The god called 'social media'

The past 48 hours I have been in a whirlwind of a journey that has lead me to this little blog for the day. God has placed it on my heart to confront the god we call social media. Mainly because he wants to kill it in my own life, and I think others might have the issue as well. If not, oh well this is documentation for later :)

I think the root of the issue is that we now seek validation instead of intimacy. Only because we have been programmed to. We post a tweet. We wait for likes or retweets. We post a photo for a like on instagram. We post a status update on facebook and constantly check back to see if someone has liked it or commented on it. We are a generation solely confined to validation. Even on youtube you become verified when you have 100,000 subscribers and have been confirmed as an 'important person.' 

Followers, friends, likes, loves. Whatever it is we want more. We seem to value to the quantity of friends instead of the quality of friends. Real Talk Kim spoke one evening and said she would rather have 4 quarters as opposed to 100 pennies. She would rather have 4 really good friends than 100 not so great ones. But in our generation, we look at our friends on facebook and when our numbers go down, we get sad because someone doesn't like us. John 15:18 talks about how the world is gonna hate you because it hated God first. It's gonna happen. 

We hide behind a wall of 'fake it until we make it,' instead of being honest with each other. We post all the wonderful moments in our life but fail to be real everywhere else. We are trained to hide our real feelings. However, we can post our own opinions and get offended when someone tries to correct us. We can sit behind a screen and bad talk something or someone but in reality, we can't do it in real life. 

Then you have the other extreme to that where people think that their point is more important than anyone else. Then this leads to disagreements, protests, and terrible outcomes. It's like we have this controlling or entitled spirit attached to us. It's our way or the highway. We can't just have a general discussion with someone about life because they view things differently than we do. The more likes we have, or followers, fuels our fire. 

Earlier I mentioned that we seek validation instead of having intimacy. The reason I say this is because we seek the likes or the comments that make us feel good instead of having intimacy with Christ. Instead of spending 30 minutes with God in the morning or evening we spend 3 hours on our phones watching videos or scrolling through our feed. We get aggravated if someone asks us about our quiet time but get even more offended if someone didn't see our post from 15 minutes ago. 

We've become so impersonal that real conversations that should be had in person are done through text messaging. We've become so content in the lack of connection with people that going to church is irrelevant. We just find time to show up on Sunday morning but don't want to do anything outside of that. We don't value relationships anymore. We can't be honest with the friends that we have because we can just go to an online site to find the answers to the questions we have. We ask google everything. We have endless Christian apps that we never use. 

This is what the wonderful world wide web and social media has done to us. Jesus had 12 followers and he did pretty amazing things. He had 12 friends who he poured into. He touched the lives of thousands. Yes, Social Media can be used for wonderful things. It can touch the heart of thousands. It can reach to people across the world. But it can also swallow up your soul and become a god. Make sure that you aren't in this position today and if you are, find a way to change it. 

God tells us that he will have no other gods before him. Don't make facebook, instagram, twitter, or even Sarahah your God. That's a new app out where people can critique you anonymously. An innocent app that can promote cyber bullying. Just what we need. More broken and hurt people. Wake Up my friends.