12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You

by Tony Reinke

The job is not to impress anybody. The job is to make much of Christ and love people. That is why we were created. So don’t waste your life grooming your mule. Make him bear the weight of a thousand works of love. Make him tread the heights with you in the mountains of worship.

This means that whatever happens on my smartphone, especially under the guise of anonymity, is the true exposé of my heart, reflected in full-color pixels back into my eyes.

the more addicted you become to your phone, the more prone you are to depression and anxiety, and the less able you are to concentrate at work and sleep at night.

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.

“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 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

From the outset of this study, we must die to the idea that a distraction-free life is possible—it is not, and it never has been.

Over time, we may lose our hearts by the erosive power of unchecked amusements.

Toward the end of my research for this book, I asked John Piper how he uses technology in fulfilling the purpose and calling of his life, and he was quick to gush over all the ways his apps and Bible software have fed his soul over the years. At the end, he looked down at his laptop, his iPad, and his iPhone, all sitting on the table, and he said, “I could almost come to tears over how precious they are to me.” Yes, they are glowing tools made mostly by men and women who are not submitted to God, he reiterated, and they are tools that open up his life to a thousand convenient temptations, but used with care and discipline, the digital tools are, he said, “a treasure chest of the glories of God.”11