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We now check our smartphones every 4.3 minutes of our waking lives.
What happens to us when we are in constant motion—when we are almost addicted to constant visual stimulation?
“Media don’t just lie around passively, waiting for us to come along and find them useful for some project we have in mind. They tell us what to do and, more significantly, what to want to do.
If we must give an account of every idle word, we are probably the first generation that can truly appreciate the volume of our idle words, since we have published more of them than any group in human history.
Too often what my phone exposes in me is not the holy desires of what I know I should want, not even what I think I want, and especially not what I want you to think I want. My phone screen divulges in razor-sharp pixels what my heart really wants.
This means that whatever happens on my smartphone, especially under the guise of anonymity, is the true exposé of my heart, reflected in full-color pixels back into my eyes.
Technology is the reordering of raw materials for human purposes.
This is always what happens when technology is misused in unbelief. God is the genesis of all knowledge and technological advance, and he is the author and finisher of a glorified city to come.
Technology, even in the hands of the most evil intention of man, is never outside the overruling plan of God.
Every technology changes the fundamental social dynamics of how we relate to the world, to one another, and to God.
We check our smartphones about 81,500 times each year, or once every 4.3 minutes of our waking lives, which means you will be tempted to check your phone three times before you finish this chapter.
When asked whether they were more likely to check email and social media before or after spiritual disciplines on a typical morning, 73 percent said before.
warns that Facebook addicts, unlike compulsive drug abusers, “have the ability to control their behavior, but they don’t have the motivation to control this behavior because they don’t see the consequences to be that severe.”
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.
Unhealthy digital addictions flourish because we fail to see the consequences,
“I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber.”
“It is difficult to serve God with our heart, soul, strength and mind when we are diverted and distracted and multi-tasking
everything.”
A distraction can come in many forms: a new amusement, a persistent worry, or a vain aspiration. It is something that diverts our minds and hearts from what is most significant; anything “which monopolizes the heart’s concerns.”
We can become so unfocused in life that we get lost in the unforgiving wheel of daily tasks and fail to listen to the voice of Christ. We fail to pray and fail to see
him as intently listening and drawing near to us. God feels distant because we are distracted.
But if we merely exorcise one digital distraction from our lives without replacing it with a newer and healthier habit, seven more digital distractions will take its place.
The more distracted we are digitally, the more displaced we become spiritually.
we must make it our aim to purge our lives of all unnecessary and unhelpful distractions.
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.
My phone conditions me to be a passive observer. My phone can connect me to many friends, but it can also decouple me from an expectation for real-life engagement.
We assume we can ignore the people we see in order to care for the people we don’t see, but that idea is all twisted backward.
Hiding our unflattering features is very natural and easy online, but excruciatingly hard and unnatural offline, in healthy local churches and honest friendships.
in the online world, we can separate ourselves from people who don’t think like us and gravitate toward people who do.
When you know that there is a place where everyone largely agrees with and values you, you can develop a reluctance to go to a church where you are not so valued, understood, or appreciated.
can also cause us to replace the concrete relationships of our given contexts with idealized communities in which we can forgo the struggles associated with the transformation of actual communities and the need to adapt to and be vulnerable to others.14
Our phones buffer us from diversity,
Communities that fail to embrace the benefits of disagreements and fail to work through tensions and differences tend to become homogeneous and unhealthy, because they “tend to have exaggerated blindspots and unaddressed weaknesses.”18
If the glory of man is your god, you will not celebrate the glory of Christ. Or, if you come to Christ and treasure his glory above all other glory, you will be forced to forfeit the buzz of human approval.
“In a solid, God-chosen relationship with Jesus, man’s disapproval cannot hurt you and man’s approval cannot satisfy you. Therefore, to fear the one and crave the other is sheer folly.”25 It is unbelief.
This approval addiction must be why Jesus expressly warns us not to seek human praise by our obedience.
Then we need the antidote of new affirmation from our friends to keep convincing ourselves that our lives are meaningful.
“Distractibility might be regarded as the mental equivalent of obesity.”
Without the ability to focus our minds, our attention is led by others, and
the greatest challenge to literacy is a short attention span,
“The more time I spend reading ten-second tweets and skimming random articles online, the more it affects my attention span, weakening the muscles I need to read Scripture for long distances.”
“Because Scripture is the supreme locus of God’s self-communication in the world, Christians are ‘people of the book.’ The Lord gathers, nourishes, defends, and guides his people through this book; and his people assemble around, feed upon, find shelter in, and follow after the words of this book.”
Our joy in God is at stake. In our vanity, we feed on digital junk food, and our palates are reprogrammed and our affections atrophy.
“The more we take refuge in distraction, the more habituated we become to mere stimulation and the more desensitized to delight.
“Our capacity for deep enjoyment thus destroyed, we quickly lose the capacity to enjoy the One who demands the most sustained attention of all.”
can be said that literacy has fallen to such a degree that, for many Christians today (perhaps most Christians today), the Bible stands as the oldest, longest, and most complicated book we will ever try to read on our own. Simultaneously, every lure and temptation of the digital age is convincing us to give up difficult, sustained work for the immediate and impulsive content we can skim.
The Bible is our open door to hear God’s voice both alone and together in community. It is intended to be bottomless in its profundity and endless in its relevance.
to skim the Bible is to misread it,
What he spoke into existence, he continues to speak through, calling human worshipers to delight in him as we enjoy what he made.
All of creation is a footpath back to God.
