Holier than Thou with my Nokia 6010

Back in 2003, the new hot phone was the Nokia 6010. It had some features that most phones still didn’t have: a color screen, downloadable ring tones, and the ability to view pictures by text message (though it didn’t yet have a camera).

I know all these things because I have one. And not just under my bed with every other phone and charger we all, for some reason, keep around. No, this nice piece of machinery is the phone I use. Before you think me somehow more holier through self-denial, I have to confess that I use a Nokia 6010 because of unfortunate circumstances. Several months ago my 2-year-old daughter baptized my iPhone in the toilet. So I pulled out the Old Faithful from the miscellanies drawer and, just like that, I’m back in 2003.

I got married in 2003. I’ve had three kids since 2003. And here we are, united again.

The setbacks to this phone are pretty substantial. Everyone sounds like they are yelling, and it feels like I’m carrying around a Hewlett-Packard XL printer’s cartridge in my pocket. Also, whenever I pull out the phone in public around friends, they turn and act as if they don’t know me. It’s pitiful.

There are some benefits to this phone . . . I just can’t think of them right now.

And then came the new iPhone 4S. I caught all the juicy tweets from the Apple Keynote. Then I watched the Apple.com preview, where they tell me how they’ve “accomplished the impossible.” They somehow “improved on the extraordinarily groundbreaking iPhone 4.” It is something that, they say, “redefines categories.” How did they do it? With magic only found in candy-coated unicorn horns, I’m sure.

And along with the rest of the world, I mourned the death of Steve Jobs. He has given us the Apple Store, the slice of heaven found in shopping malls. Don’t pretend like you haven’t thought the same thing. Everything is white and functions efficiently. No tears. No sadness. And very soon, people will be lining up to see Jobs’s last creation, the iPhone 4S.

And I wanted one. Scratch that. I want one. But with just a bit of reflection, I recognized that my heart was taking this occasion to demonstrate a poor posture. Without getting overly introspective, here’s a few things that were going through my head:

But I want one now! If I pre-order it, does that mean it will get to me by the 14th? I don’t know what I’ll do if I have to wait longer than the 14th. Why doesn’t this Apple customer care person know how long it will take to ship to me? Is he an idiot? He’s just being lazy! He just wants to get off the phone with me. I wish I had my iPhone now. If we have another daughter, we’re naming her “Siri.”

Here’s another thought I had waiting in the express line at the grocery store:

Look, that guy over there has an iPhone 4. Psha! I’ll soon have the iPhone 4S and be so much more technologically advanced than this guy. I feel sorry for him. He’s probably stuck in a two-year contract and won’t be able to upgrade until the iPhone 7! Oh Lord, thank you for not making me like other men, who are stuck with iPhone 3G’s and iPhone 4’s.

I didn’t even have the iPhone 4S, and I still had the ability to feel superior. And here is my favorite and most creative way to demonstrate a prideful heart:

All right, so I’m going to have the Nokia 6010 for at least another week-and-a-half. That’s okay, in the meantime it allows me some vain self-importance that makes people think I care less about worldly, superficial things than others—-especially that guy at the grocery store with the iPhone 4!

I exaggerate a bit to make a point. It’s probably not unreasonable to believe some of you have thought something similar. Or maybe you feel superior to the rest of the world, who short-circuit their computers with their drool. You’ve got better things to do with your time than watching an Apple Keynote . . . like pooling enough cash to order the next UFC match on pay-per view!

Pride and inordinate desires can rear their ugly heads in ways we’re often blind toward. Our idolatry is creative. As John Calvin writes, “In almost every age, since the beginning of the world men . . . have set up symbols in which they believed God appeared before their bodily eyes.”

God has not appeared before us in a sleek, black phone with an 8-megapixel camera and HD video. But neither is our salvation found in by-gone year phone models, as if we’ve relieved ourselves from personal idols just by slavishly holding on to minimalistic technological standards. Prostitutes shouldn’t shake their head at beggars, thinking if they’d just use a little ingenuity, they could make a little cash.

We all need Jesus. And to rid our hearts of these idols, we need to set the eyes of our hearts on his perfections. They’re there for us see in his Word. And that vision is more transformative than the clearest picture iPhone Face-Time can give us of a girlfriend.