12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You

by Tony Reinke

So here’s an exercise to help ground our self-perception. Once a day, set your phone down for a moment, hold out your right hand, palm out and fingers to the sky, and imagine the timeline of history reaching a mile to your left and an eternity to your right. Your time on earth intersects roughly the width of your hand (give or take).18 Nothing puts social media and smartphone habits into context like the blunt reality of our mortality. Let it sink in a bit. Feel the brevity of life, and it will make you fully alive.19

But God is the sovereign King who will not bow to our gadget mastery. 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.

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?

For smartphone users, seasonal digital monkery will doubtlessly become an essential discipline for healthy Christian living.

Even something as simple as pulling out your smartphone in a crowd is “the new yawn”—everyone else around you will feel the immediate pull and lure to check their own phones.

The key to balancing ourselves in the smartphone age is awareness. Digital technology is most useful to us when we limit its reach into our lives.

Christ reigns sovereignly over all technology, but all technology has not yet been subjected to his moral will.12 When that day comes, God will unveil his holy city before our eyes. This city will be free of all sin, and it will be full of innovations that seem almost unimaginable now.