July 12, 2016

Thoughts during the night

1. Anything in excess is an idol against the One true God.

2. An idol is any created thing.

3. Satan and his evil ways always mirror the Truth of Jesus Christ and confuse many.

4. Satan doesn’t come up with any new tactics to take people’s eyes off of Jesus, he just uses the idols of that day that fits into our society.

5. At the root of an idol is pride and the focus is not on God or the things of God but it is on ‘self’ just like satan’s focus.

6. Nothing in and of itself is an idol; job, family, spouse, work, sex, money, food, rest, drink, pleasure etc.

7. But when any one thing becomes more important than spending time with, trusting and knowing more intimately Jesus Christ, it becomes an idol.

8. Satan wanted to be like God. He wanted the attention, he wanted to be in control, he wanted to call the shots, God wasn’t enough for him. He didn’t worship the King of kings, he wanted to be worshiped and God kicked him out of Heaven where one day he will be thrown into the lake of fire and suffer for all of eternity, fully separated from the very God he rejected.

9. Satan wants to take people with him. He is subtle, he is patient, he is sneaky and he disguises a potential idol as “a good thing” as “something that we think we need” until we are overtaken by it and don’t know how to live without it.

10. His attacks are ramping up and his methods are attacking humanity at a younger and younger age.

11. If you were born before 1970 think about how your week looked in the first 20 years of your life… a) no or very few sports on Sundays b) family dinners c) many households only had 1 TV d) no computers, cell phones or social media

12. Today the average household has a cell phone for each family member. Children, as young as 2 have Ipads. 4 year olds get onto the internet as easy as turning on the TV.

13. Look around a restaurant. What do you see? How many people are engaging in face to face conversations verses how many are staring at a small device in their hands?

14. Communication with each other is a necessity of life. Broken communication led to the sin of Adam and Eve in the Garden. Information is how societies grow. Both are important, but when either become more important than communicating with our Creator, it is called an idol.

15. Communication is becoming less and less focused on deepening a relationship with someone else as it is becoming an obsession to tell the world about superficial things about yourself.

16. The average child will look to have a Facebook page, Twitter account, will frequent Snapchat, texting and Pinterest more times a day than engaging in face to face conversations. Why?
Something I heard last night while watching a TV program later woke me up in the middle of the night. The statement made was. “She has over 1 million followers.”

Our society, through Satan’s sneaky unassuming ways, is creating mini-gods at an alarming rate.

The only one anyone should be called a ‘follower’ of is Jesus Christ. The world will not see it this way, but all those who call themselves Christ followers need to take a step back and look at who they are truly following. Jesus followers need to be set apart from the counterfeit of Satan who through social media is taking millions of souls eyes off of God and putting their focus on themselves, who are unknowingly or knowingly looking for their own followers. When our focus becomes, “who liked my page?”; “who shared my link?”; “how many followers do I have on Twitter?”, it shows that too much focus is going on the creation and not the Creator.
Christians be careful. We are not to follow the worlds ways out of convenience, because of our culture, due to the way the world says it should be. Do not be deceived to think that Satan is not behind society spending more time looking at themselves and not to God.

Satan is a master of deception. He wants the world to follow him and his ways and he wants the Christians to be less and less effective in showing the world who we are to truly follow. He does this with distractions.

1. What do you desire first thing in the morning? To commune with Jesus or to check your status and social media pages?

2. How much free time do you spend reading the bible, praying for others, helping those in need, sacrificing for others, each day?

3. What is the last thing you look at or think of before going to bed? A scripture, the love of Jesus, or a TV show or social media?

How serious you are about the Kingdom of God is determined by the amount of time and effort you pour into others because Jesus is coming back soon.

How distracted you are about the Kingdom of God is determined by the amount of time and effort you spend on focusing on yourself.
Jesus said in Luke 9:23

“If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow Me.”

Instead of basing our identity on social media and striving to have people pay attention to us, and follow us, we need to base our identity on the only one worthy of our full attention, the only one worthy to follow, Jesus.