This is the track I Love off Trip Lee's previous album, The Good Life, which is about to turn three years old. We're back with Trip Lee. Trip, I Love is a tongue-in-cheek song about your iPhone. Over these years since, what habits have you put in place to ensure that your phone doesn't take up too much of your life or distract you from your family or distract you from God and the spiritual disciplines?

This is an area ... Well, I wrote that song, I Love, because this was an area that I found is a struggle for me. I wrote it as if my iPhone was my girlfriend and she was constantly grabbing for my attention. That was just a very real testimony for me and the way that I was feeling and the kind of fight I had to put up in order to focus.

It can be hard for me, especially when I'm on the road a lot, which requires lots of sitting around and waiting. I've found that I've trained myself in any kind of free time to just grab my phone. So I really do have to fight about it. As far as my family life and spiritual disciplines, I don't have really any kind of magic things.

When I read the word and when I pray, I have to either leave my phone in another room or put it on do not disturb. I absolutely have to, because I found that I definitely will get distracted. It'll vibrate and then I'll kind of run to it. Or even, the reason why I have to leave it out of the room sometimes or turn the signal off is because I get rabbit trails in my brain too.

I'll convince myself I need to look something up. This is the power of Google on me, is that I never have to wonder anything. I can find out right now. Any rabbit trail that pops up in my mind, I can pop right to. I think at the end of the day, I have to know myself and know myself well enough to know how it distracts me.

I have to either have my phone off or out of the room when I'm spending time in prayer and in the word, because it will grab me. When it comes to spending time with my family, I have to do the same thing. I will admit there have been times when I've looked up and realized I was looking down at my phone for 15 minutes and my son's playing right in front of me, or realized that I'm not paying the amount of attention to my wife I should be.

It's easy to get distracted. It really just takes intentionality and knowing myself and knowing when to leave it out. It's an ongoing fight for me, something I'm not always great at. Are you more disciplined with your phone now than you were three years ago? Absolutely. I'm absolutely more disciplined now than I was three years ago.

Me and my wife always have conversations about it. We've opened up in our life the perfect freedom to at any time rebuke each other when phones grab too much with no hesitancy. I think that's been really good for us, because it's helped us to keep a good check on each other, one of the many ways I'm grateful for my wife.

I have noticed that even outside of time that I spend in the word, the more time I spend reading 10-second tweets and skimming random articles and reading pointless posts, it does affect my attention span when I then go to scripture and try to read for long distances. I've really tried to more and more train myself to have more disciplined use of my phone and not just at all times, because I think it does weaken some other muscles that I need for other good things in my life.

I'm always just increasingly trying to think really carefully about how I'm using my phone and praying God will help me to grow. Very good. Thank you, Tripp. The next song we have is a track off Tripp Lee's previous album, The Good Life. Tripp's latest album and his new book are both titled Rise.

You can get all of those resources at Amazon right now. How should we respond when the world doesn't like us? I'll ask Tripp that tomorrow. I'm your host, Tony Reinke. Thanks for listening to the Ask Pastor John podcast with guest Tripp Lee.