I see two kinds of response to social Internet media like blogging, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and others.

One says: These media tend to shorten attention spans, weaken discursive reasoning, lure people away from Scripture and prayer, disembody relationships, feed the fires of narcissism, cater to the craving for attention, fill the world with drivel, shrink the soul’s capacity for greatness, and make us second-handers who comment on life when we ought to be living it. So boycott them and write books (not blogs) about the problem.

The other response says: Yes, there is truth in all of that, but instead of boycotting, try to fill these media with as much provocative, reasonable, Bible-saturated, prayerful, relational, Christ-exalting, truth-driven, serious, creative pointers to true greatness as you can.

Together with the team at Desiring God, I lean toward response #2. “Lean” is different from “leap.” We are aware that the medium tends to shape the message. This has been true, more or less, with every new medium that has come along—speech, drawing, handwriting, print, books, magazines, newspapers, tracts, 16mm home movies, flannel-graph, Cinerama, movies, Gospel Blimps, TV, radio, cassette tapes, 8-Tracks, blackboards, whiteboards, overhead projection, PowerPoint, skits, drama, banners, CDs, MP3s, sky-writing, video, texting, blogging, tweeting, Mina-Bird-training, etc.

Dangers, dangers everywhere. Yes. But it seems to us that aggressive efforts to saturate a media with the supremacy of God, the truth of Scripture, the glory of Christ, the joy of the gospel, the insanity of sin, and the radical nature of Christian living is a good choice for some Christians. Not all. Everyone should abstain from some of these media. For example, we don’t have a television.

That’s my general disposition toward media.

Now what about Twitter? I find Twitter to be a kind of taunt: “Okay, truth-lover, see what you can do with 140 characters! You say your mission is to spread a passion for the supremacy of God in all things! Well, this is one of those ‘all things.’ Can you magnify Christ with this thimble-full of letters?”

To which I respond:

The sovereign Lord of the earth and sky
Puts camels through a needle’s eye.
And if his wisdom see it mete,
He will put worlds inside a tweet.

So I am not inclined to tweet that at 10AM the cat pulled the curtains down. But it might remind me that the Lion of Judah will roll up the heavens like a garment, and blow out the sun like a candle, because he just turned the light on. That tweet might distract someone from pornography and make them look up.

I’ve been tweeting anonymously for a month mainly to test its spiritual and family effects on me. In spite of all the dangers, it seems like a risk worth taking. “All things were created through Christ and for Christ” (Colossians 1:16). The world does not know it, but that is why Twitter exists and that’s why I Tweet.

By John Piper. © Desiring God. | www.desiringGod.org

By John Piper

I don’t think that question will ever be settled at the experiential level. You may settle it in a group with some sentences that are biblically grounded, but the reason it won’t be settled experientially is because human beings are wired to be legalists. We are wired to trust in what we do as the ground of our assurance.

Now along comes a gospel preacher who says, “Christ died for your sins and he provided a righteousness, so that all of your guilt can be taken away and all the righteousness that God requires of you can be provided totally by another. And this forgiveness and righteousness is received totally by faith alone.” Then he follows it up in a subsequent message, saying, “The faith that justifies justifies by faith alone, but the faith that justifies is never alone. It will always be accompanied by graces like love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self control.”

And as soon as you say that this faith is going to bear fruit, people shift back into their legalistic mode of “Oh, I see. We’re really justified by our works.” And it takes a lifetime of fighting that battle.

Let me give you an illustration. Tim Keller, pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York, is really good at preaching the gospel to legalists and lechers. (Lechers are people who just give way to their appetites.) He said something recently that was so helpful when I heard it. He said that in New York you have to preach the gospel to lawless people (lechers), and that in your preaching to lawless people you have to defend the gospel against legalism. Now people will say, “Why? This is not their problem! These people are not legalists. They’re doing what feels good to them everyday. They’re totally sold out to their own immediate satisfaction, and you’re saying that when you preach the gospel to them you need to preach against legalism?”

His response is, Yes. And the reason is that if you tell them that the way they’re living is wrong, the only alternative in their head—as a natural person—is rules. That’s the only thing they they’re going to think of. They don’t have a gracious life. They cannot bring the gospel out of their brain. The gospel is supernaturally given, it is supernaturally explained, and it is supernaturally experienced. If you don’t tell them that the alternative to their life is not legalism, that’s the only default mode they know to go to.

Therefore, to preach the gospel to legalists or to lechers, you have to distinguish it not only from a lawless life but also from a legalistic self-reliant life.

I’m saying all this to say that we’ll never be done with the battle to teach that justification is by grace alone, through faith alone, on the basis of Christ’s righteousness alone. This is the case because, when people hear the gospel, they are prone either towards lechery, saying “Let us sin that grace may abound,” or to fastening on more rules that default back to their legalistic mode.

It is very difficult to help people grasp a life of faith. “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” (Galatians 2:20). That’s a mysterious way of life, and we want to try and help people understand it by distinguishing it from lawlessness on the one hand and legalism on the other.

We’re going to be doing that until the day we die.

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© Desiring God. Website: desiringGod.org

My guess is that children, maybe even more than adults, are able to understand that God’s final deliverance will make up for all the pain of the present. They may not be able to grasp with great sophistication the fact that this very moment God’s love is being manifested in and through suffering. But a child can surely understand that someday, just as he promises you, God is going to take it away. We may not know why, but he is going to take it away and he is going to reward you in a way that will make all of your suffering seem as though it was not suffering. And he is going to give you everything you need for ever and ever—millions and millions of years—and you are going to be as happy as you can possibly be.

So I would make sure that I communicate to a child that if they trust Jesus then this disease, this pain, is going to be taken away. And you could read them from Revelation 21, “All crying and mourning and pain will be no more, for the former things have passed away.”

Secondly, I think it’s important to say to them that these evils in the world—the calamity that has come upon you, upon the children around you, and upon the rest of the world—came into the world because of sin. God ordained that the creation fall into futility. And Satan exploits that, and sin exploits that. And God has brought suffering and permits it now because of sin. Your suffering is not necessarily a direct result of your own sin, but because of the sin of humanity and the sin of all our hearts there is evil in the world. So turn away from sin! Receive forgiveness of it and repent and embrace the Savior, and pray for healing. And if the healing doesn’t come now, it is going to come later.

And the third thing I would say—and this will depend on the child’s capacities (you have to judge)—God builds amazing character, faith, love and depth out of suffering. I could point to people I know right now who’ve had 23 surgeries because of horrific birth issues and who, to this day, suffer significantly because of it. Yet they are some of the deepest, wisest, most loving, most patient, most ministering people I know; and that’s because of what they’re suffered and walked through.

On the other hand, if you find somebody for whom nothing has every gone wrong, who has experienced hardly any pain, sorrow or disappointment, you’ll find that they’re generally rather superficial people. It may be hard for a child to embrace that, but you can tell them that God is doing for you what he can do for nobody else. He’s going to make you something special.

Maybe you’ll do like Helen Roseveare and take a rose—a long stem red rose—and hold it up before the child. And you’ll take a knife and say, “This red rose was what you might have been if you didn’t have this disease or this pain.” Then you start cutting it. And you cut all the green bark off of this long stem red rose. And you say, “This is what God is doing, and it hurts sometimes.” Then you cut off the barb. And then you lop off the flower at the end, and you sharpen it down. And what the child finally sees in front of him is a white straight sharp arrow. The rose has become an arrow that can be put into a bow and shot into somebody’s heart or into some enemy’s face, something that a regular rose could never had done.

I heard that illustration from Helen Roseavere as she was talking about the destruction of some teenagers in South Africa back in the 1950s. And she showed with the arrow illustration how God used the killing of these teenagers in order to accomplish some great purposes that could not have been otherwise accomplished.

So a child might get help from some kind of practical visual illustration like that, showing them that God is going to make them into someone unusually useful if they hold fast to him.

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By John Piper. © Desiring God. Website: www.desiringGod.org

If we don’t value God for who he really is, then our behavior, which is intended to be the outgrowth of our valuing of God, is going to reflect that skewed understanding of God.

The very essence of morality is not the deed we’re doing—for example, not stealing, or helping somebody change a tire on a bitter cold winter night. The essence of the morality there is not the deed. The essence of it is the mindset out of which the deed is growing. It is the deed together with the mindset. If the mindset has roots in a flawed perception of God, then the God that is being reflected through the deed is going to be a flawed God. He is going to be a flawed reflection.

The reason we tend to think that morality is not very much affected by a flawed view of God is because we don’t understand the essence of morality as the mindset, the motive, and the display of God.

This is why, by the way, I have a little problem with talking about a “Judeo-Christian ethic.” If you say “Judeo,” meaning Jews who do not believe in Jesus Christ but hold to the Ten Commandments, then you’re introducing a flaw into worship that is utterly profound. The New Testament is written to say that those who do not honor the Son do not honor the Father. So the concept of a Judeo-Christian ethic as the goal to which we’re aiming is profoundly mistaken.

Ethics has to flow out of a true view of God, and to reject Jesus Christ is to have an absolutely flawed view of God. Therefore the ethic that flows from it as morality is going to be flawed.

Even if some of the behavior is the same, the point of ethics is not merely the kernel or the shell of the behavior, but the inner convictions of the mind, the disposition of the heart, and the goal of what we’re displaying. And if Jesus Christ is omitted from that, I don’t think we have Christian ethics or morality.

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By John Piper. © Desiring God. Website: www.desiringGod.org