The Tweet of Time
You only have 140 characters to make your point. Your message has the potential to reach across the globe. You could be the very one to bring encouragement or condemnation to a lost soul. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I present to you Exhibit A, Twitter.
Founded in 2006 out of a brainstorming session by Biz Stone, Evan Williams, and Jack Dorsey, it has grown to one of the leading social networking sites in the world. “Twitter” can be defined as “a short burst of inconsequential information”, allowing one to speak their mind about topics ranging from politics, to their daily activities. Today, Twitter has over 55 million visitors every month, and is ranked the third-fastest growing social network. But it is not just for youth of today. Only 11 percent of Twitter accounts are from the ages of 11 to 17, leaving the remaining 89 percent of Twitter users to 18 and above.
Messages have been defined as personal babbling, quoting a good book, spam, or news. These 140-character messages are known as “tweets”. For example, “Hey, did you read Casey’s tweet last night?” or, “Man I need something good to tweet”, or “That quote is tweet-worthy”. No matter how you use this term in a sentence, one thing links all tweets together—they all have a limited amount of time to make their point.
In John 9:4, Jesus cried out, “I must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work.”. Jesus knew there was coming a time when no man would be able to work, so he issued a challenge to pick up the plow and not look back, advising not to return to the past (Luke 9:62). We do not have an unlimited amount of time to preach our message, we do not have an unlimited amount of time to preach this gospel, we do not have an unlimited amount of time to reach a lost and dying world. As the second hand flies by, your co-worker, your classmate, or your friends are that much closer to an eternity of suffering. Are your “tweets” making a difference?
We must not become complacent in our fight for souls. The cross cannot become a distant figment of our imagination but must rather become apart of our daily reality. We must heed Paul’s preaching in Galatians 6:9, “And let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not.” This is a promise from God that if we are strong, if we maintain our course, if we remain in the fields, in due season, we shall reap those eternal results.
The following is a statement by the head of the Gestapo in his annual report in the summer of 1938: “The situation in the churches is characterized by weariness with the struggle, by uncertainty of purpose and by lack of courage.” We must fight with all we have, we must give until we can give no more, we must preach until we have no more sermons left, we must sing until the pools of lyrics have run dry, and we must search until all are found.
You only have 140-characters each day. How are you tweeting your life?