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Jesus makes it clear that our words don’t merely expose us, they define us; and not only do they define us, they can destroy us.
“Whoever guards his mouth preserves his life; he who opens wide his lips comes to ruin” (Prov. 13:3);
“The words of a wise man’s mouth win him favor, but the lips of a fool consume him” (Eccles. 10:12).
We speak a legacy.
But if we lack self-control, the unfiltered digital words we speak through our phones will be like an army spat from our mouths that will make war on us and damage our lives in every way—relationally, socially, financially, physically, and spiritually.
threefold ethical paradigm for all of Christian living: (1) kill the sinful habits of life that misuse God’s good gifts while (2) magnifying the Giver for the gifts themselves by (3) employing the gifts with missional purpose.
Kill the sinful habits of life that misuse God’s good gifts of digital media while praising the Giver for the gifts of digital media by employing digital media with missional purpose.
If everything we post on Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat, and everything we write in our text messages and emails, is produced, we ourselves are producers. So what am I producing, and, more important, why am I producing it? Before you text, tweet, or publish digital art online, honestly ask yourself: Will this ultimately glorify me or God? Will this stir or muffle healthy affections for Christ? Will this merely document that I know something that others don’t? Will this misrepresent me or is it authentic? Will this potentially breed jealousy in others? Will this fortify unity or stir up
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The more God uses you online, and the more you build relationships online with people who do not know you personally, the more persuasively you can use humor to humanize yourself and even to make your message of grace more poignant.
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).
To what eternal destiny am I influencing others, and even myself? With
“words may be given to me in opening my mouth boldly to proclaim the mystery of the gospel” (Eph. 6:19).
The virtues of our age are hyperconnectivity and multitasking, not solitude and meditation.
“Lord, let no corrupting talk come off my thumbs, but only what is good for building up, as fits the occasion, so that my social-media investment will give grace to those who see it.”
“This Boston Globe photo is perfect,”
The words and images we share on our phones influence others (as we saw in the last chapter). But the words and images we consume transform us.
“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.”
They provide astoundingly potent models for our collective awe and emulation.
Idolatry is the vain attempt to find ultimate meaning in finite things that we can craft and hold in our hands.
The object of our worship is the object of our imitation.
Submission to a created thing, such as a smartphone, is idolatry when that created tool or device determines the ends of our lives.
In the digital age, we idolize our phones when we lose the ability to ask if they help us (or hurt us) in reaching our spiritual goals. We grow so fascinated with technological glitz that we become captive to the wonderful means of our phones—their speed, organization, and efficiency—and these means themselves become sufficient ends.
Our destination remains foggy because we are fixated on the speed of our travel.
Our idolatrous impulses make us easily trapped by this worldliness, the loss of our purpose. We often don’t stand over our phones and direct them, based on our calling to image God; instead, we bow to our phones as worlds of digital possibilities, never asking the questions of our ultimate aims. When the means become our aimless habits, this is techno-idolatry.
If idols shape us, unhealthy phone patterns are bound to be reflected in our relationships. Our digital interactions with one another, which are often necessarily brief and superficial, begin to pattern all our relationships. When our relationships are shallow online, our relationships become shallow offline.
their wills captive to the felt need to respond now to what everyone else is responding to now.”
True image bearing frees us to be digitally honest about ourselves. We pray for grace to avoid the plight of Narcissus—to avoid falling in love with the image of ourselves. And we pray for grace and courage to take a more honest look at our digital reflections in the glossy screens of our phones and see where we fail to image Christ, willing to humbly admit, repent, and change when we sometimes see the reflection of a dragon looking back.
In the big picture, technology offers us many benefits, but with one major pitfall: isolation.
The smartphone is causing a social reversal: the desire to be alone in public and never alone in seclusion.
Digital technology must not fill up all the silent gaps of life.
So as Christians, we push back our phones in the morning—in order to protect our solitude so that we can know God and so that we can reflect him as his children.
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.
This sin—seeking to satisfy forbidden curiosity—is the hallmark transgression behind all others, and it is no less bold in a consumer-driven economy. We scoff at self-limited understanding of this fallen world, and yet God has said some knowledge is forbidden, because some knowing will destroy us—as seen in the insatiable curiosity that leads into deeper and deeper addiction to more and more lurid forms of pornography. Smartphones make it possible for users to help themselves to fresh forbidden fruit at any moment of any day, and thereby destroy themselves in secret.
His omnipresence shatters the mirage of anonymity that drives so many people to turn to their phones and assume they can sin and indulge without consequence.
So the stakes could not be higher when it comes to what we do with online allurements, even pervasive and free ones.
“It is better to enter heaven having decided to never use the Internet again, rather than going to hell clicking on everything you desire.”
One day, every sinner who lived in so-called “anonymous” sin will stand before God. There is no such thing as anonymity. It is only a matter of time. Every lurid detail, sleazy fantasy, lazy word, and idle click will be broadcast in the court of the Creator. All of the things done in secrecy and darkness will be brought into the light, and every intent of the heart will be disclosed.
Jesus quenches the deep thirst that consumerism cannot slake.
“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.”
I will follow you and “like” what you produce if you turn around and do the same for me. Inevitably the substance of our content can diminish, because the impetus for likes and shares is driven more by obligatory social reciprocity.5
Smartphone FOMO is a universal experience, and as you can see, Christians are not immune. When writer Andy Crouch took forty days offline—no screens and no social media—he said the experience was mostly delightful. “But I will say this: FOMO—the ‘fear of missing out’—is a real thing,” he admitted. “What I was most afraid of missing out on was not information, but affirmation. I discovered how attached, or maybe addicted, I was to the small daily dose of reassurance that other people ‘like’ me and ‘follow’ me. . . . It was sobering how strong the pull was on me.”6
This desire for personal affirmation is perhaps the smartphone’s strongest lure, and it is only amplified when we feel the sting of loneliness or suffering in our lives. At the first hint of discomfort, we instinctively grab our phones to medicate the pain with affirmation. This habit could not be more damaging.
While there are many “one anothers” in the Bible, “compare one another” is not one of them, and yet this is the direction we tilt online.
In his comments on James 4:11–12, written long before the advent of the iPhone, pastor R. Kent Hughes said: “Personally, I can think of few commands that go against commonly accepted conventions [slander] more than this. Most people think it is okay to convey negative information if it is true. We understand that lying is immoral. But is passing along damaging truth immoral? It seems almost a moral responsibility!” This is why the biblical definition of slander is countercultural to the smartphone generation. “By such reasoning, criticism behind another’s back is thought to be all right, as
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“If ‘the words of a whisperer are like delicious morsels’ then online comments are like an all-you-can-eat buffet.”21 And who can fast in the presence of a buffet?
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.
You and I exist endlessly, called to forever make God look as satisfying as he really is (see chapter 6). That means we have been given the gift of this moment for faith, obedience, and trust in Christ.
Like trying to focus on flashes of images as we scroll our social-media feeds, we microtask the fragments of life: a new fragment in an email discussion, a new fragment in a text conversation, a new fragment in a Twitter dialogue. In chasing after all these new fragments, we simply lose our place in time.
Life online is a whiplash between deep sorrow, unexpected joy, cheap laughs, profound thoughts, and dumb memes.
We grow emotionally distant with our expressions. We become content to “LOL” with our thumbs or to cry emoticon tears to express our sorrow because we cannot (and will not) take the time to genuinely invest ourselves in real tears of sorrow. We use our phones to multitask our emotions.
