Social networking is a good thing. Teachers who rooted me on to graduation are able to witness me becoming an adult from afar. Separated by hurricane Katrina, my family is able to keep up with each other through Facebook. Friends we make in other places are able to communicate and foster relationships through afar. God made us relational beings in His image, modeled after the relationship existing within the Trinity and with that understanding, we can believe that our purpose to be relational with one another, even through social media, is a blessing.
Every good and perfect gift is from our Father[1], however, we have major potential to screw those good things up due to our wicked hearts[2].
God’s gifts are great in their intended context. Just as sex is empty without the commitment of marriage. Or food being unable to turn bad days into good ones. Words were never meant to hurt others. Yet, these things and more happen. Through my experiences as a young adult, I’ve seen social media accounts become strongholds in people’s lives.
You have the publicly concerned Christian. The person who shares blog posts, but probably never read it. The Anti-Christian, Christian: the edgy, controversial guy who makes a living off of being an online sailor. Then there’s the famous Christian, that guy or gal who get’s the hundreds of likes on their rants. The people who are probably more known for the convictions they’ve posted, but probably haven’t acted on in real life.
I’ve been in these (and many other) roles to one extent or another. I began to realize something about myself that I was too consumed to think about before; I was a man of many faces. The social media me wasn’t the real me.
The social media me was everything someone would want in a friend, boyfriend, son, or mentor, yet the verses I made statuses on Facebook were in vain. They weren’t overflowing from my heart for God; they were posted to gain the approval of people!
Deep in the midst of the glamour and bling of “Cool Christianity”, I traded the beauty of social media for the lie that I could look better because of what I posted. I believed I was finally able to look like a good Christian.
Believers should know that there is no amount of makeup or filter that can conceal our nastiness from God. We should know that by the wounds of Jesus, we are saved. But somewhere along the way we believed that if we can just win over the people, that we could make it. We believed that if we could strap on our best face and said our best words that we could fill the gaping hole in our souls that long for acceptance. In our most natural instinct, we wandered away from the truth that everything we need is in Jesus. The true “us” is the one in which we walk in the approval of God, not the “social media” us.
Are you as Christian as you look on your social media outlets? Or are you caught up in man’s approval so deeply that you never noticed? Are there two or three different versions of you? And if so, which is the real one? I don’t have all of the answers, but the Lord does. My hope is that we would think deeply about the seemingly mundane and seek a deeper relationship with Christ.
[1] James 1:16-17
[2] Romans 1:24
mitchjay 