Taken from Jesus on Self-Promotion | Matthew 6.1-4
“Thus, when you give to the needy, sound no trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be praised by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward.”
“Being noticed is not evil; but trying, expecting, or wanting to be noticed may be. And this is where all of us live. Our culture is all about being noticed for the good, bad, or weird thing you do. While its unlikely you’ll post a YouTube video that will go viral, you can still try and get noticed by others on Facebook, or FAKEBOOK. If Jesus were on earth today, I think instead he may have said “what comes out on Facebook proceeds from the heart.” Of course, you don’t believe you’re on there to get noticed…but you are. I will contend that most of what men/women put up on Facebook is motivated out of a desire to make other people think a certain way about THEM—usually positive. Whispering wasn’t invented for compliments and Facebook wasn’t invented for confession.
FAKEBOOK is all about making your life appear better than it actually is. We upload “artistic” profile pictures so people think we’re good looking. We wish our brides happy anniversary to make people thing we’re good husbands. We report the dates we go on with our daughters so that others will think we’re good Dads. We post pictures of our food so people will think we are good cooks. We post quotes from books we haven’t read so people will think we have good brains. We like organizations so that people will think we are good citizens. We friend people we’d never talk so people will think we are loving. We like comments so that people will think we are good friends. We post rants so people will think we are good consumers. FAKEBOOK is all about making your life appear better than it actually is—its’ a giant APPROVAL machine where we pretend to be someone else so that others will like us. FACEBOOK is the biggest trumpet we have today—it’s a one billion person brass band!”
