160511 The 21st Century Christian Lessob 5 Social Media

Lesson Five:  Social MediaThe Fullness of the HeartAs James says in James 3:2, any man who is able to control his tongue isn’t going to have any trou-ble controlling the rest of his life either.  For many of us, our most common spiritual challenges con-cern the things we say.  Many sins—theft, adultery, and so on—require us to invest effort in sinning.  By contrast, the sins of the tongue are nearly effortless.  We can ex-press an ungodly thought with little more effort than it takes to think it.When Satan already has this kind of advantage, it doesn’t hardly seem fair to give him the Internet too!  Online, many of the obstacles that inhibit our face-to-face expression are removed.  We don’t have to look someone else in the eye as we express our anger and contempt for him.  The distance provided by the computer screen helps us forget that real-life people are going read the words and see the pictures we post.  Some Internet forums even allow us to speak anonymously, freeing us from concern for our re-lationships and reputations.  No-where are we as free to express what is in our hearts.The only way to prevent ungodly speech on the Internet, then, is to uproot ungodly thoughts from our hearts.  As soon as we have a thought, rather than impulsively expressing it, we must learn to con-sider it and evaluate it, to deter-mine whether it is from below or from above.  We must temper our self-righteousness with humility, our anger with wisdom, or the evil in our hearts will flow over our key-boards and our lives.   The Christian and the 21st Century:  Lesson Five1.Each of the verses below lists a spiritual problem.  Identify what each problem is, and explain how it appears in the world of electronic com-munication.Proverbs 10:19Proverbs 18:2Proverbs 12:16Proverbs 20 ©Copyright Matthew W. Bassford, 2013.  This material is subject to a Crea-tive Commons attribution-noncommercial-no derivative works license.  This means that it may be reproduced, shared, and used freely, provided it is attributed to the author, not used for commercial purposes, and not altered in any way.  For more information, please see creativecommons.org