The letter to the Hebrews says of Christ, “For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified” (Hebrews 10:14, ESV). The last words of that verse translate one Greek participle, and its first-person form is ἁγιάζομαι: I am being made holy. It is present, so the work is still going on. It is passive, so the work is done to me. The same sentence says that those people have already been perfected for all time by one offering. The believer stands between those two verbs, finished in Christ and not yet finished in himself.
I named an app after that word because the app belongs to the unfinished half. It does not make anyone holy. It is a tool for a man who is being made holy and would like fewer occasions to stumble while that work goes on.
What It Does
Hagiazomai is an iPhone app for restricting your own phone. It is not parental control software, and there is no one above you with a password to your life. You set the rules yourself.
It filters adult content in two layers. The first is Apple’s own filter, which covers Safari and turns off private browsing. The second is a filter at the DNS level (CleanBrowsing’s Family filter in this version), which works in every app and on every network. The app checks both each time it runs, and if either filter is off, the app shows how to turn that filter back on and alerts a paired partner.
Beyond the filter, you decide what else is blocked: whole categories of apps, single apps, daily limits, and a downtime window. One rule governs all of it. Blocking takes effect at once. Unblocking waits a day by default. If I decide to unblock something in a weak moment, I have a day to think better of it, and I can cancel the unblock at any point in that day.
A Partner
“Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another” (Proverbs 27:17, ESV).
A rule you can quietly undo is only a suggestion. So the app lets you pair with a partner, in person, with someone you trust. He holds the Screen Time passcode. He gets an alert when a filter is turned off, when a rule begins to loosen, when you tap past a blocked app, and when the phone’s clock is moved. If your phone has not checked in for two days, his app shows that too.
The alert never says which app, which site, or how long you spent anywhere. The app does not have that information. What he receives is encrypted from your phone to his. I run no server and hold no keys.
Limits
A man can always undo restrictions he put on his own phone. Hagiazomai makes undoing them slow, and in most cases his partner is told. It cannot filter content inside an app that carries its own, and it cannot see anything already downloaded to the phone. The app’s own page lists the rest of its limits, because a tool like this is worse than useless if it promises more than it delivers.
It is also only a tool. Scripture’s instruction is plain: “For this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you abstain from sexual immorality” (1 Thessalonians 4:3, ESV). A filter cannot produce that. The Word, prayer, the sacraments, and the fellowship of the church are the means God has appointed, and a phone that is quieter leaves a man more room to attend to them.
Hagiazomai is free, with no account, no ads, and no analytics. The App Store link will be on that page once Apple approves it.