What Does the Bible Say About Social Media and Technology?

There's an old line that gets quoted all the time: don't wrestle with pigs, because you'll both get muddy and the pig will enjoy it. George Bernard Shaw is usually credited with it. But Shaw was borrowing. Jesus got there first, and He said it with a lot more edge.

Matthew 7:6: do not throw your pearls to pigs. If you do, they'll trample them, then turn and tear you to pieces.

Now think about where you spend your day. The comment sections. The quote tweets. The group chat that went sideways. Nowhere on earth is there more pig-wrestling than online. We have built a global arena for it and handed everyone a ticket.

I'm not anti-technology. Not even a little. The connectivity is stunning, the reach is unprecedented, and I get to put the gospel in front of people I'll never meet. It may be one of the great inventions in human history. But it's paradoxical, and we have to be honest about the other side. This is the most connected generation that has ever lived, and also the loneliest. Depression is up. Anxiety is up. Suicide is up. And a lot of that traces straight back to the screen. If you're parenting through this, it shapes everything about how you raise kids who actually follow Jesus.

What Jesus Meant When He Said "Don't Cast Your Pearls Before Swine"

Matthew 7 verses 1 through 6 might be the unbeliever's favorite passage in the whole Bible. Everybody knows the first line. Don't judge. People throw it at you like a trump card. Hey man, Jesus said don't judge.

He did say that. But not the way our culture uses it. Jesus said don't judge with condemnation in your heart, with a spirit of damnation. He never said stop thinking. In fact He commanded the opposite — judge with compassion, and here's the word that matters most, judge with discernment.

You already do this constantly. You made a dozen judgment calls before breakfast. Discernment isn't the enemy of love. It's how love stays useful.

So look at the three characters in the verse. The pearls are the truth, the holy things of God, the gospel itself. The pigs are people who cannot receive it — and Jesus wasn't calling anyone worthless, because every single person matters to God. He was describing a posture, not a soul. Some people don't want truth. Facts don't move them. Then there's the third character, and it's not spelled P-R-A-Y. It's P-R-E-Y. That's you and me.

Jesus is protecting you. He knows three things you need to know. You'll get muddy, because the pig is already covered in mud and that's exactly why he can't see clearly. It won't matter, because winning a pig fight means you fought a pig. And it will cost you time, energy, and effort God wanted spent somewhere else. Take a wide berth. Not because you hate them — pray for them. Love them from a distance.

The First Pig: Pride

Pride is putting self on a shelf that's reserved only for God.

The first book I ever wrote was about the seven deadly sins, and I opened with pride for a reason. Pride is the forerunner of every other sin. Every one. Take anger — before I rage at someone, I've already decided I'm the one who handles this, not God. That's pride, and anger is just what came out of it. Take lust — before I justify it, I've already decided my desires outrank His design. Take greed — I, me, my, mine, more. Pride shows up first every time, and everything else walks in behind it.

Which is why you have to look at Satan. Isaiah 14:13-14 records what he said in his heart when he tried to usurp God, and the thing to notice isn't the theology. It's the grammar. Five statements in a row, and every one begins the same way: I will ascend. I will raise my throne. I will sit enthroned. I will ascend above the clouds. I will make myself like the Most High.

Read that again and tell me it doesn't sound like a social media post.

Here's what pride actually costs you. Pride creates distance. Distance from who you should be in front of God. Distance from the people who love you. Distance from God Himself. Distance from His church. It doesn't feel like distance while it's happening — it feels like standing a little taller. That's the trick.

And I'll admit the thing all of us know is true. I don't see pride in me. I see it in you. Man, you are a prideful dude. Not me though. Never me.

The Second Pig: Envy

If pride says look at me, envy says why not me.

Here's my definition: envy is being sad over your success and a fan of your failure. And of all the sins, envy is the only one that starts ugly and ends ugly. Pride at least has a fun opening act — the humble brag, the little flex. Envy never does. It's ugly on day one and it's ugly at the finish.

This is where Scripture speaks most directly to what a feed actually does to you. Second Corinthians 10:12 says we don't dare classify or compare ourselves with others, because when people measure themselves by themselves and compare themselves with themselves, they are not wise. That's the verse for the scroll. That is the whole mechanism of the algorithm, written two thousand years before the algorithm.

Proverbs 14:30 says envy rots the bones. Proverbs 27:4 asks who can stand before it. And Galatians 5 lists it right there in the acts of the flesh, sitting between selfish ambition and drunkenness like it belongs.

Envy begins where your influence ends. Envy begins where your income ends. I'm not envious of people in businesses I'm not in. But another pastor? Now we've got a conversation. If you teach school, it isn't the surgeon who gets you — it's the teacher down the hall. Envy is always local. That's what makes it so hard to spot.

And this is one I struggle with. There are accounts I cannot follow, because the moment I do, the engines of envy fire up and take me somewhere bad. So I don't follow them. That's not weakness. That's a wide berth.

Let me tell you something I don't talk about much. Thirty-five years ago, Lisa and I helped start Fellowship Church with thirty families. I was twenty-seven years old. About six months in, back when mail still came on paper, I got my first anonymous letter. And I made the mistake of reading it.

It crushed me. I went home to our rent house and told Lisa I didn't sign up for this. I was done. Six months in, and I was out.

What came out of that night was a resolution I made before God, through tears and doubt: help me never go looking for that again. I haven't done it perfectly. But for thirty-five years, mostly, I haven't. I'm sixty-five years old and there's still stuff out there. Our team mentions it sometimes. I don't ask for details and I don't want them. Those people don't know our church and they don't know me.

Here's what I learned, and it's the most practical thing in this whole article: most online negativity and hate traces back to envy. Not conviction. Not principle. Envy. Which means engaging with it was never going to work, because you cannot reason someone out of a feeling they haven't admitted to having.

So block people. Put the phone down. Don't engage. It is not worth your energy and effort, and the enemy would love nothing more than to pull you away from what God is actually doing in your life. And if the weight of all this has settled into something heavier, that's worth naming too — here's what the Bible says about fear and how to stop being afraid.

The Third Pig: Lust

Lust is a God-given desire that has gone haywire. God invented the desire. We just decided to do it forever, our way.

Pornhub receives somewhere between one hundred and two hundred million visits a day. Sit with that number. That's not a fringe problem happening to other people. That's a mainstream, load-bearing feature of how our culture uses the internet.

Ephesians 2:2 calls Satan the prince of the power of the air. Don't let that phrase slide past you. Television travels through the air. Music travels through the air. Everything on your phone right now arrived through the air. That's not a coincidence — it's a strategy.

I love to fish, so here's how I see it working. There's the lure. Then the bait. Then the hook. And the thing about a good lure is that nothing feels wrong while you're taking it. The line just goes out. Everything's fine. I'm fine, I've got this, it's not a big deal. Then the enemy sets the hook, and he's got another one mounted on the wall. Look at that guy. He never saw it coming. She had no idea there was a hook in it.

Nobody plans this. That's the whole point of a lure.

Your Phone Cannot Change You

Here's the part I want you to actually hear, because it's where most advice about technology falls apart.

Screen time limits are fine. App blockers are fine. A digital detox is fine. But none of it transforms anybody, because the phone was never the problem. The phone is a mirror. Pride, envy, and lust were in the human heart long before Wi-Fi existed — technology just handed them a distribution network and turned the volume all the way up.

Only the Holy Spirit changes a person. And when He does, the trade is specific. Pride becomes humility. Envy becomes contentment. Lust becomes self-control. Those last three aren't willpower achievements you grind out. Galatians 5 calls them fruit — what grows when the Spirit has the soil.

So the question isn't how do I use my phone less. The question is who is forming the heart that's holding the phone.

Four Questions to Ask Before You Post

That said, transformation shows up in habits. Let me give you a couple of handles. The first one is the simplest and it changes everything: get to Scripture before screen time. Whatever gets your first ten minutes gets to set the frame for the rest of the day, and right now for most of us that's a feed built by strangers who don't love us.

Then, before you post, run it through four questions.

1. Is it true? Not is it satisfying, not will it land — is it actually accurate? A great deal of what gets shared online is true enough to feel right and false enough to do damage. If you haven't verified it, you're not informing anybody. You're just moving something along.
2. Is it loving? You can say something completely true in a way that only exists to wound. Ask yourself honestly who this post is for. If the honest answer is that you want a specific person to read it and feel small, that's not truth-telling. That's a pig fight with better vocabulary.
3. Does it glorify God? This is the pride check, and it's uncomfortable. Look at the post and ask whether it points anyone toward God or just toward you. There's nothing wrong with sharing your life. There's a lot wrong with building a shrine to it.
4. Could it cause someone to stumble? You don't know who's reading. You don't know who's two weeks into sobriety, or barely holding a marriage together, or fifteen years old and forming their entire sense of self out of what they see. Your freedom to post something isn't the only thing on the scale.

Pick Up the Pearls

Back to the mud.

Here's what I've learned in thirty-five years of ministry and more comment sections than I'd like to admit: you can win the pig fight and still lose. You typed the perfect reply. You put it right in their face. Congratulations — you beat a pig. Meanwhile the pearls are in the mud, and they were never the pig's to trample. They were yours to place.

So lean into the right people. Not people who tell you yes about everything — real relationships, where somebody can encourage you and also call you out. And take the pearls you've been given and hand them to people who actually want them. There are more of those people than the algorithm will ever show you.

And if you've never given your life to Jesus, that's the pearl underneath all of this. He died on the cross for your sin and rose again, and He'll come into your life if you ask Him — but only if you ask. You can do that right now, right where you're sitting, with the phone still in your hand.