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The physical gifts we enjoy seemingly are “thickened” by our capacity to see and treasure the unseen Giver.
Физические дары, которыми мы наслаждаемся, казалось бы, «утолщаются» благодаря нашей способности видеть и ценить невидимого Дающего.
the life of faith is about comprehending the whole when we can only see a fraction. This is the work of imagination.
Our imaginations must come alive to Christ so that we can “see” that we live in him, so that we can turn away from the visual vices grabbing our eyes, and so that we can live by faith and share a present joy as we anticipate the unimaginable future joy of his presence.
When I grow bored with Christ, I become bored with life—and when that happens, I often turn to my phone for a new consumable digital thrill. It is my default habit.
“True freedom from the bondage of technology comes not mainly from throwing away the smartphone, but from filling the void with the glories of Jesus that you are trying to fill with the pleasures of the device.”
Andy Crouch, Strong and Weak: Embracing a Life of Love, Risk and True Flourishing (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2016), 86.
W. Bradford Littlejohn, lecture manuscript, “The Vice of Curiosity in a Digital Age,” The Society of Christian Ethics, scethics.org (Jan. 9, 2016).
Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better (New York: Penguin, 2013), 83–113.
James K. A. Smith, Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2013),
The morning is when we “look back intelligently and look forward hopefully,” writes O’Donovan. And yet, “the media’s ‘new every morning’ (quickly becoming ‘new every moment’) is, one may dare to say, in flat contradiction to that daily offer of grace.
We must assign a value judgment to all information we take in. We don’t engage with digital content simply to keep up, to be informed, or to connect. Instead, we plug our ears to the noise of novelty so that we can identify meaning and embrace truth, goodness, and beauty.
Without wisdom, we foolishly get lost in the aimless now, in the explosion of novelty. Without wisdom, we foolishly get unhitched from our past and from our future.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer: “To be sure, an excessive cultivation of human relationships . . . lead[s] to a cult of the human that is disproportionate to reality. In contrast to that, what I mean here is simply that people are more important to us in life than everything else. That certainly does not mean that the world of material things and practical achievements is of less value. But what is the most beautiful book or picture or house or estate compared to my wife, my parents, my friend? Yet the only person who can speak this way is one who has really found human companionship in life. For many
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“The sobering question for the disciple is whether our attention is being drawn to something worthwhile.
We can say that FOMO is the primeval human fear, the first fear stoked in our hearts when a slithering Serpent spoke softly of a one-time opportunity that proved too good to miss. “Eat from the one forbidden tree, Eve, ‘and you will be like God.’”
We can all imagine better lives, yes, and in the words of one novelist, “sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all of the lives I’m not living.”
Every day, sinners are still animated by the empty promise of reaching some level of self-sufficiency where God will be finally rendered unnecessary.
Where God’s Word is opened, read, and embraced by the hearer, there is no eternal fear—only the promise of eternal restoration for everything missed out on in this life.
one legitimate FOMO cuts through all the other FOMOs of life: the fear of eternally missing out.
He deadened the reality of judgment with the Novocain of self-indulgence, and by it he destroyed himself eternally.
I count every real deprivation in my life—and every feared deprivation in my imagination—as no expense in light of never missing out on the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord for all eternity.
In an age when anyone with a smartphone can publish dirt on anyone else, we must know that spreading antagonistic messages online, with the intent of provoking hostility without any desire for resolution, is what the world calls “trolling” and what the New Testament calls “slander.”
James 4 is really just a restatement of the ninth commandment,13 a necessary command against lying about our neighbor inside a courtroom and a bold command that calls us, outside the courtroom, to be “more disposed to covering our neighbor’s blemishes than to publicizing them.”
We must have courage to turn away from online slander or to confront it as slander.
Most of us know firsthand what it’s like to participate in slander. The most viral emotion is anger; the most viral story is scandal.
We mourn with those who mourn. We weep with those who weep. We are a people who are easily heartbroken. But not easy to whip into a frenzy.”
Behind the safety of our phone screens, we can more easily shield ourselves “from direct contact with the pain, the fears and the joys of others, and the complexity of their personal experiences.” This doesn’t make us suppress emotion; it makes us express “contrived emotion.”
In the age of the smartphone, we are both trying to escape emotion and trying to “plug the need for contact with the drug of perpetual attention.”
This juxtaposition, by necessity, makes us broadly connected but emotionally shallow.
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 do not have “time to kill”—I have time to redeem.
“Even if we’re just casually chatting, at heart that conversation is either a way for me to keep you at a distance, or a way to build a bridge between us. Small talk can be saying: ‘I don’t want to know you, and I don’t want you to know me,’ so I’m going to keep it light, as quick as possible, and see you later. Or, small talk can be a way to say, ‘I care about you and I’d like to get to know you.’ We might start by talking about football, or the weather—but it’s heading somewhere more honest,” he says. “Our small talk is going to be judged by God for its deeper intentionality.”
to forget God is to forsake God. This spiritual plague of forgetfulness is not physical forgetfulness or mental dementia. Spiritual forgetting is sin,
All spiritual growth is rooted in remembering what Christ has done in me.
Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone (New York: Picador, 2016), 247.
Craig M. Gay, The Way of the (Modern) World: Or, Why It’s Tempting to Live as If God Doesn’t Exist (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 92, emphasis original.
C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory: And Other Addresses (New York: HarperOne, 2001), 46.
Lewis’s warning about the “dreary flickering” in front of our eyes is a loud prophetic alarm to the digital age. 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.
Aimlessly flicking through feeds and images for hours, we feel that we are in control of our devices, when we are really puppets being controlled by a lucrative industry.
We forget how to meet God, and yet we defend our smartphones, unwilling to admit that we are more concerned with controlling the mechanics of our lives than in worshiping the God whose sovereign power directs our every breath.
Apps can help me stay focused on my Bible reading plans and help me organize my prayer life, but no app can breathe life into my communion with God.
Our personal freedom from the misuse of technology is measured by our ability to thoughtfully criticize it and to limit what we expect it to do in our lives. Our bondage to technology is measured by our inability to thoughtfully criticize ourselves.
In an act of courageous self-criticism, I must ask three questions: 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?
Technophobic pride says, “God, I thank you that I’m not like this gadget addict who is distracted by his devices and feeding on the banal trivialities of the fake world.” Technophiliac pride says, “God, I thank you that I’m not like this tech despiser who is too undisciplined to manage the digital distractions of the real world.” Both views are arrogant.
For smartphone users, seasonal digital monkery will doubtlessly become an essential discipline for healthy Christian living.
What is truly essential for my phone to accomplish?
Listen to your body and listen to your soul, and use those evaluations to inform your smartphone habits. Use the negative impacts to evaluate your practices, and let the positive impacts inform your future strategies.
Paul Miller, “I’m Still Here: Back Online after a Year without the Internet,” The Verge, theverge.com (May 1, 2013).
Andrew Sherwood, “The Sweet Freedom of Ditching My Smartphone,” All Things for Good, garrettkell.com (Jan. 21, 2016).
