The Blogger: poster below sounds frustrated, I understand his point though I disagree with his solution.I can see a use and a abuse of facebook, twitter, and frankly prayer also.
A prayer chain is about as scriptural as a TWEET VERSE, they are tools based on scripture, not scripture.
Me?
I pray and leave it to God. I tweet and leave it to God. I post and leave it to God. I read and leave it to God. I facebook and leave it to God. I go to church and leave it to God. I help my neighbor and leave it to God. I do as little or as lot as I do, and leave it to God.
You can tell by my picture, I leave alot to God, but what little I do, what I can, I leave it to God and He lets me Trust Him to do the rest.
How about You? Leave it to God?
Michael James Stone
Twittering Time Away
It’s hard to imagine that there once was a time when it was almost impossible for the average person to own a copy of the Holy Bible. Until the invention of the printing press, each Bible had to be transcribed by hand.
Today, I have dozens of Bibles around the house. You can go to a dollar store and find piles of Bibles that were mass-produced in China. For a buck, you can also buy a digital copy of the Bible. I have a text file of the Bible that I can email to anyone around the world. It's amazing to think that my Bible file would only take three seconds to transmit to someone with a cable modem. During the Middle Ages, it would have taken take three years to produce the same text for someone wealthy enough to afford one.
Over the course of time, we have gone from information resources being rare to them being in amazing abundance. In fact, I think we are now drowning in a sea of data. The internet has become a vast wasteland of trivial or useless garbage.
If you type the name “Jesus Christ” into a search engine, you will receive, as I did in Yahoo, 179 million results. There are some good links, but many are harmful. The Mormon cult alone has four links in the top twenty listings.
I've always thought the best plan of operation for any Christian website is to assess what value content will have the moment after the rapture. I would say that 80 percent of the information on the average prophecy site would become useless after the rapture. Most prophetic domains devote most of their space to news and issues with a temporary importance.
One of Satan's main strategies in the destruction of men's souls is to simply stall for time. Because people are born in a lost state, the devil knows that he wins by default. By causing Christians to waste time, he can achieve victory.
Christians who have the desire to be about the Lord's work need to ask themselves, "Am I actually doing something productive?" I've seen all kinds of examples of folks engaged in trivial activity.
At least twice a month for the past five years, a woman named Mary Sullivan has been sending me and several leading figures in prophecy a forty-page email that attacks the pretrib rapture. I'm sure none of the other people on her list ever bother to read her manifesto.
The lack of priorities is another problem. I was once told about a woman who spends vast amounts of time on the internet posting news stories and running a message board. While she was cruising the internet nonstop, her daughter tried to commit suicide. I don't know the details of situation, but the incident had no effect on her internet activity.
Social networking sites like FaceBook, MySpace, and Twitter are key examples of misspent energy. I would single out Twitter as the leader of the pack. I've seen dozens of Christian sites incorporate Twitter into their web activity, and I can't recall one that posted anything meaningful. Most “Tweets,” as they are called, are just a log of what someone has done somewhere else on the ‘net. An example for RR would be, "I updated Nearing Midnight,” "I updated the Rapture Index," or "I added new articles to the site." I think the demise of Twitter will be the mass realization that nobody cares about the mundane activities of people’s lives.
This week, I found a great example of the fruits that spring from the productive use of time. A woman emailed me about the leader of an end-time cult. She asked me if I had any information on Irvin Baxter. Before I could reply to her, she had sent me another email, saying, "I sent you an email earlier about Irvin Baxter and his study on end-time prophecies. Interestingly enough, I typed in his name on Google and came upon the section of your site that has talked about him."
I long ago realized that one reason RR has been so successful is that so many Christians are wasting time. In the case of the woman who was looking for information on Baxter, there should have been a dozen apologetic sites with more detailed information ahead of us on the Google search results. These sites don't exist because most believers are focused on pursuits of trivial importance.
I firmly believe that if you pray long enough and hard enough for someone to come to faith in Christ, your intercession will eventually work. Unfortunately, it may take many years to achieve this goal. The time may come when there is not enough time. It may take ten years to lead your stubborn brother to the Lord. But if the Lord is coming two years from now, you’re eight years too late. Time is an important commodity, so don't be twittering it away.
-- Todd
