It is bad enough when you gossip or slander or lie in a room or a hallway or at a restaurant table with only another person or two around, but with a medium like Facebook these sins of speech go global.
Doug Phillips
I’ve often been challenged in how to think about Facebook and how to use it as a tool to build and develop relationships. The more I think about it, the more I realise that it seeks to be an online medium for relationships. Therefore, we need to be careful and even deliberate in how we present ourselves and how we relate to others. Doug Phillips, a guest poster on Kevin de Young’s blog, thinks through the importance of online sins of speech, motivated by Ephesians 4:29.
“Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear.” (Eph. 4:29 ESV)
One of the few blogs I regularly read is by Kevin de Young. He recently wrote about humility, in particular, humility in action.
There are hundreds of ways to love and a myriad of ways to demonstrate humility. But one of the most effective ways to accomplish both is to simply ask questions. True, it’s possible to be nothing but a smooth talking salesmen who cares little for the actual person across the table. But every virtue can be faked from time to time. So let’s not let that deter us from giving others the gift of our curiosity.
His post is worth reading in full.
Kevin de Young has written a great piece about the temptation for church to cushion us from our own sin and the need for salvation.
The temptation, subtle and strong in every preacher, is to preach to other people’s sins. And so our sermons rail on emergents or homosexuality or Richard Dawkins. … But the sin we should hear about most is our own. Just as the iniquity I should most disdain is mine.
He quotes John Miller (Outgrowing the Ingrown Church, p. 26):
Among conservatives and evangelicals, its [religious cushioning's] primary mission all too often is to function as a preaching station where Christians gather to hear the gospel preached to the unconverted, to be reassured that liberals are mistaken about God and hell, and renew one’s sense of well-being without have a serious encounter with the living God.
Pray for me, that I don’t succumb to this temptation.