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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.22
The garden was only a beginning. The goal was a globe of technological advancement, leading to a creation so refined that the city streets will be paved thick with crystal gold, a creation so radiant and luminescent that we can hardly imagine what it will look like in the end.2
Every time we open our Bibles, our souls are being fed through centuries of technological advancement.
Technology is not inherently evil, but it tends to become the platform of choice to express the fantasy of human autonomy.
First, life in the digital age is an open invitation for clear, biblical thinking about the impact of our phones on ourselves, on our creation, on our neighbors, and on our relationships to God. Thoughtlessly adopting new technology is worldliness.
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.
First, we use digital distractions to keep work away. Facebook is a way of escape from our vocational pressures. We procrastinate around hard things: work deadlines, tough conversations, laundry piles, and school projects and papers. The average American college student wastes 20 percent of class time tinkering on a digital device, doing things unrelated to class (a statistic that seems low to me!).5 When life becomes most demanding, we crave something else—anything else.
Second, we use digital distractions to keep people away. God has called us to love our neighbors, yet we turn to our phones to withdraw from our neighbors and to let everyone know we’d rather be somewhere else.
Third, we use digital distractions to keep thoughts of eternity away.
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.
Unconsciously, we want the very thing we complain about. For if we had leisure, we would look at ourselves and listen to our hearts and see the great gaping hole in our hearts and be terrified, because that hole is so big that nothing but God can fill it.”12
“It is difficult to serve God with our heart, soul, strength and mind when we are diverted and distracted and multi-tasking everything.”20 Historian Bruce Hindmarsh adds, “Our spiritual condition today is one of spiritual ADD.”21
True distractions include anything (even a good thing) that veils our spiritual eyes from the shortness of time and from the urgency of the season of heightened expectation as we await the summing up of all history.
Here’s the warning: as Christians, if we fail to manage life’s distractions wisely, we will lose our urgency and—in the sobering words of one smartphone-addicted mom of young children—we may “forget how to walk with the Lord.”37 Distraction management is a critical skill for spiritual health, and no less in the digital age. 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.38 Over time, we may lose our hearts by the erosive power of unchecked amusements. Eventually we
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The more distracted we are digitally, the more displaced we become spiritually.
Why was it so hard for them to celebrate Christ? Simple—public approval forbade it. If you follow Christ, the world will unfollow you. You will be shunned. You will be despised. 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. Christians today still face real-life glory wars and real-life tensions inside the digital world. So what do we fear more, the disapproval of God or the disappearance of our online followers?
the itch for human approval ultimately renders faith pointless.24 Why? Because faith is the act of being satisfied with Christ, says John Piper, “and if you are bent on getting your satisfaction from scratching the itch of self-regard, people’s affirmation, you will turn away from Jesus, because you can’t serve two masters.” In other words, he says, “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.
The problem is not just that we need to turn away from these micro-bursts of approval, but that we must deprogram ourselves from this online hunger.
If we don’t detox these habits, we will go on seeking intimacy by reproducing ourselves, bingeing on man’s approval, and starting each day with an approval hangover. Then we need the antidote of new affirmation from our friends to keep convincing ourselves that our lives are meaningful. This is tragic. This is wasted reward. The solid praise we expect from God is based on actions now largely unseen; the whimsical praise we seek online is based on what we project.32 We cannot neglect this contrast.
For those of us who struggle here, Jesus’s warning is very clear: “Whoever loves [his social network] more than me is not worthy of me” (Matt. 10:37).
This is so good. The immediate buzz from social likes, and comments are not what define me or bring me fulfillment. I need to believe what God thinks of me and really lean into that, instead of what someone on social thinks, however good or bad.
Daniel Boorstin was right all along: we must reckon with time. Is your heart set on becoming a celebrity in this life or a hero in the next? Is time your daily nuisance, threatening to erode your significance, or is it your friend? Do you want your approval and fame now, or can you wait for an eternal crown? We all must answer these questions, and how we answer them will determine whether our souls find health in Christ or sickness in the spotlight.
The statistics show that Christians who struggle to read books are struggling to break free from poor smartphone habits as one root cause.
It 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. It is less of a book and more of a world of revelation in which we live and move and have our being.
On the nine-month anniversary of her social-media sobriety—completely off Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter—my wife turned to me and said, “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.
