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This all means that my phone marks a place in time and space—outside of me—where I can project my relationships, my longings, and the full scope of my conscious existence. In fact, hold up the word “desire” in a mirror and it will read “erised,” the name of the magic mirror in the Harry Potter books.21 In the ancient Mirror of Erised, you see the deepest longings of your heart revealed in vivid color. Our shiny smartphone screens do the same. Too often what my phone exposes in me is not the holy desires of what I know I should want, not even what I think I want, and especially not what I want
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Second, 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.
When observing distracted souls of his own day (not unlike those of our time), he noticed that if you “take away their diversion, you will see them dried up with weariness,” because it is to be ushered into unhappiness “as soon as we are reduced to thinking of self, and have no diversion.”8 Pascal’s point is a perennial fact: the human appetite for distraction is high in every age, because distractions give us easy escape from the silence and solitude whereby we become acquainted with our finitude, our inescapable mortality, and the distance of God from all our desires, hopes, and pleasures.
said Pascal in his day: “I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber.”
The Pascal of our generation puts it this way: “We run away like conscientious little bugs, scared rabbits, dancing attendance on our machines, our slaves, our masters”—clicking, scrolling, tapping, liking, sharing . . . anything. “We think we want peace and silence and freedom and leisure, but deep down we know that this would be unendurable to us.” In fact, “we want to complexify our lives. We don’t have to, we want to. We want to be harried and hassled and busy. Unconsciously, we want the very thing we complain about. For if we had leisure, we would look at ourselves and listen to our
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“It is difficult to serve God with our heart, soul, strength and mind when we are diverted and distracted and multi-tasking everything.”20 Historian Bruce Hindmarsh adds, “Our spiritual condition today is one of spiritual ADD.”
For those with eyes to see, Christ’s return is so imminent, it potently declutters our lives of everything that is superficial and renders all of our vain distractions irrelevant. To put it another way, our battle against the encumbering distractions of this world—especially the unnecessary distractions of our phones—is a heart war we can wage only if our affections are locked firmly on the glory of Christ. The answer to our hyperkinetic digital world of diversions is the soul-calming sedative of Christ’s splendor, beheld with the mind and enjoyed by the soul.
The more distracted we are digitally, the more displaced we become spiritually. Following Paul’s words to married couples, we must make it our aim to purge our lives of all unnecessary and unhelpful distractions. Pastor Tim Keller was once asked online: Why do you think young Christian adults struggle most deeply with God as a personal reality in their lives? He replied: “Noise and distraction. It is easier to tweet than pray!”
Our typing thumbs lack empathy without living faces in front of us. It is much easier to slander an online avatar than a real-life brother.
The Christian’s challenge is to love not in tweets and texts only, but even more in deeds and physical presence.13
In the smartphone age, when our cognitive actions are separated from our bodily presence, we tend to overprioritize the relatively easy interactions in the disembodied online world and undervalue the embodied nature of the Christian faith.
In reality, we are finite. We assume that we can drive cars and read and write on our phones all at the same time, but we are weaker than our assumptions. To exist is to be walled in by physical limitations—boundaries and thresholds that limit what we can perceive and accomplish. When we always see our lives through glass, we forget that we are made of flesh and blood.
We are creatures made from mud, holding pieces of glossy glass and trying to preserve their shimmering cleanliness with state-of-the-art cases and microfiber cloths. This is impossible. We are not technology. 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. We are
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Hiding our unflattering features is very natural and easy online, but excruciatingly hard and unnatural offline, in healthy local churches and honest friendships. Self-editing is less possible in genuine face-to-face relationships. There is no Valencia filter for the real-life you. Without honestly acknowledging these online tendencies, we will continue to think local-church awkwardness is a strange feeling to be resisted rather than a precious means to reshape us.
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.
Church is a place for real encounters with others and for true self-disclosure among other sinners. In the healthy local church, I do not fear rejection. In the healthy local church, I can pursue a spiritual depth that requires agitation, frustration, and the discomfort of being with people who conform not to “my” kingdom but to God’s. The challenge for us is to “cherish corporate worship, that most counter-cultural of practices, for which no virtual substitute can be found.”22
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. Or, if you come to Christ and treasure his glory above all other glory, you will be forced to forfeit the buzz of human approval. Christians today still face real-life glory wars and real-life tensions inside the digital world. So what do we fear more, the disapproval of God or the disappearance of our online followers?
Imagine setting aside a few weeks of your summer vacation to travel on dirt roads and bump around in loud jeeps, winding deep into remote jungle villages in Central America. You risk fevers, diseases, and heatstroke, all in order to help build an orphanage for twenty destitute kids. At the end of the month, you step back, take a selfie with your handiwork in the background, and post it with pride on Facebook. Poof!—the reward is gone. Think about it. In one humble-brag selfie, the trade is made—eternal reward from God is sold for the porridge of maybe eighty likes and twelve comments of
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The digital age hurries us and shatters our concentration into a million little pieces, says ethicist Oliver O’Donovan, and now the greatest challenge to literacy is a short attention span, “caught now by one little explosion of surprise, now by another. Knowledge is never actually given to us in that form. It has to be searched for and pursued, as the marvelous poems on Wisdom at the beginning of Proverbs tell us.”
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
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We are called to suspend our chronic scrolling in order to linger over eternal truth, because the Bible is the most important book in the history of the world.
It can be said that literacy has fallen to such a degree that, for many Christians today (perhaps most Christians today), the Bible stands as the oldest, longest, and most complicated book we will ever try to read on our own. Simultaneously, every lure and temptation of the digital age is convincing us to give up difficult, sustained work for the immediate and impulsive content we can skim.
when it comes to serious literacy, the faithful church is counterculturally positioned for success, because solid expositional preaching is essentially a model of healthy, slow reading.19
“People used to do things and then post them, and the approval you gained from whatever you were putting out there was a byproduct of the actual activity. Now the anticipated approval is what’s driving the behavior or the activity, so there’s just sort of been this reversal.”18 Phones with social connections transform us—and our friends and children—into actors. That’s huge.
by outsourcing the memory of a moment to our camera, we flatten out the event into a 2-D snapshot and proceed to ignore its many other contours—such as context, meaning, smells, touch, and taste. If the cameras in our pockets mute our moments into 2-D memories, perhaps the richest memories in life are better “captured” by our full sensory awareness in the moment—then later written down in a journal. This simple practice has proven to be a rich means of preserving memories for people throughout the centuries.
Freedom in Christ is not freedom to do whatever you want; it is for sure-footed self-reflection and for avoiding the cultural bondage of sin. My freedom in Christ gives me eyes to see that not all things are helpful for me, helpful for others, or acceptable for my witness in the world.
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 unnecessary division? Will this build up or tear down? Will this heap guilt or relieve it? Will this fuel lust for sin or warn against it? Will this overpromise and instill false hopes in others?
In the gospel, we find our message and our commission in the digital age. So we pray, “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.”44
The object of our worship is the object of our imitation. God designed this inseparable pattern. What we want to become, we worship. And what we worship shapes our becoming. This is Anthropology 101.
“I have considered the costs and benefits,” he said, “and I have firmly decided that I’m not going to be held hostage to that stuff anymore.” Why not? “The chief reason is not that people are ill-tempered or dim-witted—though Lord knows one of those descriptors is accurate for a distressingly large number of social-media communications—but that so many of them are blown about by every wind of social-media doctrine, their attention swamped by the tsunamis of the moment, their wills captive to the felt need to respond now to what everyone else is responding to now.”
The smartphone is causing a social reversal: the desire to be alone in public and never alone in seclusion. We can be shielded in public and surrounded in isolation, meaning we can escape the awkwardness of human interaction on the street and the boredom of solitude in our homes. Or so we think.
And when it comes to the morning hours, Charles Spurgeon was right: “Permit not your minds to be easily distracted, or you will often have your devotion destroyed.”26 Vital to our spiritual health, we must listen and hear God’s voice saying to us, “Be still, and know that I am God” (Ps. 46:10). Every morning we must take time to stop, to be still, to know that God is God and that we are his children. 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. And we push back our phones during the day—in order to build authentic eye-to-eye trust with the people in our lives and in order to be sharpened by hard relationships. Without these two guards in place, our displacedness dominates, isolation shelters us, we can find ourselves becoming more and more lonely, and our gospel mission will eventually stall out.
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.
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.
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.13 It will be the ultimate humiliation. It will be the ultimate exposing of our hearts’ intents. It will spark the ultimate panic. It will cause the ultimate knot in the soul and the ultimate desire to run and hide
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We are all hungry, thirsty, and needy for sustenance outside of us, but we give our attention and wealth to trying to satisfy our most essential longings with the goods and the vices so easily tapped on our phones. Therapeutic materialism is a scam. We order boxes of new goods that will never heal us and we buy bags of comfort food that will never truly comfort us, all because we are blind to the free gifts of God offered in his Son, Jesus Christ, whose body and blood have been given to us to sustain our eternal life and to feed the flourishing of our unceasing joy.20 Jesus quenches the deep
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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.
It is worth reminding ourselves that the substance of our hope is not found in the latest visible spectacles on our glowing rectangles. Instead, our hearts delight in and relish a Christ we cannot yet see, a Christ we take by faith, a Christ who is so true and so real to us that we are filled in moments of this life with a periodic and expressive joy that is full of glory. Our imaginations must come alive to Christ so that we can “see” that we live in him, so that we can turn away from the visual vices grabbing our eyes, and so that we can live by faith and share a present joy as we anticipate
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To live an abundant life in this insatiable consumer society, we must plead in prayer for God-given power to turn our eyes away from the gigs of digital garbage endlessly offered in our phones and tune our ears to hear sublime echoes of an eternal enthrallment with the transcendent beauties we “see” in Scripture.
In the introduction to his landmark book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman contrasted two very different cultural warnings, those of George Orwell’s 1984 and of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Orwell argued that books would disappear by censorship; Huxley thought books would be marginalized by data torrent. 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
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Second, 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. Digital delicacies are eye-grabbing and appealing, but they lack nutrition.
FOMO is neither unique nor modern. It predates the acronym coined in 2004, it predates WiFi, and it predates our smartphones. FOMO is an ancient phobia with a history that reaches back far before we started using our opposable thumbs to text one another gossip. We can say that FOMO is the primeval human fear, the first fear stoked in our hearts when a slithering Serpent spoke softly of a one-time opportunity that proved too good to miss. “Eat from the one forbidden tree, Eve, ‘and you will be like God.’”
FOMO was Satan’s first tactic to sabotage our relationship with God, and it worked. And it still does. Behind the first sin was a desire for a “different” life. We can all imagine better lives, yes, and in the words of one novelist, “sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all of the lives I’m not living.”12 The strain of living just one life is enough, but give yourself time to think about all the other lives you could be living, and the weight of possibilities will press down and lure you to a mirage of escapism just as it did for Adam and Eve. This is FOMO.
The fear of missing out on eternal life is the one FOMO worth losing sleep over—for ourselves, our friends, our family members, and our neighbors.
But 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.
I count every real deprivation in my life—and every feared deprivation in my imagination—as no expense in light of never missing out on the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord for all eternity.
For those of us who are not “called” into a situation (the majority of us), our script calls for us to take the very countercultural posture of self-restraint, of not talking about the sins in question.5 We cover over sins, not so they can fester in silence, but so that those called to the situation can deal with those sins in the light of God’s script. In fact, as the script makes clear, the conclusions of two or three believers who are called into a particular situation bear far greater weight in God’s eyes than those of two or three hundred people filled with anger, frothing up one another
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In an age when anyone with a smartphone can publish dirt on anyone else, we must know that spreading antagonistic messages online, with the intent of provoking hostility without any desire for resolution, is what the world calls “trolling” and what the New Testament calls “slander.”
there is one uncomfortable question a Christian must ask in an entertainment-driven culture, a question that never leaves me feeling more affirmed after asking it: 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
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