Infecting Your Facebook

she got home, she reposted her statement (the one filled with obscenities) and rattled on about how hypocritical it was for her Elders to call her on carpet. Many of her “Facebook Friends” rallied to her cause… filling their postings with obscenities. And then these “Friends” went on to tell how much they HATED the church and how hypocritical and worthless Christians were.

My preacher friend then sent her a “private” message pointing out:
1. She was wrong. If she’d been at his church, he’d have called her on the carpet too.
2. BUT WORSE – her reposting and attacking her Elders encouraged people who hated Christ to pile on… and spew their hatred on Facebook page
Fortunately, she backpedaled and apologized - on Facebook – for what she had done.

Some Christians don’t understand how damaging cursing can be to Jesus.

ILLUS: I had the opportunity to talk to a local politician recently. He didn’t realize I was a preacher… and he jokingly cursed in my presence. And I remembered thinking: well the guy’s probably not a Christian BUT doesn’t he realize that he could offend someone by that cursing. He could lose a vote - for himself and maybe for his party - by that single curse.
THEN I found out, he was a regular church goer in a very Biblical church, and suddenly I was very sad. I wondered if he realized that in his one curse he damaged his witness and he had insulted his savior.

So it’s a terrible thing for a Christian to curse or tell off color jokes.
But it can get even worse than that.

ILLUS: In a preachers’ group I’m part of, there was a great deal of discussion about how much damage Facebook had in their churches.
One preacher shared this story:
ILLUS: “We had a situation where a child in the youth group had his ear flicked by one of our sponsors leading the Christmas play practice. Needless to say, (things) hit the Facebook wall, and a firestorm broke out.”
They confronted the sponsor and made sure he knew this wasn’t to be done again… but matters got increasingly worse. It seems in the aftermath, their youth minister left and then really got ugly. He writes:

“I received a great deal of hatred as the story was a bunch of growing lies, and their numerous family members, already mad because our youth minister (their favorite) had just left...and I was the target of their anger already. This just made it worse. It took a year for this to quiet down, but Facebook postings only made a bad situation worse...
The chairman of the elders didn't do what he should have done and the posts were getting uglier by the day. Our elders came to understand that Facebook is not just a nice thing that sits on certain shelves, but is now an important medium of communication that's not going away. It's a new form of gossip, but fortunately (and I use that loosely) at least we can SEE it instead of guess or get it secondhand.

Facebook can be a great place to talk with your friends… but it can also be a terrible place filled with evil and bitterness and darkness. A place where Jesus and His church can be attacked and cursed.
Christians need to be as careful there… because the world is watching.

SO, how do we deal with this problem? How do we stop ourselves from being