The Gospel Works: Social Media

Today’s post is part of a series to help us take what we learn on Sunday into the rest of the week. These posts summarize the main points from the week’s sermon and include questions for continued reflection and prayer. The posts in this series are written by members of our church’s Adult Christian Formation team.

 

This past Sunday our service theme was “God Blesses Us.” Pastor Bobby preached from Genesis 27:1-29 on a story about Jacob getting a blessing from his father.

This story helps us to see that, with social media and other aspects of the internet, it’s not the tool that’s the problem. The problem is when we go to get an identity through something that was meant to be a tool, rather than expressing an identity that we already have.

In the story of Jacob, we see the significance of longing for a blessing. This blessing required self-disclosure, the risk of being known by another person. We were created to receive blessing, but you can’t bless yourself. Like Jacob, we often dress up to try to be blessed.

Jacob only received the gift of a real blessing when he let God bless him after wrestling with God. When we look at the cross, we see that Jesus gives us the gift of his Father’s blessing by taking a curse upon himself. Unlike Jacob’s older brother, Esau, Jesus freely shares his Father’s blessing with younger siblings.

Questions for prayer and reflection:

  1. How do you use social media or other forms of communication? Do you present a fake self to others in order to be known as you wish to be?
  2. Do you regularly “clothe yourself with Christ” by refusing to gratify sinful desires?
  3. Do you clothe yourself with love, compassion, kindness, etc. as Paul tells his readers to do? How might this change the way you interact with others when using technology?
  4. What kind of self do you try to present to others? What would it mean to approach God and other people more honestly and openly, relying only on the perfection of Jesus for a secure identity?
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