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    Engage: A Christian Witness Online
    Engage: A Christian Witness Online
    Engage: A Christian Witness Online
    Ebook67 pages58 minutes

    Engage: A Christian Witness Online

    By Daniel Darling

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    About this ebook

    What does your social media status say about your faith in Christ? Is it possible to be both courageous and yet civil when speaking about controversial issues in the public square?  Check out this new e-book from ERLC written by Daniel Darling. Engage offers some simple guidelines for maintaining a Christian witness online.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHillcrest Media Group
    Release dateMar 27, 2015
    ISBN9780990906162
    Engage: A Christian Witness Online

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      Book preview

      Engage - Daniel Darling

      PREACHERS

      ONE

      A WORLD OF

      WORDS

      IF SILENCE IS GOLDEN, NOT MANY PEOPLE CAN BE ARRESTED FOR HOARDING.

      E.C. MCKENZIE

      For a moment, visualize a limitless commodity, a supply whose flow is constricted only by a lack of imagination. A resource so malleable it transcends histories and economies and social structures. Today it may be transmitted online, face-to-face, over radio and television and cellular waves. Yesterday by papyri and parchment, leaf or slate.

      Imagine a tool as easily employed by nimble thumbs and moist lips as a simple quill. A tool as powerful in a lush garden as on a rough-hewn Roman instrument of execution.

      In an age of shortage, from energy resources to clean air to basic nutrition, this product’s supply becomes more abundant as it is used, and its power can be leveraged for both the greatest social good and the most destructive social evil.

      It’s the simple commodity of words.

      Today, perhaps more than any age in history, we live in a world of words. Never before have so many words been spoken to so many people across so many platforms with such great efficiency.

      Consider social media first. Facebook has 1.39 billion users worldwide, 890 million of whom log in to share 4.75 billion pieces of content each day.¹ Add the 500 million daily tweets sent on Twitter and over 285 million blogs on Tumblr and WordPress.² In addition, an untold number of podcasts, books, and print articles are readily available. And I didn’t even mention (pun intended) the millions of daily words uttered around the world in speeches, cable TV shows, business meetings, sermons, and personal communication. The economy of words stretches upward and outward as far as the eye can see.

      A LIFE OF WORDS

      I’ve had a lifelong love of words. I grew up with parents who highly valued reading, furnishing an endless supply of novels, biographies, and historical works to satiate my appetite for knowledge. Our dinner table was always a lively place of communication, where we marshaled forth our best political, religious, and cultural arguments. In school, I had teachers who nurtured my passion for communication through written and oral presentations.

      For the vast majority of my adult life, I’ve made a living with words as an editor, columnist, author, pastor, and speaker.

      So yes, I’m a man of words. But if you can look past my over-the-top assessment, you too will realize that you live in a world shaped, largely, by words.

      The book of Hebrews tells us that it was a word, the word of God, that formed the worlds (Heb. 11:3). God used words to instruct the children of Israel, literally writing with his hand on tablets of stone (Exod. 31:18). It is through these and the rest of the Scriptures—written words inspired by God, chronicled by man—where we learn of God and find faith (John 5:39; Rom. 10:17). Jesus, the gospel writer John says, is the living word of God (John 1:1). As a man, he was sustained by the very power of God’s Word (Matt. 4:4). As God incarnate, it was his last words on the cross, It is finished, that satisfied the wrath of God and secured the faith of those who believe (John 19:30).

      To be sure, words alone, by themselves, are not the whole of life. The pastor of the first church in Jerusalem, the Apostle James, reminds us that we must not simply be hearers of the word, but doers (James 1:22). The aging Apostle John, in one of his final letters to the Church, cautions us to not simply love with words, but with action (1 John 3:18).

      And yet, we must acknowledge that words do matter. Words are weighty things. Consider how the Scripture speak of itself, the written words of God. Hebrews compares the Bible to a two-edged sword, so powerful they are piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart (Heb. 4:12). This is how highly God values his written revelation of himself to man.

      Of course the words of fallen humans are not as powerful as the words of the sovereign God of the universe, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have weight. They can be as destructive as sword thrusts or instruments of healing (Prov. 12:18). James compares their power to the rudder of a mighty ship, the bit in a horse’s mouth, or the spark of a match (James 3).

      Novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne said, Words, so innocent and powerless . . . when standing in a dictionary, how potent for good or evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.

      Of course this is not anything new to you. If you’ve lived long enough on this earth, you’ve been both inspired and wounded by words. The teacher whose perfectly

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