Should a Christian use AI to be a better dad?

Can Christians use AI and still honor God?

In this episode, Whitney Sewell shares how he went from distrusting AI to using it every day to reclaim hours for his family, faith, and business. He opens up about feeling buried by work, overwhelmed by email, and constantly behind - and how AI became a tool to help him steward his time more intentionally.

But this conversation goes beyond productivity. Whitney addresses questions many believers are quietly asking: Is using AI honest? Does it replace trusting God? Where should Christians draw the line?

His answer is simple:

AI is a tool. It is not the Holy Spirit.

This is a practical, faith-first conversation for Christian entrepreneurs, business owners, and fathers who want to embrace technology without compromising their convictions.

🎁 Free Download: First 5 AI Tasks to Get Your Time Back
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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Can a Christian even use AI? Should we? Or is this one of those things we are better off keeping our distance from? I asked those same questions. You know, when all this started, it looked like hype to me, and I did not trust it. I still don't trust it all the way, but I have been using it hard for a while now, and it has handed me back something I had given up for lost. It's time. And time, it turns out, is the whole thing. It's the middle of the afternoon, and I'm in my office with the door shut and a screen in front of me. You know, out in the driveway, my kids and my wife, they're playing Foursquare, and there's a soccer ball going in the yard, and they're having a big time. I can hear all of it through the window, right? The laughing, they're arguing over the rules, you know, somebody yelling at, you know, it's their turn. And every few minutes, my one and two-year-olds, they break off from the game, run up to the office window, they press their faces against the glass and they wave at me. They blow kisses to me. I wave back and their faces just light up. And then they turn and run back out to the game. I'm on the other side of that glass working. I built my business to provide for those kids. And there I was on a beautiful afternoon, watching them through a window, providing for a life I was not in. That window is what this is about. Yes, I'm going to talk about AI and some tools that have surprised me, but what is it? You know, on the other side of that glass, right? You know, that's the real subject. How a man gets more time for what matters. You should know I'm not a tech guy. I'm a husband, I'm a dad of five kids, and a business owner who spent years as the bottleneck of his own company. Decisions ran through me, answers waited on me. I caught it being needed. It was more like being stuck. The most common place you can probably relate to, you know, where it kept showing up was my email. For so long, my inbox had me beat. It grew by hundreds every day, and thousands sat there unread. It got to where I would open it in the morning and not even know where to begin. The ones that mattered and needed a real answer and real thought, you know, they got buried under the volume. And I got slow, embarrassingly slow. I would open my inbox in the morning and I could just feel it in my chest, right? Before I would read a single message, just the weight of how many people I was letting down without meaning to. Good people waited weeks, sometimes longer, just to hear back from me. And not because I didn't care. You know, I wanted to get back to them, but because I could not find them in the pile of hundreds of emails. I started using AI to change that. Now it scans my inbox. It pulls out the ones I need to answer, it surfaces the ones I missed and reminds me of what I know on a topic before I reply. So the answer, you know, is mine and it's a good one. That is real time. I am no longer handing to an assistant to sort for me. Now I move through the highest priority ones, I edit them, and I send them in less time than I used to. I mean, it used to take me just to do one or two emails. More good emails out the door with better information in a fraction of the time. This has saved countless hours each week for me and relationships. I stopped being the man who leaves good people hanging for weeks and sometimes months. You cannot put a price on that for any businessman. If you are one of those people who have waited weeks for an answer from me, I apologize. I hope I can do better going forward. Let me show you what it looks like past the inbox. You know, when AI drafts an email for me now, it isn't like guessing. It knows the history of my business. It remembers details about a person, a deal, you know, that I would have to dig for or it would just plain forget. The draft comes back already knowing who this is and what we've talked about. And it sounds like me because it learned from years of how I write. I read it, I fix what I want, and I send it. Then there is the work I don't even ask for anymore. You can get set up with an AI agent, right? Uh, and it's just AI that's on a schedule. People use that term to sound fancy, but it's just an AI agent that's scheduled to do a task for you and do a job on its own. Mine runs research for me every week without me lifting a finger. You know, what are my competitors doing? You know, what are they saying online? How are their posts landing? It gathers it and hands it to me the same day, every week, ready to read. But here's the one thing I think would help you most is meeting prep. Imagine you have a full day of meetings, five minutes before each one. There's a single document already sitting on your calendar, and it has everything who this person is, why you are meeting, when you last talked, and what you covered, you know, what they're known for, anything worth knowing that they've put out there online. And you know, the open items from the last time you sat down, even right. You did not build that. AI did the night before, right? For every meeting on your schedule. And it put it right there where you could look right at it and find it very easily. You walk in ready instead of scrambling beforehand and trying to remember how you even know this person. You know, now you walk in knowing their name, knowing the history, and not caught off guard again. And some of it runs while I'm just living my life. You know, I had a mountain of mind-numbing organizing to do, the kind of just clicking and sorting. You'd pay an assistant for weeks to grind through. I set an AI agent on it and drove my son to a youth retreat. It worked through the night while I slept. And the next morning, the job was waiting for me. You know, weeks of busy work handed, you know, back to me the next morning while I was with my boy at a youth retreat. So I use this tool every day now. And the more it gives back, the more I want other men to learn it. That is why we are here. You know, let me go straight at the concern I would have if I were you sitting here right now. The one you really I had to work through myself as well. If I let AI think for me and write for me, you know, does it make me a smaller man? More dependent, duller? You know, does outsourcing my words mean I'm outsourcing me? I am still working through some of this myself. But here's where I land. And it's the most important thing I'll say today. AI is not the Holy Spirit. It does not get that seat, and I will not give it that seat, right? The Spirit is the one who guides us into truth. No tool speaks that direction into my life, my marriage, or my walk with God. So I do not go to a screen for the things that belong to the Lord. I go to him. I am in his word. I am praying and I am seeking him for direction. AI does not touch that and it never will. What AI does is help me think and learn. And that is a different thing. Let me give you an example that surprised me. My time in the word. I will be reading a chapter and you know, I will ask Chad or Claude about, say, a word in the original language, you know, what it meant in Hebrew or Greek. And then connections start to open up. I will ask, you know, who wrote the book and where that man was in his life when he wrote it. I will ask, you know, who was he writing to and what were they walking through? What was on their minds in that day? And I come out of that time understanding the passage deeper, not skipping past it, right? The tool did not do my reading for me. It drove me further, you know, just into it and did research that would have taken me many hours. Use the wrong way. AI does your thinking for you, and you go soft, right? You know, use the right way, it pushes you deeper into your own thinking and learning. I dump my thoughts, you know, my ideas into it and let it help me shape them into something that helps other men. But I don't want it to, you know, just to write for me with no input and no review. I have it interview me, pull what is already in my head out where you know I can use it and put it in my own words in a better order, even. The thinking stays mine, the creativity stays mine. You know, I am still the one bringing the ideas. Do you wonder if it is honest to send something a tool helped you write? Here's my answer. It is honest when the thinking is yours, the conviction is yours, and you stand behind every word as your own because you do. It stops being honest the moment you let it speak for you, you know, on something you've not thought through. And you know, you put your name on a position you do not hold. The test is plain. Could you stand up in a room and defend every line of it out loud as what you believe? If the answer is yes, the tool just helped you say it better. If the answer is no, you skip the part that was yours to do. Two other concerns come up, and each is worth discussing. First, isn't this just a shortcut? Shouldn't I be trusting God instead of learning on a tool? You know, I understand the question. But it sets up a choice that was never real. You know, trusting God and using a good tool, they're not opposites, you know, and they never have been. Psalm 127 says, unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain. The builders still build. The house just does not stand because of how hard they work. It stands because the Lord builds it. The same Psalm says, It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toll, for he gives to his beloved sleep. That is a lot of us, right? Up early, up late, worn down. Sure, you know, it it all rests on us. You know, a tool that helps you put down some of the anxious toll is not a threat to your faith. Your faith was never in the toll to begin with. Second, if a tool can do this much of my work, what is left of me, right? That one runs deep because it is about where a man finds his worth. Here's the truth. You know, I just keep coming back to my worth, I was never you know connected to my output. It was never how much I got done in a day, right? I belong to God. You know, he made me and he calls me his own. And none of that moves when I use a tool that takes some of the tasks off my plate. AI does not shrink the man. It clears the work you know a machine can do and it hands back the work only you can do. No tool will ever lead your home, disciple your kids, or sit across the table from your wife and be present. That part is yours. It always was. And this is the part I care about most because you know the time is worthless if you waste it. Let me tell you about another afternoon. The kids were outside again, and one of my boys wanted to come ask if I would play. He didn't want to come in because he knew dad was working and he didn't want to bother me. So he stood out there and held it in. My wife saw it and she finally told him it was okay and that he should go ask me. So he came into my office, had tears in his eyes, and careful and unsure, he asked me if I would come outside and play that afternoon. It crushes me just to think about it. I closed the laptop and I went out and played. But I've not been able to forget that picture of my own son standing in the yard, working up the courage to ask his father for an afternoon. A boy who had already learned somewhere along the way to expect the answer to be no. That is what the hours are for. Not so you can pour the saved, you know, time back into the business and feel productive, but so that when your kids ask you to play, you know, you're not buried. Right. And the answer is yes. So you have margin for your wife, you know, for the time with the Lord in the morning, for the calling he set in front of you. Here's the question to think about this week. If you got an afternoon back, you know, would your kids even think to ask for it? AI can buy back the hours. You decide what they're worth. And for a man who follows Christ, you know this is precious time the Lord has given you to steward well. If you want to start, here's the good news. You do not need anything fancy. A tool like ChatGPT or Claude run about $20 a month, and that is plenty to begin. What you do need is to start small and to start with you. Most men hear this and they try to automate their whole business in a weekend. They burn out by Sunday night and decide, you know, AI is overhyped. That is not the way. Here's the way. First, get your business out of your head onto the page. The tool can only help you once it knows how you work. Tell it, right? Talk it through the way you would explain your business to a new hire and let it write down what you say. You'll be so surprised how much of it was only ever living in your head. Second, feed it your own world, right? Give it your past emails, the documents you already have, a few examples of how you write. You know, generic questions get you generic answers. The more of you know your real context it has, the more it sounds like you and knows your business instead of sounding like a stranger. Third, pick one thing, not 10 or one. The task that buried you worse last week, the one you dread, the one that keeps you at your desk, you know, after hours and you know, the house goes quiet. Build the tool to carry that one well before you know you touch anything else. For me, it was email. You know, I got that working, and only then did I move on to the next thing. One win builds the next. You're not behind. You are one task away from getting your first hour back. Here's where most men are with this. They know AI is everywhere. You know, they have poked at it, a draft here, a question there. You know, then they got busy and it fell off. They're sitting on a tool that could hand them their week back and using it like it's a toy. That is not a knowledge problem. The information is all over the internet and for free. It's a build problem. Nobody has sat down with them and helped them put it to work around their real business, you know, their real week and a life they want. You know, that's the difference between dabbling and getting your time back, not access. It's someone showing you how. Well, I want to show you. I am helping a few men to put AI to work in their business the way I have so they can get many hours back every week. Their businesses can run leaner and without them stuck in every small decision. If you are buried in your work and you want those hours back, reach out and let's see if you are a fit. I'll help you assess where your week is going, find work AI can take off your plate and help you build it. The hours are not the point. What you do with them is you know, being present with your wife, leading your kids, building something that does not cost you and the people you built it for. At the start, you know, I told you about my little ones pressing their faces, you know, under my office window while I sat on the other side of the glass working. You know, I'm still in that office. The work is still there, but I'm on the other side of that glass with them a lot more than I used to be. And the tools I talked about today are part of how. That is the whole reason any of this matters. Thank you for being here. Now go be present with your wife and kids this week and lead them well.