Exodus 20:3, New International Version

"You shall have no other gods before me."

Does this sound familiar: the alarm clock rings and you shut it off, but then you spy on your cell phone. It is then that the pull begins — not physically magnetic, but strong, nonetheless. “Just a quick check to see if I have any text messages,” you reason to yourself. The pull grows stronger. Every tap. Each new swipe. They all lure you deeper into the black hole of social media, making empty promises. You think, “I will just quickly read that intriguing news piece on Twitter … the one with the captivating headline. Can’t start the day off right without it.” Or your clicking sends you down a trail of curiosity when you notice an old friend’s family update on Instagram or a Facebook ad for a product that promises to make your life more organized or exciting. You glance at the top of your phone and notice the time. “Well, that’s twenty-three minutes I will never get back!” Now, running late, you must let go of any hopes you had for carving out a slice of your morning to meet with God. Ouch.

Psalm 42:2 (NIV) states, “My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When can I go and meet with God?"

My soul thirsts for God. We might read that as a wish — we wish we had that kind of longing for the Lord. However, if read in a straightforward manner, we can take it as fact: the soul of a believer always thirsts for God. Sadly, we often try to quench that dryness with trivial pursuits like phone tapping, yet we still experience a parched soul.

The last phrase of the scripture asks a question: "When can I go meet with God?" Well, when?

Meeting with the Lord doesn’t have to be done in a legalistic manner. Do what works for you. No matter what works best for you, make time today to go meet with God. Ghost your phone. Turn it back on only when it is truly needed. Your relationship with Jesus will grow stronger because of it, and your cell phone won’t even notice you are gone.

For years, a cell phone has always been within our reach. It is there to wake us up in the morning, there to play at our music library, there to keep our calendar, there to capture our life in pics and videos, and there as our ever-present portal to Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

Our cell phone is such an integral part of our daily lives, we rarely even think about it. What is it doing to our minds as we live with this constant distraction? We are now living in a virtual universe that can take all of the time we have. So, what happens to us when we are in constant motion, when we are addicted to constant visual stimulation? What happens to us? What happens to our relationship with the Lord?

We become like what we behold. To worship an idol is to become like the idol; to worship Christ is to become like Christ. What we love to behold is what we worship. What we spend our time beholding shapes our hearts and mold us into the people we are. This spiritual truth is frightening, but it raises the following questions. What happens to our soul when we spend so much time on the glowing screens of our phones? How have we changed? How are we conformed? How are our spiritual lives affected when we seek our cell phones above the Lord?

We are in danger of becoming shallow with our relationships, both with people and with the Lord. Our digital interactions with one another, which are often necessarily brief, begin to form the pattern in all of our relationships. When we begin to become brief in our interactions with people, we can become used to that. All of our personal interactions take the same shape. When we hang out with friends, we offer Tweet-like responses in a brief conversation with little meaning. The same could spill over into our prayer life if that's the kind of conversation we are used to. Our prayers can become brief, like text messages, and lack spiritual meaning.