Tony Reinke Quotes

• “If we neglect Scripture in order to read only other books, we not only cut ourselves from the divine umbilical cord that feeds our souls, we also cut ourselves from the truth that makes it possible for us to benefit from the truth, goodness, and beauty in the books that we read.”

  Tony Reinke

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• “The more we take refuge in distraction, the more habituated we become to mere stimulation and the more desensitized to delight. We lose our capacity to stop and ponder something deeply, to admire something beautiful for its own sake, to lose ourselves in the passion for a game, a story, or a person.”

  Tony Reinke

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• “Before You post
  
  *Will this ultimately glorify me or God?
  *Will this stir or muffle healthy affections for Christ?
  *Will this merely document that I know something that others don’t?
  *Will this misrepresent me or is it authentic?
  *Will this potentially breed jealousy in others?
  *Will this fortify unity or stir up unnecessary division?
  *Will this build up or tear down?
  *Will this heap guilt or relieve it?
  *Will this fuel lust for sin or warn against it?
  *Will this overpromise and instill false hopes in others?”

  Tony Reinke

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• “Currently, the Library of Congress houses eighteen million books. American publishers add another two hundred thousand titles to this stack each year. This means that at the current publishing rate, ten million new books will be added in the next fifty years. Add together the dusty LOC volumes with the shiny new and forthcoming books, and you get a bookshelf-warping total of twenty-eight million books available for an English reader in the next fifty years! But you can read only 2,600 - because you are a wildly ambitious book devourer. ... For every one book that you choose to read, you must ignore ten thousand other books simply because you don't have the time (or money!).”

  Tony Reinke

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• “Freedom in Christ is not freedom to do whatever you want; it is for sure-footed self-reflection and for avoiding the cultural bondage of sin. My freedom in Christ gives me eyes to see that not all things are helpful for me, helpful for others, or acceptable for my witness in the world.”

  Tony Reinke

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• “Stories arrest us. Parents use stories to capture the attention of active children. Preachers use stories to capture the attention of sleepy adults.”

  Tony Reinke

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• “Life online is a whiplash between deep sorrow, unexpected joy, cheap laughs, profound thoughts, and dumb memes.”

  Tony Reinke

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• “The question of this book is simple: What is the best use of my smartphone in the flourishing of my life? To that end, my aim is to avoid both extremes: the utopian optimism of the technophiliac and the dystopian pessimistic of the technophobe.”

  Tony Reinke

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• “We get one chance at this life. We have one body, one mind, and one life to live. Reading provides us with a vicarious experience of others' lives.”

  Tony Reinke

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• “Reading is a discipline, and all disciplines require self-discipline, and self-discipline is the one thing our sinful flesh will resist.”

  Tony Reinke

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• “The sad truth is that many of us are addicted to our phones because we crave immediate approval and affirmation. The fear we feel in our hearts when we are engaged online is the impulse that drives our "highly selective self-representations." We want to be loved and accepted by others, so we wash away our scars and defects. When we put this scrubbed-down representation of ourselves online, we tabulate the human approval in a commodity index of likes and shares. We post an image, then watch the immediate response. We refresh. We watch the stats climb-or stall. We gauge the immediate responses from friends, family members, and strangers. Did what we posted gain the immediate approval of others? We know within minutes. Even the promise of religious approval and the affirmations of other Christians is a gravitational pull that draws us toward our phones.”

  Tony Reinke

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• “The Christian life is Christ—a truth that deeply reassures our souls, focuses our hearts, and simplifies our spiritual lives. But it’s a calling that we perpetually fumble. The veil removed from our eyes in conversion gives way to clouds over our eyes in trials and sleepiness in our steps with the spiritual disciplines. The greatest challenges we face are Christ-clouding distractions.”

  Tony Reinke

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• “Legalism is a wicked lie that puts a mirror in front of our faces and makes us think we are looking at Christ when we are actually adoring the ghost of our own self-righteousness.”

  Tony Reinke

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• “In the mature Christian more aware of his sin (in private) there will be found an authenticity to his humility (in public) that cannot be faked by those who are less aware of indwelling evil. A deep sense of indwelling sin is essential to humble living.”

  Tony Reinke

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• “A lot of people assume you can think better with a slow diet of books, but that will not be the case for every reader. I prefer inundation.”

  Tony Reinke

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• “A wide gap separates a reader who simply consumes books from a reader who diligently seeks wisdom.”

  Tony Reinke

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• “Assuming a driver never looks up in the average time it takes to send a text (4.6 seconds), at fifty-five miles per hour, he drives blindly the length of a football field. Texting”

  Tony Reinke

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• “Keeping Christ in view at all times is, by far, the hardest—and the most essential—part of our calling as Christians.”

  Tony Reinke

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• “True happiness is not found. It finds you.”

  Tony Reinke

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• “Fundamentally, literacy is a spiritual discipline that must overcome the spiritual darkness that veils us. If we ever hope to spiritually benefit from our reading, the Holy Spirit must intrude upon our lives and remove our blindfolds so that we can behold the radiant glory of Jesus Christ (John 1:9). Once we see His glory, our literacy—how we read books—is permanently and forever changed.”

  Tony Reinke

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• “Every time we open our Bibles, our souls are being fed through centuries of technological advancement.”

  Tony Reinke

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• “The statistics show that Christians who struggle to read books are struggling to break free from poor smartphone habits as one root cause.”

  Tony Reinke

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• “Sin is not merely wrong doing; sin is essentially wrong adoring. Sin is the fastening of our hearts on any good, treasure, or security in life that replaces the good, treasure, and security of God.”

  Tony Reinke

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• “If we’re being honest, we don’t call ourselves royalty. If we’re being honest, we call ourselves timid, confused, and insecure. All our self-loathing and self-promoting is a thin veil covering over our frightening conviction that we are nobodies.”

  Tony Reinke

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• “In a world so easily satisfied with images, it’s too easy to waste our lives watching mindless television and squandering our free time away with entertainment. We have a higher calling. God has called us to live our lives by faith and not by sight—and this can mean nothing less than committing our lives to the pursuit of language, revelation, and great books.”

  Tony Reinke

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