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1. Unchecked distractions that blind souls from God.
These are the most dangerous distractions: worldly worries, anxieties, and pursuits of wealth, self-centered concerns with personal security that suffocate the soul by snatching away seeds of truth, choking off the fruit of the gospel, and rendering its hope irrelevant. ...
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2. Unchecked distractions that close off comm...
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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. Yet he seeks us; he seeks our undivided attention.25
3. Unchecked distractions that mute the urgency of God.
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.
The death and resurrection of Christ has marked the beginning of the end, the runoff, the moment when a soccer match clock exceeds ninety minutes and keeps ticking for some amount of unknown stoppage time, soon to finally expire. The clock on God’s redemptive timeline is past ninety minutes, and ticking.
we must die to the idea that a distraction-free life is possible—it is not, and it never has been. The holy life is piously complex, meaning we must learn how to apply distraction management in every situation.
The more distracted we are digitally, the more displaced we become spiritually.
As in every age, God calls his children to stop, study what captures their attention in this world, weigh the consequences, and fight for undistracted hearts before him. To that end, here are ten diagnostic questions we can ask ourselves in the digital age:
1. Do my smartphone habits expose an underlying addiction to untimely amusements? 2. Do my smartphone habits reveal a compulsive desire to be seen and affirmed? 3. Do my smartphone habits distract me from genuine communion with God? 4. Do my smartphone habits provide an easy escape from sobered thinking about my death, the return of Christ, and eternal realities? 5. Do my smartphone habits preoccupy me with the pursuit of worldly success?
6. Do my smartphone habits mute the sporadic leading of God’s Spirit in my life? 7. Do my smartphone habits preoccupy me with dating and romance? 8. Do my smartphone habits build up Christians and my local church? 9. Do my smartphone habits center on what is necessary to me and beneficial to others? 10. Do my smartphone hab...
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Facebook becomes a safe and sanitized room where I can watch the ups and downs of others as an anonymous spectator, with no compulsive impulse to respond and care in any meaningful way. And as I do, I become more and more blind to the flesh and blood around me.
Texting and driving is such a commonplace habit, the stats are now canonical. Talking on the phone while driving a vehicle makes you four times more likely to get into an accident, but texting while driving makes your chance of a crash twenty-three times more likely. Assuming a driver never looks up in the average time it takes to send a text (4.6 seconds), at fifty-five miles per hour, he drives blindly the length of a football field. Texting and driving is so idiotic, forty-six of fifty states have banned it.
We are more likely to bubble with rage toward others screen to screen instead of face to face, and researchers call this phenomenon “anonymous anger.”
If anger is the viral emotion of online disembodiment, then joy is the Christian emotion of embodied fellowship,
All writing that is remote—like the ancient letter, the modern text message, or this book—is more like ghost-to-ghost communication than person-to-person interaction. Yes, there is something of us in written words, but not everything in true fellowship can be typed out on phone screens and sent at the speed of light through fiber-optic cables.
we tend to overprioritize the relatively easy interactions in the disembodied online world and undervalue the embodied nature of the Christian faith.
The metaphorical act of my baptism symbolized what is possible only by the physical reality of Christ, and my spiritual union with him guarantees my physical future.17
Every time we reenact Jesus’s pattern, we remember Christ (now unseen) and proclaim his death until he returns (then seen)—affirming that he is as real as the cup and bread in our hands.
When we always see our lives through glass, we forget that we are made of flesh and blood.
We are not smooth, clean, and indestructible like man-made crystal. No. We are easily scratched. We are born broken. We are dust and water, chemicals and germs, and everywhere we go we leave oily blots on everything we touch. It is almost impossible to miss the juxtaposed parody between our dusty selves and glistening pixels. We smudge technology because we are not machines.
historian Daniel Boorstin warned us about fifty-six years ago. He predicted that after the arrival of “the Graphic Revolution,” which exploded the ability to mass produce and edit images of people in film and in print (and now online), our heroes would be replaced by celebrities.9
Heroes are men and women of character, known for acts of valor and celebrated long after their deaths. Time, not image, makes heroes.
Every culture has its heroes, because we want to know that humanity is potentially great.
The dominance of images in the media (and now a hyperabundance of digital images) meant that waves of celebrities could be created, rejected, and replaced. We turned to celebrities who were “fabricated on purpose to satisfy our exaggerated expectations of human greatness.” Unlike the hero, the celebrity is newsworthy simply for his visible charm, his spectacle of glamour, writes Boorstin. In fact, “anyone can become a celebrity if only he can get into the news and stay there.”
in the online world, we can break free from our physical limitations (if we want to).
The physical defects, limitations, and awkwardnesses that we are born with, or that we now live with, can all be dissolved and glossed over online.
Second, in the online world, we can separate ourselves from people who don’t think like us and gravitate toward people who do.
In effect, our online communities “render invisible the majority of the human race.”16
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.
The approval and affirmation we seek online is absurd because it misunderstands how approval works in God’s economy.
First, the itch for human approval ultimately renders faith pointless.
“In a solid, God-chosen relationship with Jesus, man’s disapproval cannot hurt you and man’s approval cannot satisfy you.
Second, the test of authenticity for our lives is not determined by the applause of man, but by the approval of God.26
The sad truth is that many of us are addicted to our phones because we crave immediate approval and affirmation.
The buzz of social approval has conditioned us to feed on “regular micro-bursts of validation given by every like, favorite, retweet, or link.”31 This new physiological conditioning means that our lives become more dependent on the moment-by-moment approval of others. 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.
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.
corporations are refining the art of attention capturing with a growing field of technological expertise called “captology,” a nickname for “computers as persuasive technology.” Captologists study ways of using smartphones to capture attention and to adjust behavior patterns.
what I see now has been tailored to what I liked in the past, creating a custom-built vortex of content, a swirl of new objects, filling my screen as I flick and scroll, all with the aim of keeping my eyes glued to the screen by feeding very specific appetite patterns of my craving heart and ultimately reinforcing my smartphone obsession.
“If you want to internalize a piece of knowledge, you’ve got to linger over it.”6
“Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words,” laments writer Nicholas Carr. “Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”8
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.
“The more we take refuge in distraction, the more habituated we become to mere stimulation and the more desensitized to delight. We lose our capacity to stop and ponder something deeply, to admire something beautiful for its own sake, to lose ourselves in the passion for a game, a story, or a person.”12
“Our capacity for deep enjoyment thus destroyed, we quickly lose the capacity to enjoy the One who demands the most sustained attention of all.”13
This book gives us life, and it moves and pushes God’s redemptive plan forward. In fact, “the whole purpose of God for the universe stands or falls on the book. If the book fails, everything fails.”14
to skim the Bible is to misread it, points out New Testament theologian Daniel Doriani in three points.
First, the aim of the Bible is discipleship, to continually form and re-form our thinking, our habits, and our behaviors. This dynamic process never ends, and thus our reading never e...
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Second, the Bible’s Author warns us over and over again that the book will be rejected, distorted, or misunderstood in various ways. Stern internal warnings caution us to slow down and...
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Third, “the Bible’s Author and authors have chosen to reach their goals not by straightforward lecture, proceeding proposition by proposition, but through songs and poems, dark sayings, and half-interpreted stories.” In other words, “We readers don’t take dictation; we swim in metaphor.”16 And to app...
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