12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You

by Tony Reinke

the Christian priority on the invisible does not render the visible creation worthless.19 It means that what we see is given its fullest meaning by what we cannot see. The physical gifts we enjoy seemingly are “thickened” by our capacity to see and treasure the unseen Giver.

The gospel of consumerism says: everything you could possibly imagine for your earthly happiness and comfort is available in a dozen options, sizes, colors, and price points. The gospel of Jesus Christ says: everything you could possibly need for your supreme joy and eternal comfort is now invisible to the human eye.

the life of faith is about comprehending the whole when we can only see a fraction. This is the work of imagination.

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.

The average output of email and social-media text is estimated at 3.6 trillion words, or about thirty-six million books—typed out every day! In comparison, the Library of Congress holds thirty-five million books.1

Postman summarizes the contrast well. “Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much information that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared that the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.”2 Huxley seems to have won.

the bigger challenge for us in the digital age is not the mental pollution of information overload, but the nutritional deficiency of the content that has been engineered, like modern snacks, to trigger our appetites. Online information is increasingly hyperpalatable, akin to alluring junk food. Breaking news, tabloid gossip, viral memes, and the latest controversies in sports, politics, and entertainment all draw us to our phones as if they were deep-fried Twinkies held out on sticks at the state fair.

Alastair Roberts, our phones make it possible to share and consume a steady diet of information that is pointless beyond making us feel connected to others. This is phatic communication—trivial knowledge that is shared to maintain some sort of social bond, but not to convey ideas

Social media and mobile web access on our phones all drive the immediacy of events around the world into our lives. As a result, we suffer from neomania, an addiction to anything new within the last five minutes.

“I think more than ever before Christians are news junkies,” counselor Paul Tripp told me. “More than ever before, through social media and websites and a 24-hour news cycle, we are aware of what is happening around us. And I think for many of us this has raised our fears.”4

We can boil down our core online fears to two anxieties, says theologian Kevin Vanhoozer: “status anxiety (what will people think of me?), and disconnection anxiety (‘I connect, therefore I am’).” But connected to what, and at what cost? “I’m afraid that, for many, the answer too often is: connected to the empire of the entertainment-industry complex.

if you are in Christ, the sting of missing out is eternally removed. FOMO-plagued sinners embrace the gospel of Jesus Christ, and he promises us no eternal loss. All that we lose will be found in him. All that we miss will be summed up in him. Eternity will make up for every other pinch and loss that we suffer in this momentary life. The doctrine of heaven proves it. The new creation is the restoration of everything broken by sin in this life; the reparation of everything we lose in this world; the reimbursement of everything we miss out on in our social-media feeds.

Charles Spurgeon: “The easiest work in the world is to find fault.”19

Christians, of all people, should be most vigilant not to unnecessarily shovel one another’s dirt into public view.29

“Our culture is looking for something to be angry, frustrated, and outraged about,” pastor Matt Chandler said about Facebook discussions. “We thrive on pessimism. We want to be acutely aware of the brokenness of things and others, and that reveals something about us—God help us. But in light of this, should not Christians be annoyingly optimistic?

am I entitled to spend hours every month simply browsing odd curiosities?

I do not have “time to kill”—I have time to redeem.

Yet smartphone abuse causes us to squander precious hours and almost erases us from our place in time in three different ways.

First, and most commonly, we simply lose ...

Second, it is of the nature of technology to dislocate us historically.

Third, and most significant, if we use our phones to find sin, we cut ourselves off from God’s timeline.

a “careless word” is literally a word “uttered without any thought of the effect it will have on other people.”14 We must be willing to put a stop to our lazy, thoughtless digital chitchat texts, humorous tweets, and laughable Facebook posts.

Is my digital chitchat aimed or is it aimless; thoughtful or thoughtless; strategic for the eternal good of others or wasted on self-expression?

The Word calls us to remember in order to obey, as the apostle Peter explained when he said that our aim is Christian maturity that grows from faith to goodness, from knowledge to self-control, from perseverance to godliness, and finally from mutual affection to love. “For whoever lacks these qualities is so nearsighted that he is blind, having forgotten that he was cleansed from his former sins” (2 Pet. 1:9). All spiritual growth is rooted in remembering what Christ has done in me.

“I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked.”2 This “Nothing” strategy is “very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years, not in sweet sins, but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them . . . or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off.”3

I am often reminded that my phone may be a lot of things, but it is not a toy. The magician and the wielder of a smartphone are close cousins,6 and this is because, suggests literary critic Alan Jacobs, our modern technology offers us a bewitching power not unlike the magic in the Harry Potter fantasy series: “Often fun, often surprising and exciting, but also always potentially dangerous. . . . The technocrats of this world hold in their hands powers almost infinitely greater than those of Albus Dumbledore and Voldemort.”7 Into our hands are placed these wands, these smartphones, these powers of idolatry, freighted with redemptive expectations.

We talk more about God than we talk to him. Our hearts are more interested in following empty patterns of worship than encountering the Spirit. Our worship on Sunday seems flat, but our week is filled with an endless quest for Christian advice to fix what we know is wrong. We seek a mechanical relationship with God, searching for new techniques to fill the spiritual void in our lives. Signs such as these reveal how technology degrades our priorities. But worship calls for redirection in our lives.

Francis Schaeffer, who said: “Christians have two boundary conditions: (1) what men can do, and (2) what men should do. Modern man does not have the latter boundary.”15

Our greatest need in the digital age is to behold the glory of the unseen Christ in the faint blue glow of our pixelated Bibles, by faith.15