Scripture

Our verse for today comes from Romans 14:19, “Therefore let us follow after the things which make for peace and the things by which one may edify another.”

Background

Let me share some statistics with you, and let’s see if you can figure out what it is that I am referring to. Self-promotion – 6%; News & spam – 8%; Pass-along value – 9%; Conversational – 38%; Pointless babble – 40%. For the many of you that use it, you may immediately have guessed that these stats refer to X (Twitter), the super-popular online social network service. X allows its users to “follow” other people, whether they be their regular group of friends or their favorite athlete or movie star. The messenger simply writes a quick “tweet” about something on their mind, and immediately the followers are up-to-date and informed. These statistics represent estimates of the content of the more than 50 million tweets that are sent each day. And even though the messages are limited to 140 characters in length, in the first five years that X existed, the printed version of all of the tweets that were sent would equate to 133,000 copies of the King James Bible. They would cover 350 million sheets of paper, and that paper would wrap around the earth 2.5 times. It would take the average reader almost 3,000 years to read them all if he read for eight hours each day. And having read them, the reader would be very well-versed in countless amounts of pointless babble.

Application

Jesus talked a lot about following Him. He said we had to deny ourselves to do it. He said we had to take up our cross to do it. He told the rich man to sell all he had and give to the poor so he could do it. X proves that we know how to follow. Unfortunately, it reveals some of the triteness that we will cast our attention towards. And we all know that there is no shortage of pointless babble and self-promotion. But peace, that is much more rare. So many that are so close to us don’t have it. They might even have Jesus, but they still ache for peace. And so, let us follow the things that will edify and make for peace. Let us help someone else follow Him who is worth following. Let your tweets have a bunch more substance than what 140 characters can express.

Charge

As we seek Him today, spend your day and make your communication be about more than babble. Let the cross you are carrying direct the path you are following.

Salvation – Eternal Life in Less Than 150 Words