When Mark Zuckerberg was a teenager at Phillips Exeter Academy, he kept up with students\u2019 names and faces by using a \u201cface book\u201d — a booklet published annually containing the names and pictures of students and faculty.<\/p>\n
Zuckerberg is now 32 and a billionaire as the result of creating his own face book: Facebook.com, the largest social networking site on the Internet. Since Facebook has more than 1 billion registered users, there\u2019s a chance you are a member or have a friend or relative who is.<\/p>\n
A place where lots of people know your name<\/p>\n
The TV comedy \u201cCheers\u201d used its theme song, \u201cWhere Everybody Knows Your Name,\u201d to touch a nerve in American culture: the need to connect with others. Cheers\u2019 characters met daily to stay in touch, proving the theme song\u2019s premise: \u201cSometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name.\u201d<\/p>\n
That\u2019s what Facebook has become — a place for \u201cfriends\u201d to share life. I put \u201cfriends\u201d in quotations because on Facebook the term is used loosely, to put it mildly. If you aren\u2019t familiar with Facebook, a \u201cfriend\u201d is someone you are linked with and with whom you can share information, pictures and the like. Some people accumulate \u201cfriends\u201d for the prestige factor. But most people genuinely want to be in touch with family, acquaintances and, yes, actual friends.<\/p>\n
But there is another side to putting yourself \u201cout there\u201d on a social networking site like Facebook.<\/p>\n
Your life \u2013- for all the world to see<\/p>\n
Once you go public on Facebook, you are inviting the entire world to know about your life — or at least hundreds of \u201cfriends.\u201d The larger your \u201cfriends\u201d network, the more likely someone will read something you thought would stay private and make it public. For that reason, Facebook becomes a source of accountability.<\/p>\n
For Christians, Facebook is another opportunity to ask ourselves, Who am I? Who is the person I am presenting to the world? What are my friends learning about me? Is my Christian walk matching my Christian talk? Am I the same person on Facebook as I am in church?<\/p>\n
Living a life above reproach<\/p>\n
It\u2019s always been true that \u201cyou can run, but you can\u2019t hide\u201d — and the internet has made it doubly true. But we shouldn\u2019t want to! What can we do to live the kind of life the apostle Paul called \u201cblameless,\u201d or \u201cabove reproach\u201d (1 Timothy 3:2)? How can we live a life in which there is no dividing wall between public and private?<\/p>\n
First, live intimately and honestly before God. When the double life King David had been living was brought to light by a prophet from God, he recorded his psalm of contrition for all to read (Psalm 51). What he thought was hidden had been in God\u2019s sight all along.<\/p>\n
David\u2019s other great testament to transparency is found in Psalm 139 where he confessed that God is everywhere and sees everything. He concluded with what should be our prayer daily: \u201cSearch me, know me, test my heart, show me anything You see that I don\u2019t see. And lead me in Your way\u201d (Psalm 139:23-24, paraphrased).<\/p>\n
Second, live openly before the Word of God. The writer of Hebrews reminds us that everything is \u201cnaked and open to the eyes of Him to whom we must give account.\u201d God shows us what He sees in us by the \u201cliving and powerful\u201d Word of God, revealing the \u201cthoughts and intents of the heart\u201d (Hebrews 4:12). Psalm 119:9 reminds us that we \u201ccleanse\u201d our way by \u201ctaking heed according to [God\u2019s] word.\u201d Meditating \u201cday and night\u201d on \u201cthe law of the LORD\u201d will result in the \u201creproof\u201d and \u201ccorrection\u201d we need (Psalm 1:2; 2 Timothy 3:16).<\/p>\n
Third, live accountably before others. Hebrews 10:24-25 affirms that we are to motivate \u201cone another\u201d to live a life of \u201clove and good works,\u201d \u201cexhorting one another.\u201d Family is our first line of defense against living with double standards. The family of God should be second. If you are not in a small group or some other context with Christians, you are missing out on one of the chief blessings of the body of Christ: accountability for a life of holiness.<\/p>\n
If you are a member of Facebook, use it as a place to cultivate the life you want your best friend, Jesus Christ, to see daily.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When Mark Zuckerberg was a teenager at Phillips Exeter Academy, he kept up with students\u2019 names and faces by using a \u201cface book\u201d — a booklet published annually containing the names and pictures of students and faculty. Zuckerberg is now 32 and a billionaire as the result of creating his own face book: Facebook.com, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[83,2747,223,203],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6959"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6959"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6959\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6959"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6959"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6959"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}