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The job is not to impress anybody. The job is to make much of Christ and love people. That is why we were created. So don’t waste your life grooming your mule. Make him bear the weight of a thousand works of love. Make him tread the heights with you in the mountains of worship.
Unknown to me at the time I was unboxing my first iPhone, Jobs was actively shielding his children from his digital machines.6
We are, in fact, living with a parallel, virtual universe, a universe that can take all of the time that we have. What happens to us when we are in constant motion—when we are almost addicted to constant visual stimulation? What is this doing to us? That is the big question.”
the more addicted you become to your phone, the more prone you are to depression and anxiety, and the less able you are to concentrate at work and sleep at night.
will point out some scientific findings, but only as a turnstile for us to move the discussion from the biological effects of our screen habits into the more important discussion of the spiritual push and pull between our online actions and the infinite consequences of our device behaviors. Eternity, not psychology, is my deepest concern.
When life becomes most demanding, we crave something else—anything else.
the human appetite for distraction is high in every age, because distractions give us easy escape from the silence and solitude whereby we become acquainted with our finitude, our inescapable mortality, and the distance of God from all our desires, hopes, and pleasures.
Staring at the ceilings of our quiet bedrooms, with only our thoughts about ourselves, reality, and God, is unbearable. “Hence it comes that men so much love noise and stir; hence it comes that the prison is so horrible a punishment; hence it comes that the pleasure of solitude is a thing incomprehensible.”
Unchecked distractions that mute the urgency of God. Marriage is a beautiful gift, but it also comes packaged with routines and obligations—certain domestic distractions—demanding much attention. In embracing the blessings of marriage, spouses also willingly accept the distractions of the married life and relinquish what Paul sees as the “undistracted” life—the gift of singleness.26 Marriage is not the ultimate priority of life; neither is romantic love or sex. Marriage is a precious gift, and intimacy in marriage is a beautiful expression of God’s design—but Scripture calls for seasons when
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The more distracted we are digitally, the more displaced we become spiritually.
The ease and immediacy of Twitter is no match for the patient labor of prayer, and the neglect of prayer makes God feel distant in our lives.
Do my smartphone habits distract me from genuine communion with God? 4. Do my smartphone habits provide an easy escape from sobered thinking about my death, the return of Christ, and eternal realities?
We sin with our phones when we ignore our street neighbors, the strangers who share with us the same track of pavement.
But those who aim their entire lives toward the glory and approval of God will find, in Christ, eternal approval.
Vain glory will not satisfy your heart; it will only intensify your craving for human praise.
Is your heart set on becoming a celebrity in this life or a hero in the next?
2 Corinthians 4:18, who “look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.”
“Compulsive social-media habits are a bad trade: your present moment in exchange for an endless series of someone else’s past moments.” She’s right about the cost. Our social-media lives can stop our own living.
To what eternal destiny am I influencing others, and even myself? With this high calling in mind, Paul pleads for prayer. Each of us must know when to speak as we pray, like Paul, that “words may be given to me in opening my mouth boldly to proclaim the mystery of the gospel” (Eph. 6:19).
The object of our worship is the object of our imitation.
What we want to become, we worship. And what we worship shapes our becoming.
God “created little images of himself so that they would talk and act and feel in a way that reveals the way God is. So people would look at the way you behave, look at the way you think, look at the way you feel, and say, ‘God must be great, God must be real.’ That is why you exist.”13 In other words, we were created to stand in opposition to the techno-worldliness that inevitably makes God look irrelevant in the new world of technique and device mastery. Here’s the key: “God didn’t create you as an end in yourself. He is the end; you are the means.
If God’s people are bored with God, they are really bad images.
“When you had your smartphone, you were a walking vending machine of whatever you’d ingested that day,” she told him. “It was difficult to talk about deeper things that mattered, because you were constantly distracted by Internet litter. You’re now able to focus and give necessary attention to deeper issues. More of what we talk about comes from your heart rather than your Twitter feed.”
“If loneliness didn’t exist, we could reasonably assume that psychiatric illnesses would not occur either.”
“For manufacturers and marketers, human beings are best when they are alone, since individuals are forced to buy one consumer item each, whereas family or community members share,”
Responsibility Avoidance. We want to put off the burdens of the roles God has given us as fathers, mothers, bosses, employees, and students.
And when it comes to the morning hours, Charles Spurgeon was right: “Permit not your minds to be easily distracted, or you will often have your devotion destroyed.”
In effect, social media becomes a bellows that keeps pumping fuel into the internal fire of our envy.
Most people think it is okay to convey negative information if it is true. We understand that lying is immoral. But is passing along damaging truth immoral?
What is done in the name of “exposing truth,” with the single goal of undermining someone’s character, is an expression of slander.
Am I entitled to feed on the fragmented trivialities online? In other words, am I entitled to spend hours every month simply browsing odd curiosities? I get the distinct sense in Scripture that the answer is no. I am not my own. I am owned by my Lord. I have been bought with a price, which means I must glorify Christ with my thumbs, my ears, my eyes, and my time.4 And that leads me to my point: I do not have “time to kill”—I have time to redeem.
Idols cut us off from remembering the past mercy of God and blind us to his future grace.
“I tell you, on the day of judgment people will give account for every careless word they speak, for by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned” (Matt. 12:36–37).
“I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked.”
We are always busy, but always distracted—diabolically lured away from what is truly essential and truly gratifying. Led by our unchecked digital appetites, we manage to transgress both commands that promise to bring focus to our lives. We fail to enjoy God. We fail to love our neighbor.
We give our time to what is not explicitly sinful, but also to what cannot give us joy or prepare us for self-sacrifice.
Our advances in technology have a way of rendering God more and more irrelevant to our world and in our lives—the very definition of worldliness.
Ends: Do my smartphone behaviors move me toward God or away from him? Influence: Do my smartphone behaviors edify me and others, or do they build nothing of lasting value? Servitude: Do my smartphone behaviors expose my freedom in Christ or my bondage to technique?
Do I want my kids to see me gazing at a handheld screen so much as they grow up? What does this habit project to them and to others around me?
Step away from social media for frequent strategic stoppages (each morning), digital Sabbaths (one day offline each week), and digital sabbaticals (two two-week stoppages each year).
for many of us, who lack this maturity, technology tends to feed our vanity and kill our wonder.
