It happens every day. You’ve got a moment of quiet, a second to yourself. In the silence of that moment, an unbidden desire begins to well up in your soul: “Let me just check my phone.” And before you know it, you have jumped headlong into the abyss of TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram. It’s a fate we’re all too familiar with, but especially for those who can’t imagine a minute, let alone a life, apart from your phones. The saying goes that the only two things certain in life are death and taxes, but so many of us could add addiction to our screens as another inevitably.
But what if, instead of succumbing to that unbidden desire to constantly flip through our phones, we, parents and teenagers, learned to interrogate our desires instead? What if we questioned our desires, tested our time on TikTok, to see if this is really what is best for us, and, more significantly, what best honors the Lord?
So before you click, scroll, watch, subscribe, or follow, here are a few questions that we should ask to help us discern whether or not we are using social media, our phones, or any technology wisely.
Is this helping me love God with all my heart, soul, mind and strength?
And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment.
Matthew 22:37-38
In Matthew 22, Jesus famously answers the question of what the greatest commandment is by calling us to love God with all that we are. Ultimately, whatever technology or social media platform you use, however you choose to use it, should be done out of love for God, and it should be done in order to love God more.
Does your use of technology, social media, and the internet help you love God more? Does it fuel your worship of him and increase your delight in him? Or does it cultivate a love for something else? Our love of material things may be cultivated in our constant shopping and deal hunting. Our love of ease and comfort may be stoked by our endless binge watching. Our love of approval is fueled by our constant fretting over our social media presence. As you consider your digital habits, would you say that they help you to love God more, or something else more?
Is this helping me love others?
“And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
Matthew 22:39
Jesus goes on in Matthew 22 to highlight the inseparable relationship between our worship and our love. If we love God with all that we are, then we will be able to love others in sacrificial, selfless ways.
Social media and the internet can grant us amazing information about the people in our lives (sometimes shockingly so!). And the more we know and understand about people, the better we can love them. As we discover a classmate’s crazy class schedule, the passing of a friend’s grandparent, a recent family vacation, someone’s excitement about a hobby or a favorite team, we now have opportunities to love! I may see a friend on Sunday, and I have something to ask them about! I can text or call a brother or a sister and tell them that I’m thankful for what’s going on in their lives. I can pray for that person with greater specificity and care. Opportunities to love abound in the digital age.
Is this helping me steward my life well?
In the parable of the talents in Matthew 25, Jesus is represented by a master who leaves his servants in charge of affairs. The master calls them to steward his resources in his absence until he returns. And we know what happened: two of them were faithful and stewarded what was entrusted to them, and they were commended. But one servant wasn’t faithful. He essentially did nothing, he wasted his stewardship, and his reward was removed. Jesus’ point is clear: He is our master, we are his servants, and we likewise are called to steward everything we have for the glory of our master.
The sobering reality that Jesus presents us with is that your life is not your own. Your time is not your own. We have been entrusted with every minute of our lives, and we will give an account for how we spend each of them. Quite simply, is the way that you are using social media, your phone, gaming, YouTube, etc. helping you steward your life faithfully?
All of us know the danger of wasting away our time in front of our phones, our computers, and our TVs. As much as I think we can and should use these tools in productive and faithful ways, we know all too well how much of our time is stewarded poorly because we are glued to a screen.
Is this helping me find my value and identity in Christ?
Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ.
Philippians 3:8
As we scroll our social feeds and peruse the vast edges of the internet, we are not always aware that we are essentially sitting through sermons. Every post is a proclamation, every video is a viewpoint. We are constantly presented by a barrage of preachers and teachers, both secular and sacred, who are proclaiming what is true and what is valuable. And one of the most pervasive messages that we encounter online is that our value and identity are tied to what people think of us online. We love that thrill when our friends comment on our most recent post, and we hate that sinking feeling when we don’t get as much engagement as we hoped. Our own sense of value and identity can rise and fall with our follows.
In Philippians 3, do you hear where Paul finds his value and his identity? It’s in finding Jesus and being found in Jesus, knowing him and being known by him. Everything else is literal trash in comparison.
Despite what is being preached in our feeds, you are not your social media presence, you are not your engagement metrics, you are not your data, you are not your bio, you are not the sum of your followers. You could strip away all those things, get rid of every device, delete every account, unsubscribe to every service, and who you are to God would be exactly the same: his beloved child whom he purchased with the blood of his Son.
These four questions are by no means exhaustive, but they should help us navigate the digital age we live in. Our answers to these questions will naturally vary as we individually assess our lives, but if we are honest before the Lord and with ourselves, we’ll find ourselves living more faithfully. No question about it.
This article is part of our Teen Mental Health Series.
Photo Credit: Cotton Bro Studio