1) The telephone can divert the flow of prayer. God wants his people to talk to him. That’s one reason why he sends all sorts of experiences into our lives - so that we’ll talk to him about them. That should be the automatic reaction of the believer when joys or troubles come: we turn to God first and pour out our feelings to him. “He alone is my rock and my salvation.. Trust in him at all times, O people; pour out your hearts to him, for God is our refuge” (Psalm 62 vss 6-8). But how often do we do that? Instead we reach for the telephone. We pour out our feelings to anyone and everyone else rather than to God. Our troubles should drive us to seek comfort in God. Instead, we find relief in other human beings.

William Cowper lived before telephones were invented. But he understood that temptation. He asks:

How much greater the danger is in our age when there’s always a “fellow-creature” ready to listen on the other end of a telephone line! We may gain human sympathy but we lose the supreme treasure of intimacy with God.

2) The telephone makes solitude hard to find. Most people in our society hate silence. If they’re alone in the house, they switch on the radio or television “just for company”. Or they pick up the telephone, just so that they can hear a voice. They don’t want to be left alone with their thoughts.

We need times of solitude. Times to sit in silence and think. To examine ourselves, to search our hearts, to remember God, to meditate on death and judgement, and heaven and hell. We need to be alone with God. That means shutting out distractions and interruptions. Jesus said “go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father” (Matthew 6:6).

How hard it is to find that solitude in a world of telephones! The moment you sit down to be quiet, the telephone will ring.. or you’ll feel a sudden impulse to ring a friend. For us, finding quietness means not just closing the door but unplugging the telephone.

3) Telephones encourage us to speak without thinking. How often the book of Proverbs warns us about the danger of speaking without thinking. “When words are many, sin is not absent, but he who holds his tongue is wise”. “Do you see a man who speaks in haste? There is more hope for a fool than for him” (Proverbs 9:19, 29:20).

The phone rings. Someone has a question, a problem, an interesting story to tell. And of course, you’ve got to reply. You’re taken off-guard. There’s no time to reflect, to think things through, to decide how much it’s wise to say. You can’t say “Oh just give me five minutes to think”. Five minutes silence in the middle of a telephone conversations seems an eternity. So words flow. It’s only when the phone goes down, you begin to realise what you’ve said. How many times we’ve made rash promises over the phone, betrayed secrets, committed ourselves to things we don’t really agree with... How much safer if we had dealt with the matter by letter, or face to face. “He who guards his mouth and his tongue keeps himself from calamity” (Proverbs 21:23).

4) The telephone can prevent us from building balanced relationships. The telephone can keep friends in touch. But paradoxically, it can also prevent us from building real friendships with the people around us. We were created to live in communities - to be in contact with real people: neighbours, workmates, fellow church-members. We were intended to interact with those people in many ways - to talk to them, yes, but also to smile at them, to shake their hands, to walk along the road with them, to eat meals with them, to help them in practical ways, to play football or Monopoly with them. Does the telephone help us to build such relationships? I suspect not. Many of us find it easier to chatter to a disembodied voice at the other end of the country than to relate to the people around us. People in our society seem to spend more and more of their lives on the telephone and have fewer and fewer face to face friendships.