What’s the last thing you do at night? Ruth Williams sets us a challenge
What does your bedside table look like?
In this ‘brave new world’ we live in, there are many innovations and technologies for which we can be thankful. We can Skype with missionaries in far flung places and pray intelligently about global prayer needs moments after events have occurred. We can text a distant friend a word of encouragement or tweet about the blessings of a Christian conference. Instagram and snapchat have provided new evangelistic tools to our keen young people at universities and Christian Unions are using Facebook pages and YouTube to reach a whole new generation for Christ.
Life online?
But wherever there is a means of blessing there is always the possibility of a hidden danger. Such is the perverse nature of our hearts. Andy Yen in a recent TED talk, itself an internet innovation providing the thinking person with an incredibly diverse range of topics to consider intelligently, reminds us that the young people of today’s generation are being encouraged to live their lives online. Posting their thoughts, feelings, anxieties or passions on the internet, they do not know what it is to experience ‘privacy’ in the way that those of us who remember life before email and social messaging can.
There are many of us who can remember the days when a message or letter was handwritten and had to be posted. When perhaps angry words were tempered by the need to write them out and revise them. How easy now to post a hasty response to a church meeting or deacons’ debate. We can click send before we have prayed over or slept on a matter. Technology may be a blessing or a curse. The harried worker can be hassled by email on a beach with his family. A ‘romantic’ meal out can be dominated by smart phone notifications, ‘checking-in’ to our location on Facebook, updating our status mid-meal, sitting in silence staring at a screen rather than connecting with those we love on a deep level.
Temptation in the bedroom
Most pervasively of all, Christians of all generations find a new temptation has crept into their bedrooms. With smart phones as the new ‘Swiss army knife’ of modern survival, we use them as diary, map and alarm clock. We wear watches, but we check our phones to read the time!
Now, on the nightstand, in addition to our Bibles, we have our trusty smart phones. We stay up late answering emails or trawling the internet, finally logging off and going to bed, only to check the mobile before trying to sleep. Scientists inform us that the white light from our screens plays havoc with our sleep patterns and yet we feel the compulsive urge to check Facebook before we nod off.
Compulsive behaviour
We need to wake up to the fact that social media is compulsive. It is the modern addiction and it is affecting our churches spiritually more than we care to acknowledge. How richer our lives could be if we reached for our Bibles with the same regularity that we reach for our phones. What if we took the Word of God with us everywhere with the same sense of dependence, if we checked in as many times with it in a day? What do we reach for first in the morning? Is it the phone or the Word?
Will the latest viral post feed my hungry soul? Do I need to watch the cutest cat or the sweetest child, or do I thirst for something more than amusement? Can we as believers justify the hours we sometimes spend playing Candycrush on the way to work, rather than talking about the Saviour to the people we rub shoulders with every day on the train?
Romans 12 v 1-2 reminds us forcibly of the danger for our souls of forgetting that the world around us seeks to ‘squeeze’ us into its mould. Relevant we must be, culture-savvy and cutting edge maybe, but are we allowing the technology that dominates our lives to rob us of our greatest joys?
In the old days, Bible reading and prayer were known as the ‘means of grace.’ So called simply because of the profound truth that they are the daily means by which the Christian receives the grace of God. Pre-internet, we knew what it was to struggle with our ‘quiet time’. We knew the battle for a consistent prayer life and a meaningful Bible study at the start of a new day. It is dangerously and tragically possible to go to sleep each night with God’s Word, his ‘means of grace,’ six inches from our pillow on the table and yet to allow it to gather dust.
Where’s the daily prayer life?
A recent survey of Bible college students in America found that 80% did not have a regular ‘quiet time’ or a daily prayer life. But what if the study had measured their use of social media? If the same survey was undertaken in our churches, would we discover a new temptation has taken hold? Each morning, we turn off the phone alarm clock, and check our phone for messages, before searching our Facebook/Twitter/Pinterest account to see what is new. A new pandemic is threatening our spiritual health and it is not only a danger to the young.
Night thoughts
Now that Mum and Dad have discovered Facebook, it is becoming passé for many of our youth who have moved on to newer things. However, it is often the middle-aged, ‘mature’ church member who finds themselves addicted! What fills our final thoughts as we turn off the light each evening? Some witty retort we have just posted online or the words of life we have just been meditating on together?
Social media can be used for great good. A pastor friend, with a busy London ministry, has consistently used Facebook to share his devotional thoughts every day for years. His posts bring nothing but blessing and challenge to all who read them. However, pastorally, we must acknowledge the new dangers affecting our congregations. Spiritual growth is being stunted and God’s best gifts squandered as believers ‘amuse themselves to death’.
With many now using their phones as ‘Bibles’, even our Sunday services are not immune. We no longer ask for phones to be switched off, but put on silent. It is not uncommon to see a percentage of any congregation reaching for their smart phone when the reading is announced. Even in the middle of a worship service, Facebook and Snapchat can vie for our attention. Will anyone confess to a sneaky glance mid-sermon? Something serious has taken hold!
Hating quiet?
It is not just the younger generation who have lost out on the blessing of privacy. Modern society seems to hate quiet; every moment must be filled with noise or comment. Do we cherish our private communion with God? Do we guard our quiet times alone with him? These new threats are but a fresh disguise for the same old enemy of our souls. But we are not unaware of his schemes. 2 Corinthians 10 v 3-5 reminds us that ‘though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal but mighty in God for pulling down strongholds. Casting down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ.’
For 21st-century believers, new battle lines have been drawn. For us, part of the battle to ‘take every thought captive’ includes the idle use of social media that wars with our souls.
May we continue to use modern technology for great good. One of our church apprentices has recently begun to use the targeted advertising on Facebook pages to interact with young people in our area and challenge them with life’s big questions. It has provided us with a whole new mission field. But may we also be wary of an overde-pendence on the things of this world, ever conscious that as Christians we must ‘march to the beat of a different drum.’
