This question was sparked in me by a Bible verse that a friend of mine put on Face book the other day. The verse was this:

“Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. 8 He who does not love does not know God, for God is love.”

It’s found in 1 John 4:7-8.

John’s life message and mine is the Royal Law, as many of you reading this would know. If you don’t know what that is, write to me: deb@agapelife.co.uk and I’ll gladly explain it. Do we live it fully? of course not…. But it’s verses like this that make me realise and remind me how serious it is! God isn’t joking about this stuff. He says if you don’t love, YOU DON’T KNOW GOD! Oh my word…. I’ve written other blogs on Facebook before and you can find them by going to my blog page http://www.debbullock.wordpress.com if you want to read them but this is a new slant I’d like to challenge you and me with. Facebook is about sharing your life, your joys, your sorrows, your achievements, your photos etc… and we all know we check more than once how many ‘likes’ we’ve had, we look down the list and say things like, ‘wow, so and so liked it!’ or ‘ no ‘likes’ from so and so!’ Don’t pretend you don’t do that because you do. It’s how we’re designed, we want to be liked, we want to be celebrated and we want to be loved. After all, the people that we have on our particular face book pages are supposed to be friends… but what about when those friendships break down? What about when we fall out of favour with one another? What happens then? How do we manifest that on Facebook? This is how: we stop ‘liking’ things that each other writes… Pathetic aren’t we? I’m not writing just to you, I’m writing to myself. If we’re Christians, we are commanded to love one another and if we don’t then, according to John, we don’t know God. Let me challenge you, however you feel towards a person, even if they’ve done something terribly wrong, they still have worth as a human being – you don’t have to agree with the choices they may have made but we are absolutely duty bound to love each other. Does not ‘liking’ something I put on Facebook mean you don’t love me, to some degree, I think it does. I see it as a lack of wanting to celebrate my life. The challenge is to ‘like’ more things than you have done in a while on someone’s Facebook status’ – It takes less than a second to click that mouse and, even if they don’t ‘like’ you back, you’re doing what’s right and sharing the love of God all the time even if you don’t feel like it! Let the past go and let’s celebrate one another more. I’m sorry for the times I haven’t ‘liked’ a particular photo or status because I’m struggling with the person who’s written it. That’s bound to happen, we have an enemy who wants nothing more than for us to all go off one another! That’s not what’s going to speak to the world is it? So, if you or I want to know God then we need to make sure we love one another and, in the 21st century, rightly or wrongly, one of the biggest ways we can do that is on social media. If it’s so painful, then break away and delete that person – I think you have permission to do that – but, if you still have them as a friend, then that means something. So love them by celebrating who they are – if we’re on the same side, then let’s train our weapons on the real enemy and not each other.

“He who does not love does not know God….” At least think about it….