An updating of James 3 by Pastor Marcus

Listen family, when you set yourself up to be Jesus’s public relations figure, you’re putting yourself in a position of incredible scrutiny.  Not by your audience, but by the one for which you claim to speak.  Here’s the deal, God’s word can never be mistaken, but the rest of us can’t go more than five minutes without getting off-track in thought, word or deed.  It would take a true saint, be a mark of true perfection, if a person never said, posted, tweeted, or snapped something they didn’t instantly know was going to come back to bite them.  You could trust that person to never do anything wrong…ever!  We use such small buttons and switches to power enormous machines; a handheld joystick can smoothly direct the flight of a space shuttle!  And now our thoughts can be quickly sent out through the handheld devices we carry with us everywhere.  Wildfires that burn thousands of acres start with a single spark, but they’ve got nothing on the way a 140 character tweet can inflame passions.  It can blaze right through the body of believers, leaving third degree burns that at best will scar, and at worst might never heal.  This is just what our enemy wants, being the master of the quick word that can derail a person’s life and set them on a road to ultimate destruction.  So much of our world has been brought to heel in this modern age.  We cross rivers, mountains and oceans without a thought, we cure diseases, we have made famine a foreign concept and we predict the weather.  All that control and yet the same ability has allowed us to unleash our words with less restraint and to greater harm.  Our words now go viral, infecting our lives with toxins worse than any carcinogen.  The same FB feed features inspirational thoughts about God (#blessed!) and wild rants that portray our “friends” as the worst possible monsters.  Scrolling through such a world presents us with an impossible reality.  You don’t turn on the tap wondering whether water or raw sewage will emerge, do you?  No more than you expect McDonald’s to replace the BigMac with a raw Kale wrap.

Don’t buy the culture’s view of what makes someone sophisticated and cosmopolitan.  Real savvy consists in refusing to blare your “POV” just because you can.  It is a hellish version of wisdom that feel the need to assert itself just to prove its superiority to others.  That kind of bullying is born of bitter hearts that pervert the truth.  It is the product of an earth-bound values system in which “might makes right.”  God’s approach makes peace because it is single-minded in its devotion to His kingdom and is therefore unafraid of the thoughts of others, willing to extend grace and to do good to all, never making the mistake of taking sides in merely human disagreements.  That’s why it is always discreet and sincere.  It produces the outcome of the blessing of God’s shalom, recognized by all who see it.

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