12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You

by Tony Reinke

Technology pushes back the results of the fall

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.

God governs every human technology

So God scattered the builders across the globe by a variety of languages (and drew all those languages back together at Pentecost when the gospel was ready for worldwide distribution10). God was not absent at Babel. He was the cosmic foreman on site, overruling human technology to serve his ultimate gospel purpose.

God created trees to serve man, but man invented crosses to destroy man. In the darkness of this most evil moment, God’s entire plan for the glorious new city took a decisive step forward. Through an evil misuse of technology, man killed the Author of life, yet God was sovereign over the entire process.

God makes himself clear to us through metaphors of technology, and we find it possible to define him, and also to distort him, by projecting metaphors of technology onto him.

Smartphone cases double as wallets because we wouldn’t dare leave the house without them.

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.

we use digital distractions to keep thoughts of eternity away.

“I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber.”

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.

Do my smartphone habits build up Christians and my local church?

We sin with our phones when we ignore our street neighbors, the strangers who share with us the same track of pavement.

Scripture describes the nature of God’s people: we are individual members of the church, and our unity amid diversity finds expression in metaphors of the multisensory and multifunctional nature of the human body.14 Keep reading, and Paul encourages holy kisses (awkward!).15 He also warns us not to neglect our gathering together,16 and focuses on two common church celebrations: baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Both sacraments are essential to our gatherings and contain multiple layers of compound embodiments. We cannot be baptized or feast at the Lord’s Table on our phones.

Also generally why meeting together is important. Ref Zoom church.

The modern-day mantra we hear so often—“I will follow Christ, but don’t bother me with organized religion”—is symptomatic of the disembodied assumptions of the digital age. In reality, the Christian life could not be more embodied.

Maybe this is a key function of church attendance in the digital age. We must withdraw from our online worlds to gather as a body in our local churches. We gather to be seen, to feel awkward, and perhaps to feel a little unheard and underappreciated, all on purpose. In obedience to the biblical command not to forsake meeting together,21 we each come as one small piece, one individual member, one body part, in order to find purpose, life, and value in union with the rest of the living body of Christ.

But whatever the cause, the literacy problem we face today is not illiteracy but aliteracy, a digital skimming that is simply an attempt to keep up with a deluge of information coming through our phones rather than slowing down and soaking up what is most important. Those who are aliterate have difficulty separating what is eternally valuable from what is transient. They skim, but not in order to identify and isolate what needs to be studied more carefully and meditatively. Because the aliterate cannot navigate this distinction, they struggle to draw relevance from written texts, especially ancient texts.

In the smartphone age, we are bombarded daily by the immediate: Facebook updates, blog posts, and breaking news stories. Yet the most important book for our soul is ancient.

Sin lies about the future. If I don’t grab this chance at glory now, sin tells me, it will be lost forever. So we point our phones at celebrities, which only points out our forgetfulness. We forget eternity. We so easily lose the faith to imagine that one day we will inherit the world and be more renowned and wealthier than Johnny Depp could ever imagine in this life.

This reminds me of PJ Smyth's thing about not feeling bad for not being able to travel the world. In the new creation, we will see it all. And it will be better than it ever was.

Second, we must learn to enjoy our present lives in faith—that is, to enjoy each moment of life without feeling compelled to “capture” it.

The goal is not to mute all smartphone media but to feed ourselves on the right media. We were created to behold, see, taste, and delight in the richness of God’s glory—and that glory often comes refracted to us through skilled artists. Our insatiable appetite for viral videos, memes, and tweets is the product of an appetite for glory that God gave us. And he created a delicious world of media marvels so that we may delight in, embrace, and cherish anything that is true, honorable, just, pure, lovely, commendable, excellent, or worthy of praise.25 This will keep us very busy marveling at Scripture, at nature, and at God’s grace in the people he created.

For Christians, humor is not an end in itself, but a means of ultimately making gospel truth more real to people watching you online (as we will see later). Humor or not, self-expression alone is never an adequate reason for Christians to communicate online. To what eternal destiny am I influencing others, and even myself?

“We are not who we think we are; we are not even who others think we are; we are who we think others think we are.”

“You put up a statue of Stalin because you want people to look at Stalin and think about Stalin. You put up a statue of George Washington to be reminded of the founding fathers. Images are made to image.” What does this mean for flesh and blood? It means 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.”

Our worship and our idolatry are always acts of surrender, writes Peter Leithart on our tendency to yield ourselves to our technology: “Idolaters of technology don’t literally consider their technologies to be divine. But many do ‘lower’ themselves before their technologies. Instead of wisely using the products of their labor and ingenuity, they ‘bow’ until the latest gimmick is ruling their lives—determining how they use their time, how they spend their money, their interests and values.”16 Submission to a created thing, such as a smartphone, is idolatry when that created tool or device determines the ends of our lives.

Digital technology must not fill up all the silent gaps of life.

Technology does this—it makes us think we can indulge in anonymous vices, even conceptually, without any future consequences. Anonymity is where sin flourishes, and anonymity is the most pervasive lie of the digital age. The clicks of our fingertips reveal the dark motives of our hearts, and every sin—every double-tap and every click—will be accounted for.

Sinclair Ferguson, “It is better to enter heaven having decided to never use the Internet again, rather than going to hell clicking on everything you desire.”

Before God, our browsing history remains a permanent record of our sin and shame—unless he shows mercy. Before his omniscient eyes, our browsing history can be washed clean only with the blood of Christ.

the life of faith is about comprehending astonishing spiritual realities, which “requires a robust eschatological imagining, a faith-based seeing which perceives what is not yet complete—our salvation—as already finished, because of our union with Christ. It is a matter of seeing what is present-partial as future-perfect.”

Every generation of the church faces its own unique struggle to focus on God and on the things not seen. The struggle is real—whether it is with the latest iPhone or the ancient household idol.

1. On the external front: Are we safeguarding ourselves and practicing smartphone self-denial? 2. On the internal front: Are we simultaneously seeking to satisfy our hearts with divine glory that is, for now, largely invisible?

Yeah, good point. We dont just aim to reduce our phone usage but to increase our worship.

Our gluttonous fascination with the failures of others long predates social media. Faultfinding is an ancient hobby, meant to prop up a façade of self-importance, even among Christians. Faultfinding destroys our love for others. Faultfinding runs contrary to Calvary. In Christ, our pardoned sins are plunged into a grave—but the slanderer keeps going at night to exhume his neighbor’s sins in order to drag those decomposing offenses back into the light of the city square.

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.

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.

The essential question we must constantly ask ourselves in the quickly evolving age of digital technology is not what can I do with my phone, but what should I do with it?

Contrary to Schaeffer’s wisdom, we buy our phones with the unquestioned assumption that anything our devices can do they should do. Or, to say this more personally, we tend to fill our devices with a lot of nonessential apps. If this sounds weird, it is, because we have been conditioned to never ask the minimalist question: What is truly essential for my phone to accomplish?