Does Ephesians 5:16 Apply To How Much We Use Facebook?

I was convicted a few days ago about how much of my time I spend on things that really don't matter that much, particularly facebook. I don't really spend a ridiculous amount of time on facebook, but it seems like more often than not, I will get logged in, spend a few minutes doing "important" things (like responding to messages, commenting on people's status, and taking quizzes), and before I know it, it is a half hour later! This has started to bother me, and it might be an area in your life that is a problem as well (God only knows, I don't).

While I was thinking about this, one verse in particular came to mind. In Ephesians 5:15-16 we read, "Therefore be careful how you walk, not as unwise men but as wise, making the most of your time, because the days are evil." When I remembered this verse, the thought struck me: "I wonder if this has anything to say about how much I use facebook?" It is obvious that Paul meant for this truth to impact each and every part of our lives, and so I realized that it must also have something to say about using facebook.

So what is Paul trying to tell us here? The word behind the phrase that most Bible translations put as "making the most of your time" would be literally translated as "redeeming" the time. It's not entirely clear what Paul meant by "redeeming the time", but he seems to be suggesting that time is a precious commodity that slips away from us all too easily. In fact, since our time is a resource, however we spend it is an investment. If we are not wise and intentional about how we spend this resource, it will be wasted. And because of this, in light of what God has done for us in Christ and the new realities of grace that this brings to our lives, we have a responsibility to "buy back" the time that would otherwise be wasted. This isn't just a matter of getting the most activity that we can squeezed into an already full day; it is a matter of using our time wisely and in a way that will most honor God.

Switching back to facebook, then, what would this truth that Paul is trying to teach us have to say about how much we use social networking? I believe that there valid uses for facebook, and that many people have been successful in using it as a tool for evangelism, restoring old relationships, and promoting ministry events. But if you are honest with yourself, you might find that more often than not it just becomes an opportunity to squander your time. This is certainly the case for me. I have found ways of using facebook to promote different ministry events, to share the gospel, and to encourage other believers, but I also get sucked into the trap of just wasting time on it as well. As Gregg Harris (an elder at my church) would probably say, "Facebook loves you, and it has a wonderful plan for how you spend your time and money!"

Where do we go from here, then? It would be inappropriate and wrong for me to say that you should no longer use facebook, or that it is sinful to use it for more than ten minutes a day. It may be necessary, however, for you to limit yourself in terms of how often you use it. For myself, I'm not planning on giving myself a time limit, but I do intend to ask myself whether the ways in which I'm using it are a "redemptive" use of my time, or whether they are just wasting another precious day that God has given me as a gift. If I do that, I really believe that I will begin to find more time in my day, find myself spread less thin between a number of different activities, and I will find the opportunity to seek the face of God more. May God give us all the grace to use our time wisely, to turn away from the areas where we waste it, and to do everything with a mind toward honoring Him in all our thoughts, words, and deeds.

Why Prayer Must Be The Foundation Of Any Movement Empowered By God

I've been really impressed lately by the need of my local church to give ourselves as a body to corporate prayer. This is sort of strange to me, because up until a few years ago prayer never really mattered to me that much; this tells me that this impression is almost certainly from God. But this also got me thinking about the question, "What's so special about corporate prayer?"

For a lot of people, it seems like it should be good enough to pray individually, or even just as families. After all, doesn't Jesus say in Matthew 6:6, "But you, when you pray, go into your inner room, close your door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you"? It is good (and very important) to pray individually and in smaller groups (such as families), but if prayer never goes beyond this level, I believe that the church will never have access to all of the power of God that He wants to give to those who are earnestly seeking Him. And I'm convinced that the reason that God will only give certain things in response to prayer is because prayer itself must be the foundation of any movement empowered by God.

Now this last statement ("prayer itself must be the foundation of any movement empowered by God") might have caught you off guard, but when you consider the nature of what sin really is, you will also see that prayer is one of the ultimate antidotes toward the problem of sin that God has given Christians in this life. At the core, I believe that sin is self-reliance rather than God-reliance. When Adam and Eve sinned against God in the Garden of Eden, the problem wasn't so much that they ate a piece of poisonous fruit that killed them spiritually; the problem was that in the act of eating that fruit, they declared independence from the expressed will of God for their lives, and in the process became self-reliant. To put it in other words, they thought that they knew better than God did how they should live, and this attitude of rebellion killed them. And because of this, as God is working in our lives to undo the effects of sin ("sanctification"), He is also teaching us to live in the way that Adam and Eve should have lived in the first place-in a trusting, reliant relationship with God. This doesn't mean just believing that God's way is best; it means seeking God out constantly for His insight, His wisdom, His strength, His motivation, and His joy. It means we seek God out through prayer.

With this in mind, it begins to make sense why the Bible talks so much about the importance of prayer. God could easily just give us whatever we need without our asking it (see Matthew 6:32), but He evidently sees much more need for the asking than we do. The reason for this, like I just said before, is because in the process of asking, we are making a conscious decision to rely upon God instead of ourselves. God doesn't want us to continue making the same mistake that our first parents made thousands of years ago and that humans have been making ever since. Instead of just trusting that what we already think is best, He wants us to come to Him again and again, over and over, trusting that as we come to Him each and every day, He will give us the good things that we need to continue on in this battle.

So what does this mean for prayer on the corporate level, such as in the church? If God wants me as an individual to depend on Him in prayer for my everyday life, and if He wants our families to look to Him over and over again to provide the things we need, how much more does He want our churches to express this same attitude of dependence and reliance on Him as we come together as a group of believers in prayer! The reason that prayer must be the foundation of any movement empowered by God is because it is only through prayer that will we truly be relying on Him rather than on ourselves, and it is only through prayer that God will get all the glory that He deserves out of us. We can try to keep doing things on our own-relying on our own ideas, trying to muster up our own strength, and hoping that we will see things clearly enough to chart a course into the future-but if we do this, we are making exactly the same mistake that Adam and Eve made. We might not put it in so many words or even admit that this is the case, but when our churches are marked by an attitude of being prayerless, they are also marked by an attitude of being self-reliant and they are possibly quite offensive to God. May God give us all the grace to seek Him through prayer each and every day as individuals, as families, and as local church congregations.

"A prayerless man is proud and independent, and any church that neglects corporate prayer is sadly no better. Only God's humble and needy children take the time to pray. Everyone else is just going through the motions and naively trusting in their own strength!" (David Smithers)

"The condition of the church may be very accurately gauged by its prayer meetings. So is the prayer meeting a grace-ometer, and from it we may judge of the amount of divine working among a people. If God be near a church, it must pray. And if He be not there, one of the first tokens of His absence will be a slothfulness in prayer!" (Charles Spurgeon)

When Was God At His Best?

I just came across a sermon by the late Pastor E.V. Hill called "When Was God At His Best" that he gave at Chicago's Moody Bible Institute in 1992. I posted it to my podcast site (http://theologymeetslife.mypodcast.com), so you can check it out there if you are interested. This is honestly one of the best and most passionate sermons that I've ever heard-check it out!

The Names of God

God's Covenant Love

I've been meditating a lot lately on what we mean when we say that "God is love". I know that this statement is obviously true, but it's a slippery concept to really get your hands around. Do we mean by this that God acts in loving ways, that God somehow equals love, or something else altogether? For the most part, I suspect that many of us just take the best experiences of love that we have had in life and somehow transfer those onto God, and assume that this is basically what God is (except maybe a little bit bigger and better). But I've come to the conviction recently that none of these explanations of what "God is love" means really does the concept any sort of justice. In fact, I am now convinced that the only way we can begin to understand God's love is from the perspective of "covenant love".

As soon as I mention the idea of covenants here, I realize that I run into a problem. In our society, we have nothing at all similar to what the Bible is talking about when it talks about covenants. The closest thing we have to a biblical covenant is marriage, and for the most part marriage as it is practiced in the Western world is not covenantal at all. But, by way of summary, what I mean when I speak of a covenant is an agreement between two parties to do certain things, to not do other things, and rewards and punishments which will be invoked if either party breaks their side of the deal. God has always been in the business of making covenants, and we cannot understand His love apart from this important concept.

So with this understanding of covenant in place, what do we learn about covenants from the Bible? I can't do any sort of justice to fully explaining the idea of covenant as we find it in the Bible here, but to be brief, covenants are so significant in the Bible because God's reputation is at stake when He enters into covenant. There is nothing outside of God that could ever compel Him to enter into a covenant with anyone else; in fact, if He does choose to make a covenant, it's entirely an act of grace on His part. But when He does enter into covenant (whether with Noah, Abraham, the Israelites through Moses, or under the New Covenant), He is limiting Himself to act only in certain ways, and not in other ways. And what happens if God breaks His end of the deal? He would be proven to be unfaithful; He would be a covenant-breaker. There is no way that God would ever allow this to happen, and so for His own name's sake He will be faithful to keep His covenant perfectly. With this in mind, verses in the Old Testament relating to covenant begin to make sense.

Jeremiah 33:23-26: "And the word of the LORD came to Jeremiah, saying, “Have you not observed what this people have spoken, saying, ‘The two families which the LORD chose, He has rejected them’? Thus they despise My people, no longer are they as a nation in their sight. “Thus says the LORD, ‘If My covenant for day and night stand not, and the fixed patterns of heaven and earth I have not established, then I would reject the descendants of Jacob and David My servant, not taking from his descendants rulers over the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. But I will restore their fortunes and will have mercy on them.’ ""

Because God had entered into a covenant relationship with the descendants of Israel, His covenant love and faithfulness to them was as certain as the fact that the regular motions of day and night would continue. And of course, since God's covenant with day and night will continue until the end of this present creation, He is basically saying "Look, there's no way this thing is going to fail. Even if the sun stopped coming up in the morning and the moon at night, I would still be good for my word-it's that certain." We also see Moses getting at this same idea when He recounts what he told God after the rebellion at Kadesh-Barnea:

Deuteronomy 9:26-29: "I prayed to the LORD and said, ‘O Lord GOD, do not destroy Your people, even Your inheritance, whom You have redeemed through Your greatness, whom You have brought out of Egypt with a mighty hand. Remember Your servants, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; do not look at the stubbornness of this people or at their wickedness or their sin. Otherwise the land from which You brought us may say, “ Because the LORD was not able to bring them into the land which He had promised them and because He hated them He has brought them out to slay them in the wilderness.” Yet they are Your people, even Your inheritance, whom You have brought out by Your great power and Your outstretched arm.’"

In this passage, Moses made no argument that the people did not deserve to be destroyed; instead, He appealed to God's reputation especially as it related to His covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Since God is always a God of covenant faithfulness and love, Moses challenged Him to demonstrate that covenant love to His people by not destroying them but rather by going ahead of them into the promised land. This is quite a bold challenge that Moses made to God, but he was able to make it because he was confident that not only is God a God of love, but that He is also a God of covenant love.

So what difference does it make if God is a God of "covenant love" rather than just regular old love? This makes a difference because it very likely will change how we expect God to act toward us in the future. If we just think that God is love, then we can expect Him to act in ways that are always loving. But here is the problem: what if we become unlovable? What if we get to the place where God just decides to say, "That's it, enough! I've had enough of them, I'm through putting up with them!" From the perspective of ordinary love, that's a possible outcome. But if God is really a God of covenant love, He will always be faithful to His covenant promises to us, even when we aren't especially "lovable" or acting in ways that reflect His character. God does truly love us with a passion and power that outdoes that of ten thousand burning suns, but He has demonstrated this love to us specifically through a (new) covenant, one that He entered into freely and without compulsion. If God ever gets to the point where He simply gets sick of us, He will still be faithful to us, because it's not just us that He's dealing with; His own reputation is at stake. Because of this, we can cling to those same covenant promises that God made to Israel:

Isaiah 49:14-16: "But Zion said, “The LORD has forsaken me, and the Lord has forgotten me.” Can a woman forget her nursing child and have no compassion on the son of her womb? Even these may forget, but I will not forget you. Behold, I have inscribed you on the palms of My hands; your walls are continually before Me."

Worth And Sin

I want to share with you a chapter out of the book "Becoming What God Intended" by David Eckman. This is a book that had a profound influence on me about 5 or 6 years ago; I would go so far as to say that it was the first book that really challenged me to see my spiritual growth as an issue of living and fleshing out the reality of what God has already made me to be in Christ. To put this in other words, God has given us a firm, certain, and unshakable identity in Christ, and the essence of spiritual growth and maturity is making that identity a reality in all that we say, think, and do. This chapter, then, is dealing with the topic of "Worth and Sin". (Just a note: there are a few bits of theology in here that I don't agree with, especially in the first two paragraphs, but I would encourage you to overlook this for the time being and focus on the spirit of what Eckman is saying.)

God's Ultimate Expression Of Love

God's ultimate expression of love for us came when we were in the pit of sin and ungodliness. God's love raised a cross over that dark pit and Jesus' outstretched arms displayed the dimensions of His love. The quality of that live is not based upon what we did right, because we were not doing anything right. The word 'ungodly' is translated from the Greek asabeia, meaning a person who doesn't know how to act around, respect, or respond to God.

Amazingly, according to the latter part of Romans chapter 5, Jesus died for those who are destined to become believers as well as those who won't become believers. His death was not a stock market investment based on financial wheeling and dealing for His own gain. His death was based on what He felt all of us were worth to Him.

Imagine A Walk With God

To illustrate this, take a moment to imagine the time in your life when you committed your most embarrassing sin or set of sins. Imagine that time. Dredge it up. Pull it up to your consciousness, no matter how red-faced you get. The sin might have been only a trifle, or it might have been something absolutely terrible.

Once you have it in your mind, imagine that in the midst of committing that sin, you hear a knocking at the door. The knocking is steady. The knocking is persistent. You know you must answer it. In great embarrassment and discomfort you go to the door. Your mind races. You wonder who it might be-the neighbors, the police, your spouse. Whoever it is, you know you have been caught at your most shameful, guilty moment.

You open the door with great fear, but to your surprise, you are met with the most understanding and compassionate facial expression you have ever seen in your life. The individual at the door looks into your eyes and says, "I am God the Father. I have picked out this moment because I need to talk with you. Let's go for a walk."

With great hesitation, you step alongside Him. He looks at you again with that same striking facial expression-total understanding marked by real compassion. Then He says, "I know you are weak. I know what you were doing. I know, whether you recognize it or not, that you intensely dislike me. And I know that deep at the core you have no great interest in a relationship with me. You're ungodly. But I need to share with you that I am the only one who knows who you are. You don't even know who you are. You are chained by guilt, you are bound by shame, and you are running on deep resentment."

"But I can see beyond your problems and I can see someone you have never seen-I can see you. Because I know who you are, I've intervened at this moment to show you what you are worth to my Son and Me."

At that point, His hand directs your eyes to a hillside where you see a cross bearing a young man whose face radiates with that same astonishing expression-total understanding marked by real compassion. You suddenly realize that the man on the cross is God's Son. The Father says softly, "We picked this strategic moment. We didn't pick the moment when you will be wonderful and successful in the future. We chose this moment to show you how serious we are and how significant you are to us. My Son is dying for you because you are worth a Son to Me. You are worth more than your guilt to Us. We are the only ones who know who you are!"

Counterfeit Love

Immersed in sin and unbelief, we are still worth a Son from the perspective of this generous-hearted God. Many of us, however, are used to a totally different kind of love. Fair-whether friendships can be heartbreaking experiences. Perhaps all of us have experienced relationships where someone has told us they love us, but we find out they love us only for what we can do, what we've got, or who we know. This is not love, but a sour counterfeit that leaves an emptiness that is hard to overcome.

Have you ever been involved in a situation where you thought you had an everlasting friendship with someone but later found out they had ulterior motives?

All of us want to be loved for who we are. Yet we are unwilling to risk exposure of our true selves because we are scared to death that if somebody finds out who we are, they'll run from us.

We don't have to run from God's love for His love hunts us down. The great word for God's love in the New Testament is agape. In the Old Testament Hebrew, one of the great words for God's love is Kesed. Kesed not only underscores God's affection for His own; it also has the element of loyalty in it. Meaning "loyal affection", it occurs in Psalm 23:6 where King David said, "Only goodness and 'loyal affection' has hunted me all the days of my life." The Israelites, the Philistines, the Edomites, the Ammonites and nearly everyone else in the ancient world tried to catch and kill King David. But when his life was nearing its end, his observation was that only God's affection and loyalty caught him.

Often our world only offers short-term loyalty and "stock market" like affection. God not only offers long-term loyalty with infinite affection, but He places it upon His own.

God's Grace: A Light Shining in the Darkness of Weakness and Suffering

For those of you who are interested, I just posted the audio to a sermon that I preached recently at my home church, so it is available to listen to online. The sermon was given on August 29th, 2009 at Gresham Household of Faith Community Church, and the title was "God's Grace: A Light Shining in the Darkness of Weakness and Suffering". You can listen to it here.

Does Your Prayer Life Make You The Kind Of Christian That Hell Fears?

I've been doing a lot of thinking lately about prayer and how it works in the life of a Christian. I know there is a lot of discussion and debate about the nature of prayer in view of God's sovereignty (for instance, does my prayer change God's intentions, or does it just change me?), but I am more interested in actually looking at what kind of person you are in prayer. To get at this issue, I would like to raise the question, "Does your prayer life make you the kind of Christian that hell fears?"

This might come across as a strange question, but I think we find evidence that there are some Christians in particular that are well-known in hell. For instance, we read in the book of Acts of the seven sons of Sceva, a Jewish priest, who were attempting to drive out demons in the name of Jesus just like Paul did. In response to this, the demon actually said in Acts 19:15: "I recognize Jesus, and I know about Paul, but who are you?" For this demon to know about Jesus is not at all surprising, since all things (including demons in some form) were created by Him. But for the demon to know of Paul is another matter entirely. Apparently Paul had created enough of a reputation for himself by preaching the gospel and overturning the kingdom of Satan that even this demon was aware of his ministry. And this is no little matter: for a Christian to be known in hell (and, I might suggest, even feared) is a weighty matter indeed.

With this in mind, we should recognize that we are obviously not the Apostle Paul, and that we do not have the same authoritative commissioning that he had to lay the foundation for the early church. But I believe that this principle still holds true: there are some Christians who are so sold-out for Jesus Christ and so passionate about doing His will that when God works through them, the very foundations of hell itself shake. This is not only true in outward and visible ministry; it is also true in prayer. In fact, as we learn about the armor of God in Ephesians 6, we learn that our fight as Christians is primarily spiritual in nature (cf. Eph. 6:12), and that the battles of this fight are fought out in the arena of prayer (cf. Eph. 6:18-20). So the question remains: does your prayer life make you the kind of Christian that hell fears?

For many Christians, and unfortunately for myself as well, our prayer lives fall far short of being the sort of thing that we would expect to be feared by hell. Instead of engaging in warfare in the Spirit, we spend most of our time presenting God with a check-list of things that we'd like Him to do for us. In fact, a good friend of mine once told me that "for most Christians, prayer is nothing more than an attempt to manipulate God with their thoughts". And I cannot count the number of prayer meetings that I have been in where the level of prayer never rises beyond telling God what is on our mind in order to move to what is on His mind. Because of this, I fear that when we stand before Jesus, He will say something to the effect of "Steven, I had many more things to tell you, but you could not bear them." It's just like Leonard Ravenhill used to say: "We are still paddling on the edge of the ocean of the possibilities of grace." There is so much more depth and breadth to prayer that we can't even appreciate, because we have stayed in the shallow end of the pool while all the while God is calling us to come out deeper and experience the fullness of His grace.

So if like me you often lack the power and depth in prayer that we are talking about here, what can you do? What can you do to become the kind of Christian whose prayers are powerful, effective, and whose effects are felt to the very core of the devil's kingdom itself? There is no simple answer to this, but I would begin by suggesting that any renewed dedication to prayer must begin with a renewed focus on God Himself. Instead of spending all your time in prayer this week by giving God His daily "to-do list", spend time praying over and meditating on the attributes of God. If you're at a loss for where to start, try beginning in Exodus 34:6-7 (which actually happens to be one of the most repeated verses within the Old Testament itself; it's pretty much the "John 3:16" of the Old Testament). Also, spend some time reading through and praying over Isaiah 40:10-31, a chapter unlike any other that reminds us of what kind of God He is that we really serve. And let your prayers flow out of that. As you get in touch with who God is, what pleases His heart, and what brings a smile to His face, you will come to share His heart for the world. In that process, you will come to genuinely love the things He loves, and hate the things He hates. And when you finally get to that point, you will begin to find yourself genuinely jealous for the reputation of God, angry that His name is being blasphemed among the nations, and zealous that His name might be made great in every corner of this world. It is only in the context of that burning passion for the glory of God that you will find yourself praying the kinds of prayers that make demons tremble, and then you will find yourself in a place where God will really work through you to magnify His name throughout the earth.