Love not the world, neither the things [that are] in the world. If any man loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.
-1 John 2:15
Have you ever liked a photo on Instagram or a post on Facebook? Chances are you have.
Now you might be wondering why I would bring this up, and I wouldn’t blame you. It seems out of place to talk about something other than Jesus on the church blog, right? Actually, Jesus himself always taught in parables, which are still relevant today. Our Messiah gave people bits of information that they could understand and relate to in the stories He told them – then He went a step further and explained what the stories meant and represented spiritually.
Since the answer is probably yes to whether you have tapped that thumbs up icon on your well-used Smartphone, I’ll ask this question: do you “like” God? The question is really asking do you have a close relationship with God that people envy? One that gives you an unbreakable bond to Him in everything you do? Or do you passively interact with Him? Do you just tap the thumbs-up on the Christian icons and like or favorite God every now and then?
Imagine a phone with a bunch of text notifications – some are from God, some are from the world, and some are from Satan. Which ones do you answer the most? For me, the worldly ones, as well as Satan’s personal texts seem the most appealing at times. They appear as shiny and flashy ads and they seem like they will solve all your problems, but if you click on the ads they just lead you away from what you were focused on, cause viruses, and lie to you. Just like notifications on our phones, we can choose which messages to listen to in our lives. Do we listen to the voice of hope and peace and love? Or do we let whispers of ambition and pride and jealousy into our hearts and minds? We choose which messages to receive and in turn, it is our responsibility to answer them.
What if the reason we don’t get more spiritual “texts” from God is that we don’t text Him back? If we don’t actively seek God’s word and character, we are left to piece together an incomplete picture of God and His plan for our world and for us. What if you just “like” what He posts and favorite all His tweets, but you don’t ever connect to Him personally? For us as Christians, if we don’t have a personal relationship with God through prayer and striving to follow his ways, we are just His metaphorical Facebook friends. We wrongly use the word “friends” and only know the easy-to-digest outer things about God because we refuse to engage on a deeper level. We as believers tend to just tap that thumbs up icon all day instead of actually connecting to our Savior and having a real relationship with Him. As followers of Christ we need to get off our spiritual cell phones and see that God is right here in the room from us – all we have to do is take a few steps off the couch and he will be waiting with arms open wide, ready to receive us.