Has My Phone Become My Idol? Three Diagnostic Questions
00:00:00.000 | This is Scott Anderson, CEO for Desiring God.
00:00:02.840 | You and other friends of Desiring God make possible the work of this ministry, including this podcast.
00:00:09.420 | Thanks for your part in helping us freely share the truth that God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him.
00:00:17.880 | This week we are joined on the Ask Pastor John podcast with Dr.
00:00:26.940 | Richard Lentz, who is the vice president for academic affairs and the dean of the main campus at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary,
00:00:33.980 | just a short drive north of Boston. And Dr.
00:00:37.200 | Lentz is also the author of a book that releases this winter titled "Identity and Idolatry,
00:00:41.880 | the Image of God and its Inversion," which is published in Don Carson's Silver Series, New Studies in Biblical Theology.
00:00:49.620 | So implicitly, Dr.
00:00:52.180 | Lentz, where we ended yesterday is that an idol is something that is not God and something that we cannot imagine
00:00:58.440 | living without. Is that right? That's exactly right. And it
00:01:03.060 | often points at and beyond itself to deeper needs you're trying to gain,
00:01:10.280 | deeper significance and senses of security
00:01:14.040 | that are there. And so often
00:01:18.080 | significance and
00:01:20.420 | safety are the two
00:01:22.420 | dilemmas we face with idols, idols in every age.
00:01:26.920 | How do we gain security, safety in a world which threatens us, and it threatens us in different ways, and how do we gain
00:01:34.060 | significance? And I think the smartphone, just to use that again as the anecdote,
00:01:39.200 | tells us that we are significant if we are connected to enough other people's lives,
00:01:44.640 | but what we find is being connected to so many different people's lives
00:01:50.080 | we gain actually a greater sense of insignificance, and our safety is
00:01:54.600 | apparently or allegedly granted here because we are
00:02:00.400 | connected with lots of other people. That's our safety net, if you will. And when you pull that out,
00:02:07.540 | you begin to say to yourself, "How will I be granted
00:02:12.160 | security or safety without this?" And that's this dynamic of feeling a loss
00:02:19.120 | when you take the idol out. Yeah, that's a key definition.
00:02:22.200 | Yesterday I mentioned a study that says that the average college student uses their phone nine hours a day.
00:02:27.760 | So one of these college students comes up to you and wants to know how he or she can tell if their smartphone is an idol.
00:02:35.280 | What are the diagnostic tests, the questions that you would put forward? Right, right. A couple of them.
00:02:41.760 | I mean, the immediate thing is what would you lose if you didn't have it? Second would be what role does it play?
00:02:48.560 | Honestly. And third, how big of a presence is it? What's its function in your life?
00:02:55.280 | And so again, those are questions that are
00:02:57.480 | sometimes hard to answer by yourself. And so
00:03:01.600 | even the questions of idolatry and identity are communal questions and are best answered
00:03:09.520 | in a community. And surely
00:03:13.600 | the fundamental community is with God. But here with the smartphone,
00:03:18.280 | often the dilemma is that none of those
00:03:22.280 | conversations
00:03:24.760 | appear to be very
00:03:26.760 | thick or rich or deep or wide.
00:03:29.920 | That we have
00:03:33.160 | condensed the conversation to a
00:03:36.400 | you know, a small tweet, a short text. And
00:03:42.200 | so we never get beyond
00:03:44.400 | the temporary, the superficial, the
00:03:48.480 | impression. And it's an extension of the television age when we lived on the management of
00:03:57.040 | impressions. And so that has simply speeded up and gained
00:04:02.800 | momentum in our time. And so again being cautious that somehow there was a
00:04:10.720 | golden age back in the 1950s when
00:04:13.760 | we all sat around watching healthy television and had really good relationships.
00:04:20.360 | I don't believe that for a second. It's in many ways an extension of that age that
00:04:25.920 | encourages us like a
00:04:28.680 | sleeping pill simply to accept the artificial and the superficial as normal. And that's the
00:04:36.360 | that's the key to ask the teenager or the person that lives on Facebook constantly.
00:04:42.520 | What are the moments in life when you ask hard questions? When you
00:04:48.800 | think outside of the ordinary superficial details of life? And
00:04:54.760 | almost for sure not going to be because of a text message or because of a tweet.
00:05:02.000 | Those are good diagnostic questions for us to ask about our phones and really any potential idol in our lives. Thank you, Dr.
00:05:09.040 | Lentz. And one paradox of the digital age is that we are all connected together.
00:05:14.080 | We're all linked via the web and yet loneliness does not go away.
00:05:19.040 | So how are our relationships potentially being thinned out in the digital age?
00:05:24.720 | This is a perplexing question for everyone and I want to ask you that tomorrow, Dr. Lentz.
00:05:29.680 | Thanks for joining us on the Ask Dr. Jon podcast with guest Dr. Richard Lentz. We'll see you tomorrow.
00:05:34.440 | [BLANK_AUDIO]