(upbeat music) Back in April, we surveyed readers of DesiringGod.org. 8,000 of you responded. Thank you for the amazing amount of input you gave us. And of the total responses we received, over 50% of those who have a smartphone admit to checking their phones within minutes of waking up in a typical morning.

Among readers 18 to 29, that number is over 60%. Most of us know a pattern like this, of checking email and texts and social media on our phones immediately in the morning is not a healthy pattern, but we do it anyways, Pastor John. So why do you think grabbing for our phones in the morning is a default reaction for many of us?

And do you have a better way forward? I think there is a better course, but to help everybody understand why I think that and what that better course is, it might be helpful to start, and maybe this would be today's podcast, to start by analyzing why we are so prone to click on our phones before we do almost anything else.

So I thought of six possible reasons why we do this. And I got these reasons out of my head by analyzing John Piper's soul and his temptations. I haven't done any surveys, so if people think this is narrow, they say, "Well, yeah, it is. It comes out of me, and if people are like me, then they might get help." It seems to me that all of these six things, I'm going to say, are rooted in sin rather than rooted in the desire to serve others and savor God.

And I put it like that because I do think the great commandment does set the agenda for our mornings and our midday and our evening. We are to love God with all of our heart, soul, mind, strength when we wake up in the morning. And we are to prepare ourselves to love our neighbor, serve our neighbor as ourselves.

And given how sinful John Piper is, and I presume others are like me, very few of us wake up with our whole soul spring-loaded to love God and love people. This takes some refocusing, to put it mildly. This takes some focusing of our souls by means of the Word of God and prayer.

We have to remind ourselves about reality in the morning in order to begin to love God and love people the way we ought. So here are my six guesses for why so many of us are drawn almost addictively to consult with our phones or devices when we wake up in the morning.

And the first three I call candy motives. And the second three I call avoidance motives. So first, I think we love to immediately take a bite of candy from our phones for our novelty hunger. Call this novelty candy. We simply love to hear what's new in the world or among our friends.

What has happened since the last time we glanced at the world? Most of us like to be the first one to know something, and then we don't have to assume the humble posture of being told something that smart and savvy and on-the-ball people already know, unlike us who didn't know.

And so we want to be quick and have knowledge of what's new in the world. Then maybe we can assume the role of being the informer rather than the poor, benighted people that need to be informed about what happened. And if they were smart enough, they would have been on their social media earlier.

So there's a big ego trip, I think, in our novelty hunger. Second, I think we love to immediately take a bite out of our candy for ego hunger, our candy phone for ego hunger. What have people said about us since the last time we checked? Who has taken note of us?

Who has retweeted us or mentioned us or liked us or followed us? In our fallen sinful condition, there is an inordinate enjoyment of the human ego being attended to. Some of us are weak enough, wounded enough, fragile enough, insecure enough that any little mention of us just feels so good.

It's like somebody kissed us. Third, I think we love to immediately take a bite out of our candy for our entertainment hunger. So this is entertainment candy. There is on the internet, as we've all come to know, an endless stream of fascinating, weird, strange, wonderful, shocking, spellbinding, cute pictures and quotes and videos and stories and links.

And many of us have gotten to the point where we're almost addicted to the need of something striking and bizarre and extraordinary and amazing. So at least those three candy motives, I think, are at work as we wake up in the morning and have these cravings that we satisfy with our phones.

Then there are these three avoidance motives. In other words, these aren't positive desires for something. These are facing things in life that we simply want to avoid for another five minutes. First, I would call it the boredom avoidance. We'd wake up in the morning, we find that the day in front of us simply looks boring.

It feels boring. There's nothing exciting about coming in our day and little incentive to get out of bed. And of course, the human soul hates a vacuum. And if there's nothing significant and positive and hopeful in front of us to fill the hope-shaped place in our souls, then we're gonna use our phones, perhaps, quickly to fill that hole and avoid having to step into all that boredom.

Second, there is the responsibility avoidance. We have a role, father, mother, boss, whatever. There are burdens that are coming to us in the day that are fairly weighty. The buck stops with us. Many decisions have to be made about our children, the house, the car, the finances, dozens of other things.

Life is full of weighty responsibilities and we feel inadequate for them. And we're lying there in bed feeling fearful, and maybe even resentful that people put so much pressure on us. And we just are not attracted to this day at all. And we would very happily avoid it for another five or 10 minutes.

And there's the phone to help us do it. And the third avoidance incentive is hardship avoidance. You may be in a season of life where what you meet when you get out of bed is not just boredom and not just responsibility, but you meet mega relational conflict or issues of disease or disability in the home or friends who are against you or pain in your own body and your joints that you can barely get out of bed because it hurts so bad in the morning.

And it's just easier to lie there a little longer and the phone adds to the escape. So those, Tony, are at least six of the things I thought of that are functioning probably in my incentive when I'm inclined to go there first before something else. And so there is a better way forward and I've probably used too much time on this.

So maybe we'll have to do the better way at another time. - Yeah, let's do that tomorrow. This is Gold Pastor John. Thank you for your response here in helping us think through these issues. If you have a specific question about technology and technology habits in your life, we would love to get those questions from you.

Send them to us via email at askpastorjohn@desiringgod.org. For everything you need to know about this podcast, go to desiringgod.org/askpastorjohn. I'm your host, Tony Ranke. I'll see you tomorrow. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)