.
Um, um, my mum.
She birthed me, so yeah.
Probably like friends and family.
I think I have to say my wife.
We have a great relationship and she tells me what to do.
I think I would say Steven Spielberg.
Just growing up, I loved all of Steven Spielberg's films
like Jurassic Park and E.T. and everything.
And I just, I really like the guy and I want to be like him.
And there's a guy that I like, he's also our age, called Conal Mag.
And he does a lot of promoting charities and all online.
And I feel he's really influential and really inspiring.
Influence in my life has got to be my mum and dad.
They're phenomenal.
Phenomenal adventurers.
It's probably my grandparents, just because they're two pretty awesome people.
I'm gonna say my parents. Parents.
Yeah, they brought me up my whole life and I just look to them for
inspiration and how to live a great life.
I wonder what you would have said if Danny met you in the street.
We've seen influence work in crazy ways in the past, for good and for bad,
to the point that we don't even realise we're being impacted by it.
Because we're so caught up in it.
Did you know that social media makes most of its money through advertising?
Some experts reckon that we see around 5,000 adverts a day,
and this influences how we look, how we dress, how we think,
and how we feel about ourselves.
We live in a time of influencers.
Influencers are behind the camera too.
There are whole teams of people thinking of ways to keep us scrolling,
flicking, and watching.
As they try to get our attention, the question becomes, who are we
going to let influence us the most?
We can all think of today's influencers, but what about history?
Who is history's greatest influencer of all time?
Well, the famous Time magazine every year create a list of the most influential
people of that year, but they've also widened that to get
a list of the most significant people in the whole of history.
In that list includes people like William Shakespeare.
To be or not to be an influencer, that is the question.
He's influenced our English lessons with books like Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet.
On that list, they've also included Joan of Arc, the famous French heroine,
and Abraham Lincoln, the 16th American president who helped
to abolish slavery, and Queen Victoria, who helped
to create the London Underground.
And my personal favourite, Thomas Edison.
Not only did he invent the light bulb, but he also created the carbon microphone,
which we have in our mobile phones today to record sound.
So, you know, we can almost thank him for TikTok, right?
So we've got all of these incredible influential people,
but who came top of the list as the most significant person
in the whole of history?
It was Jesus Christ.
In the Bible, in Matthew's account of Jesus, we read
arguably some of his greatest teaching.
We first see Jesus as an influencer when we read chapter 5.
Now when Jesus saw the crowds, he went up on a mountainside and sat down.
His disciples came to him and he began to teach them.
We can clearly see that all of these people were hanging on his every word.
So what would you expect the teaching to be?
Would you expect him to say, 'Only look out for yourself.
If someone puts you down, Forget about them.
Only share your good moments and make sure to show off your good deeds.
Well, no, not even close.
This is what Jesus taught us: Love your enemies.
Pray for those who persecute you.
Don't call attention to your acts of charity.
Jesus said, when you give to the needy, don't let your left hand know what your
right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret.
'then your Father who sees what is done in secret may reward you.' No wonder it's
claimed his followers turned the world upside down.
Someone who demonstrated that upside-down way of living was Jesus's cousin,
a guy called John the Baptist.
He recognized that Jesus was the greatest of all time.
He wore camel skin for clothes and was someone who ate locusts
and honey for dinner.
But even though his appearance and eating habits were crazy,
his attitude and John's own response to Jesus really got people's attention.
As you look at his life, Jesus was clearly his biggest influence.
He says some incredible things about Jesus.
In one account, he says, "He who is coming after me is mightier
than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry." And in another account,
he says, "He must increase, but I must decrease." John saw his role
as preparing the way for Jesus' arrival.
John's greatest influence was to point people to the greatest influencer.
This is so different to our current influencer culture, which says,
"Look at me and at nobody else." It'd be like becoming a YouTube sensation
by directing likes and subscribers to somebody else.
You see, John the Baptist was like a signpost pointing others away
from him and to someone better.
Or like a floodlight, which reveals and illuminates the main event.
For John, he knows people have needs, but he also knows that he's not
the one to meet those needs.
And so he points people to Jesus, the one who meets our deepest
need and who shows us who God is.
Our greatest need isn't to be entertained.
Our greatest need isn't to be kept up to date with all the current trends.
We all have longings and desires that only our Maker can satisfy.
The more we get to know Jesus, the more we will understand that he must
become greater and we must become less.
The reason why so many people today are still influenced by Jesus
is because he gives us hope and a purpose.
So, what would it look like if Jesus was our greatest influence?
