12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You Quotes

“The more we take refuge in distraction, the more habituated we become to mere stimulation and the more desensitized to delight. We lose our capacity to stop and ponder something deeply, to admire something beautiful for its own sake, to lose ourselves in the passion for a game, a story, or a person.”
― Tony Reinke, 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You

“Before You post

*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?”
― Tony Reinke, 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You

“The more distracted we are digitally, the more displaced we become spiritually.”
― Tony Reinke, 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You

“Life online is a whiplash between deep sorrow, unexpected joy, cheap laughs, profound thoughts, and dumb memes.”
― Tony Reinke, 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You

“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.”
― Tony Reinke, 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You

“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.”
― Tony Reinke, 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You

“Assuming a driver never looks up in the average time it takes to send a text (4.6 seconds), at fifty-five miles per hour, he drives blindly the length of a football field. Texting”
― Tony Reinke, 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You

“The sad truth is that many of us are addicted to our phones because we crave immediate approval and affirmation. The fear we feel in our hearts when we are engaged online is the impulse that drives our "highly selective self-representations." We want to be loved and accepted by others, so we wash away our scars and defects. When we put this scrubbed-down representation of ourselves online, we tabulate the human approval in a commodity index of likes and shares. We post an image, then watch the immediate response. We refresh. We watch the stats climb-or stall. We gauge the immediate responses from friends, family members, and strangers. Did what we posted gain the immediate approval of others? We know within minutes. Even the promise of religious approval and the affirmations of other Christians is a gravitational pull that draws us toward our phones.”
― Tony Reinke, 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You

“The question of this book is simple: What is the best use of my smartphone in the flourishing of my life? To that end, my aim is to avoid both extremes: the utopian optimism of the technophiliac and the dystopian pessimistic of the technophobe.”
― Tony Reinke, 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You

“The statistics show that Christians who struggle to read books are struggling to break free from poor smartphone habits as one root cause.”
― Tony Reinke, 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You

“The Christian’s challenge is to love not in tweets and texts only, but even more in deeds and physical presence.”
― Tony Reinke, 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You

“Facebook becomes a safe and sanitized room where I can watch the ups and downs of others as an anonymous spectator, with no compulsive impulse to respond and care in any meaningful way.”
― Tony Reinke, 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You

“If you follow Christ, the world will unfollow you.”
― Tony Reinke, 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You

“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.”
― Tony Reinke, 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You

“Smartphones and social media were supposed to cure the epidemic of loneliness. We would all be connected—all together, all the time—and none of us would ever feel alone. But the harsh truth is that we can always be lonely, even in a crowd—​​​and now, even more so, in a digital crowd.”
― Tony Reinke, 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You

“As a result, we suffer from Neomania - an addition to anything new within the last five minutes.”
― Tony Reinke, 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You

“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 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”
― Tony Reinke, 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You

“Every time we open our Bibles, our souls are being fed through centuries of technological advancement.”
― Tony Reinke, 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You

“Remembering is a key verb of the Christian life. We recall our past, we correct our nearsightedness, we take heart, we regain mental strength, awe find peace in the eternal Word. Remembering is one of the key spiritual disciplines we must guard with vigilance amid the mind-fragmenting and past-forgetting temptations of the digital age.”
― Tony Reinke, 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You

“But if people see us bored with God, absorbed with ourselves, and conformed to worldly celebrities, they will not see the image of Jesus reflected in”
― Tony Reinke, 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You

“Habits unnecessary to our calling. A hamster wheel of what will never satisfy our souls. Lewis's warning about the “dreary flickering” in front of our eyes is a loud prophetic alarm to the digital age. We are always busy, but always distracted—diabolically lured away from what is truly essential and truly gratifying. Led by our unchecked digital appetites, we manage to transgress both commands that promise to bring focus to our lives. We fail to enjoy God. We fail to love our neighbor.”
― Tony Reinke, 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You

“Time, not image, makes Heroes”
― Tony Reinke, 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You

“When you had your smartphone you were a walking vending-machine of whatever you'd ingested that day', she told him. 'It was difficult to talk about deeper things that mattered, because you were constantly distracted by Internet litter. You're now able to focus and give necessary attention to deeper issues.”
― Tony Reinke, 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You

“we must die to the idea that a distraction-free life is possible—it is not, and it never has been. The holy life is piously complex, meaning we must learn how to apply distraction management in every situation.”
― Tony Reinke, 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You

“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 beauty of Christ calms us and roots our deepest longings in eternal hopes that are far beyond what our smartphones can ever hope to deliver.”
― Tony Reinke, 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You

“If God’s people are bored with God, they are really bad images. God is not unhappy about himself. He is infinitely excited about his own glory.”
― Tony Reinke, 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You

“ways in which our smartphones are changing us and undermining our spiritual health: Our phones amplify our addiction to distractions (chapter 1) and thereby splinter our perception of our place in time (12). Our phones push us to evade the limits of embodiment (2) and thereby cause us to treat one another harshly (11). Our phones feed our craving for immediate approval (3) and promise to hedge against our fear of missing out (10). Our phones undermine key literary skills (4) and, because of our lack of discipline, make it increasingly difficult for us to identify ultimate meaning (9). Our phones offer us a buffet of produced media (5) and tempt us to indulge in visual vices (8). Our phones overtake and distort our identity (6) and tempt us toward unhealthy isolation and loneliness (7). But it’s not just about warnings. Along the way, I have also attempted to commend twelve life disciplines we need to preserve our spiritual health in the smartphone age: We minimize unnecessary distractions in life to hear from God (chapter 1) and to find our place in God’s unfolding history (12). We embrace our flesh-and-blood embodiment (2) and handle one another with grace and gentleness (11). We aim at God’s ultimate approval (3) and find that, in Christ, we have no ultimate regrets to fear (10). We treasure the gift of literacy (4) and prioritize God’s Word (9). We listen to God’s voice in creation (5) and find a fountain of delight in the unseen Christ (8). We treasure Christ to be molded into his image (6) and seek to serve the legitimate needs of our neighbors (7).”
― Tony Reinke, 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You

“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.”
― Tony Reinke, 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You

“Our lives are consolidated on our phones: our calendars, our cameras, our pictures, our work, our news, our weather, our email, our shopping - all of it can be managed with state-of-the-art apps in powerful little devices we carry everywhere. Even the GPS app on my phone, which guided me to a new coffee shop today, possesses thirty thousand times the processing speed of the seventy-pound onboard navigational computer that guided Apollo 11 to the surface of the moon.”
― Tony Reinke, 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You

“Smartphones are dangerous, like marriage and music and fine cuisine—​​​or anything else that can become an idol.”
― Tony Reinke, 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You