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Facebook addicts, unlike compulsive drug abusers, “have the ability to control their behavior, but they don’t have the motivation to control this behavior because they don’t see the consequences to be that severe.”
we use digital distractions to keep work away. Facebook is a way of escape from our vocational pressures. We procrastinate around hard things: work deadlines, tough conversations, laundry piles, and school projects and papers.
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.
Instead, we retreat into our phones—projecting our scorn for complex situations or for boring people. In both cases, when we grab our phones, we air our sense of superiority to others—often without knowing it.
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.
Staring at the ceilings of our quiet bedrooms, with only our thoughts about ourselves, reality, and God, is unbearable. “Hence it comes that men so much love noise and stir; hence it comes that the prison is so horrible a punishment; hence it comes that the pleasure of solitude is a thing incomprehensible.”
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 hearts and see the great gaping hole in our hearts and be terrified, because that hole is so big that nothing but God can fill it.”12
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.
We sin with our phones when we ignore our street neighbors, the strangers who share with us the same track of pavement.
“Though I have much to write to you, I would rather not use paper and ink [modern technology for John]. Instead I hope to come to you and talk face to face, so that our joy may be complete” (2 John 12).
When we remove part of our embodied personhood, misunderstandings become easier. When we trade our physical arms that cross, eyes that linger, ears that detect sarcasm, and vocal tones that imply patience for the two-dimensional avatar, we invite misunderstanding and tension.
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.
Joy is a precious emotion of our integrated existence. Joy brings our attention, our minds, and our flesh and blood together into face-to-face fellowship—eyeball-to-eyeball love.
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.
This feeling of awkwardness, this leaving the safety of our online friendships, this mingling with people we don’t know or understand in our local churches is incredibly valuable for our souls. Church is a place for real encounters with others and for true self-disclosure among other sinners.
the itch for human approval ultimately renders faith pointless.24 Why? Because faith is the act of being satisfied with Christ,
“In a solid, God-chosen relationship with Jesus, man’s disapproval cannot hurt you and man’s approval cannot satisfy you. Therefore, to fear the one and crave the other is sheer folly.”25 It is unbelief.
“look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.”
Positively, to express Christ-honoring art means that everything we create, share, and spread on our phones—paintings, music, photography, poems, and books—can amplify God’s natural and special revelation. So we aim to produce art that reflects God’s glory in undiminished splendor.
we must humbly admit that we are targets of digital megacorporations that can make us into restless consumers with strategic intermediated content.
But we must see that we are being conditioned to turn to our phones when we want to be amazed and wowed, and in turn, we are being milked for corporate profit.
we must learn to enjoy our present lives in faith—that is, to enjoy each moment of life without feeling compelled to “capture” it.
feed ourselves on the right media.
“Compulsive social-media habits are a bad trade: your present moment in exchange for an endless series of someone else’s past moments.”
Christian leaders and artists are called to broadcast truth all over the place, prayerfully hoping some of it will take root in hearts.
“All things are lawful,”
“But not all things are helpful,”
Ends: Do my art and social media point others toward God? Influence: Do my art and social media serve and build up my audience? Servitude: Do my art and social media imprison me into an unhealthy bondage to my medium?
If we are self-controlled, the words we use to build others will also build us.
The desire to imitate the glory we see in others is one of the most obvious (and most profound) psychological realities that advertising targets.
“You put up a statue of Stalin because you want people to look at Stalin and think about Stalin. You put up a statue of George Washington to be reminded of the founding fathers. Images are made to image.” What does this mean for flesh and blood? It means God “created little images of himself so that they would talk and act and feel in a way that reveals the way God is. So people would look at the way you behave, look at the way you think, look at the way you feel, and say, ‘God must be great, God must be real.’ That is why you exist.”
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.
“For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience” (Rom. 8:24–25).
In Christ, whenever we weigh the importance of anything in our lives, we weigh what is seen on one side, but it is outweighed by “an eternal weight of glory” on the other side.
When we live for what is visible and ignore what is invisible, we illustrate the definition of faithlessness. True faith lives for what is invisible and undisclosed.
“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.
But in contrast to this immediacy, and the breaking news of the moment, “the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning” (Lam. 3:22–23). The morning is when we “look back intelligently and look forward hopefully,” writes O’Donovan. And yet, “the media’s ‘new every morning’ (quickly becoming ‘new every moment’) is, one may dare to say, in flat contradiction to that daily offer of grace. It serves rather to fix our perception upon the momentary now, preventing retrospection, discouraging deliberation, holding us spellbound in a
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Lacking self-control over the volume of our data ingestion introduces burdens that our physical bodies cannot carry.
we must embrace our freedom in Christ, as we step back from the onslaught of online publishing and the proliferation of digital sages. By grace, we are free to close our news sources, close our life-hacking apps, and power down our phones in order to simply feast in the presence of friends and enjoy our spouses and families in the mystery, majesty, and “thickness” of human existence.
Foresight is blurry, but hindsight is 20/20, and that means we remember our past misses with crystal clarity.
Yes, we have blood on our hands—because we both carry and spread this vicious FOMO disease.
“status anxiety (what will people think of me?), and disconnection anxiety (‘I connect, therefore I am’).”
Disciples who are awake to reality have their attention fixed on the only breaking news that ultimately matters, namely, the news that the kingdom of God has broken into our world in Jesus Christ. This breaking news demands our sustained attention, and a wide-awake imagination.”
At the first hint of discomfort, we instinctively grab our phones to medicate the pain with affirmation. This habit could not be more damaging.
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.’”
By insisting that we, God’s creatures, are missing out, the lies of FOMO make us easy targets for advertisers; sharpen the sting of our quarterlife and midlife crises; and sour the elderly years, when the reality of cultural “missing out” becomes most obvious.
contrasts between eternal loss and eternal glory.
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.
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.
In a chapter loaded with wisdom on how Christians are to handle the dirt they have on one another, we find slander: a sin that “violates the early Christian commandment because of its uncharitableness, rather than its falsity.”8 That’s the key. Tim Keller and David Powlison define slander as “not necessarily a false report, just an ‘against-report.’ The intent is to belittle another. To pour out contempt. To mock. To hurt. To harm. To destroy. To rejoice in purported evil.”
