Have you ever had one of those rants on your mind? You know the ones… the ones where you write and rewrite what you are going to blast to the world on social media; the ones where you have a few select people in mind when writing them and you can’t WAIT for them to be put into place by your intentional eloquent and ever so passive aggressive words.

I recently had such a moment. I was moments away from pressing that “post” button, but then I evaluated my words. Here is what I was going to write:

“Witnessing the moral indignation in this country by the morally bankrupt is so extremely ironic.”

After reading it a few times and marveling at my poignant word-smithing, I realized something extremely humbling… I am morally bankrupt. In an attempt to point out other’s hypocrisy I was miserably failing to realize my own, trying to stand on some kind of moral platform that I did not build.

You see, any righteousness I have is not my own. It was given to me in grace. It was given to me in mercy. It was given to me in the most amazing act of love… and my response? To try to point out the perceived failings of others.

I am sharing this because, we as Christians, do this so often in social media. Instead of remembering the love of Christ, His mercy and grace, we cling to fraudulent righteousness. We stand on its platform as some kind of champion and declare “Look at all MY good”. My friends, what are we doing? What am I thinking? Jesus was NAILED to a platform and raised up on it, ridiculed, mocked, spat at, so that I could flourish in the righteousness that His sacrifice was able to create in me. The feeble platform of righteousness I built to stand on, the one where I could force my social media friends to feel the weight of their hypocrisy, crashed beneath me in that moment.

My challenge is cling to the authentic righteousness and allow your personally built self righteous platforms be destroyed… if yours are like mine, there are many. Instead, cling to righteousness that makes our heart break for the lost, to pray for our persecutors, to love our enemies, to serve others, to pursue repentance and …  to delete piously rewritten Facebook posts!

Soli Deo Gloria

Jesse Horne