The Dangers of Social Media

This is relevant to every single person that has a social media account. I will try to expose the plans and the strategies that the enemy uses to attack Christians via social media and to use the pitfalls of it against us every single day.

So let's just jump right in and get straight to the core of the situation. I want to read you a quote, many Christians find themselves defeated by the most psychological weapon that Satan uses against them.

This weapon has the effectiveness of a daily missile, its name low self-esteem Satan's greatest psychological weapon is a gut feeling of inferiority in adequacy and low. 

Self-worth. This feeling shackles many Christians in spite of wonderful spiritual experience and knowledge of God's word.

Although they understand their position as sons and daughters of God, they are tied up in knots, bound by a terrible feeling of inferiority and trained to a deep sense of worthlessness.

I read a study the other day where research was done on the effects of social media and the study concluded that the people affected by social media the most were children, especially girls between the ages of teen to 14.

There are staggering numbers that keep on increasing with feelings of low self worth, self harm, self doubt, as well as suicide.

This is incredibly sad and incredibly alarming that we are allowing ourselves to be vulnerable to one of the most powerful tools today of spiritual warfare. 

To understand the dangers of social media, you need to understand the basic human need to feel loved, to feel like you belong somewhere, to be popular, or to feel important. We all have that need.

And in essence, it is perfectly human to have those needs, but the problem, however, comes when you are looking for validation in places and from people that does not have your best interest at heart from strangers, that really could not care less, If you make a success or failure of your life's purpose, people feed off their attention.

The more attention they get, the more love they feel. Every like has an importance and every comment carries power.

So now you can just imagine young people especially falling into this vicious cycle because they are measuring their self worth to the amount of followers or likes they get and unfortunately social media is flooded with posts and people.

So becoming popular means you need to be different or stand out somehow from the rest, the competition for followers and likes or stuff.

The results in young people are getting more daring with their revealing clothing poses, or very much out there with opinions or their lifestyle, because they know it will grab attention sex cells. And if you post something that will make someone stop scrolling and like, or comment on your post, you feel validated.

This cycle is a vicious monster that is being fed and most definitely will result in negative thoughts, self-esteem or depression issues.

There is a platform out there that is encouraging content creators and influencers to sign up, uh, and then monetize their content, which sounds great. However, this platform is known for their, uh, adult content and pornography and people are signing up with alarming rates of around 200,000 per day.

By earning easy money means removing your clothes and enticing a world full of strangers. By putting yourself on display, social media has become a beast to be reckoned with because now it's not just good enough to get likes and followers on, on Instagram or Facebook.

Now, the pressure is on to monetize. So now you add money to it. It's not just now you proving yourself worth or proving to be popular. Now is how much money can I earn by putting myself or my life on display by adding money and earning money for this type of content as an incentive, it's just a recipe for a disaster.

The world is broken and many people live in broken homes where there is sometimes a lack of love, peace, safety, and acceptance. They are not getting what they need from their family. So they put themselves in the hands of strangers to provide that feeling of belonging.

The problem is that it is so fleeting and with no substance, and to keep that high of feeling great about yourself, or to get that paycheck at the end of the month, you need to keep outpost or outdoing your last post and a, those of your competitors. I heard someone asking, how can you protect your child from the dangers of social media? Because we all know, especially teenagers. It is really it's, it's impossible to keep them away or offered as a final solution, but you have to teach them self acceptance.

You have to boost their self-esteem and self-worth and they will not fall into the multitude of traps on social media. That sounds all good and well, right?

The main thing that I've left out of that advice is that our identity, our values and our self-worth needs to lie in what God says and feels about us, our, our identity and our self-worth can depend on how people respond to us or what people think of us or how people share or like, or follow our accounts. If that is a measure of your self worth, your measure of success, you will always come up short, it doesn't matter what age you are. Doesn't matter what kind of content you put out there. If that is your gauge of measuring who you are, and you are worth, you are in for a lot of trouble.

The world is obsessed with finding yourself and discovering who you are, and there're numerous ways that this is presented to oneself.

You can do physical tests, or, and sometimes people tend to take the job or career as a gauge of identity, because we spend so much time on it.

Relationships, status, appearance, grades, and reputation also provide a sense of identity, any of these things may feel like a solid foundation, but none of them are permanent.

Any of them could change without warning, and if you base your identity on things like success, wealth, power, physical appearance, and so on, you are setting yourself up for great disappointment because a sudden job loss could leave. You question your choices in life, a new piece of gossip aimed your way could destroy your reputation. Even if it's untrue, your appearance will change. As you get older, God, however, is unchanging. He is reliable.

He is the same yesterday, today and forever and if you find your identity in Him, you will never ultimately be let down because He has proven time and time again, to be trustworthy.

I want to urge two things from you. Number one, take care of yourself, do not give the enemy any foothold in your life by believing his lies.

We all have failures in our lives, but having a failure at something, doesn't make you a failure. Having something not turned into a success story doesn't mean you will not make a success story of something else.

And when those feelings of I'm not good enough, I'm not thin enough, I'm not pretty enough, I don't have enough money, etc do not give into those feelings.

Your identity is so solid in God and how He sees and feels about us.

When you know this, when you know that your identity lies with the Most High, you start thinking and you start acting differently and you are not allowing these things to take hold in your heart.

The second thing I want to urge you to do, (if you are a parent), is to install these things into your kids from a very young age, because eventually they will face social media. They will face all the challenges.

When they know they are loved not only by you as their parents, but by God as well, you will ensure that their self-esteem is intact. That the knowledge of where their identity is stays prominent in their lives.

That is one way that you will make sure to protect them from the dangers of social media going forward in their life. I want to end this by just reminding you that the devil is not gonna just use social media. He's gonna use a lot of things in your life to, to, to come knocking on that door of self doubt and feelings of worthlessness.

Don't give the devil of foot hold stay in the protection God gives us with the Armor of God. Stay in prayer daily.

From now on, let's use social media a little bit differently with Godly discernment about what we are looking at, the feelings we are allowing in and how that makes us feel about ourselves.