Nobody is As Happy as He Seems on FaceBook

A must read from Russell Moore:

Why FaceBook and Your Church Might be Making You Sad

Here is just a tiny excerpt to tempt you to click through …

“By not speaking, where the Bible speaks, to the full range of human emotion—including loneliness, guilt, desolation, anger, fear, desperation—we only leave our people there, wondering why they just can’t be ‘Christian’ enough to smile through it all.

The gospel speaks a different word though. Jesus says, ‘Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted’ (Matt. 5:4). In the kingdom, we receive comfort in a very different way than we’re taught to in American culture. We receive comfort not by, on the one hand, whining in our sense of entitlement or, on the other hand, pretending as though we’re happy. We are comforted when we see our sin, our brokenness, our desperate circumstances, and we grieve, we weep, we cry out for deliverance.

That’s why James, the brother of our Lord, seems so out of step with the contemporary evangelical ethos. ‘Be wretched and mourn and weep,’ he writes. ‘Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom’ (Jas. 4:9). What would happen to a church leader who ended his service by saying to his people, ‘Have a wretched day!’ or ‘I hope you all cry your eyes out this week!’ It would sound crazy. Jesus always does sound crazy to us, at first (Jn. 7:15, 20).

Nobody is as happy as he seems on Facebook. And no one is as ‘spiritual’ as he seems in what we deem as ‘spiritual’ enough for Christian worship. Maybe what we need in our churches is more tears, more failure, more confession of sin, more prayers of desperation that are too deep for words.

Maybe then the lonely and the guilty and the desperate among us will see that the gospel has come not for the happy, but for the brokenhearted; not for the well, but for the sick; not for the found, but for the lost …”

(HT: Challies)