Monday, April 18, 2016

The Danger of Bringing a Facebook Mentality to the Word of God

Today I thought I'd share a post I wrote on Facebook over a year ago. It's a reminder I need daily, and I hope it challenges and encourages you to sit and soak in the Word for a while. Then, having been filled up, you can go and be squeezed out for the sake of the gospel. May the Lord work in your heart and mind as you encounter Him through His Word.

We’ve all been there.  Scrolling down through our newsfeed at breakneck speed, our eye having been trained to pick up only what we believe is of the most significance or interest to us.  As our “friends” multiply and our feed ever expands, we somehow feel this sprint through the flurry of posts is helping us save time.  After all, if we were to actually read (not to mention digest) every single post we’d forever be glued to the screen! 

In the Facebook world, running through the newsfeed is okay.  Facebook is a creation of man largely filled with postings that serve man’s own purposes. But how often do we take our Facebook mentality and bring it with us to the Word of God? 

We have so trained our attention span to be split-second that we breeze through passages in the Bible without giving them a second thought—perhaps even without actually knowing what we just read in the first place.  And as we sprint through the verses, we stop only when we pick up on what we believe to be significant or interesting to us personally.  

But the Bible is not a creation of man, to be used by man for his own purposes.  The Bible is the Word of the Most High God, the message God sends to us as humankind, and its message is as current as the Facebook post from “just now.”

So my challenge to us is this:  Stop bringing a Facebook mentality to the Word of God. 

Slow down. 

Resist the default of sprinting through chapters without asking God what He wants to teach us—about Himself, about ourselves, about the world around us.  Push ourselves to start digging deep, even in passages that don’t seem relevant to us at the time.

Read the Bible—every part of it—as if it is of the utmost significance.  Because it is.

To read the Arabic translation of this post, click here.

.لقراءة الترجمة العربية لهذا المنشور إضغط هنا



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