For those of you who know me personally, you know I tweet a lot. To my defense though, it’s not because I talk that much. A lot of my tweets are me responding to other people (which counts as a tweet) and my “Jesus” tweets. Before I was saved I used to tweet a whole bunch of inappropriate things. After I gave my life to Christ, my speech and the way I tweeted also changed. Imagine being my friend or a follower on twitter who was used to seeing me drop the "F" bomb all the time to all of a sudden (as it must have seemed), you see me tweet that I gave my life to Christ and my tweets started to be about Jesus. Gheesh, my followers and friends must have been so shocked and confused lol.
My mom gave me this daily bread that she used to use the year before by David Jeremiah (you should check him out if you’ve never read his stuff or heard him preach before). It has a memory verse from the Bible along with a little lesson in it everyday. This was awesome for me because I didn’t know how to read the Bible, how to apply it to my life or where to even start. So this made it easy for me. The daily lessons were so real and moving I didn’t want to keep the blessing to myself, so about a month later I started tweeting the lessons that I was reading (word for word) so that my followers would see. I wanted everyone to experience and be as excited for Jesus as I was. I started doing this without any type of expectation. One year and 10 months later… and I’m still tweeting my daily bread every morning. I will also tweet gospel songs that are on my heart and tell my followers that Jesus loves them.
What I didn’t expect or anticipate, was the response I would get. There’s a mixture of what people do with this information. Some would retweet my daily bread which I thought was awesome because that means their followers see it, so the Word reaches more people. One day my phone (the primary source that I tweet from) stopped working. It put me out of commission for about 1 week, thus I was not on twitter. A week after coming back to twitter I had so many mentions from so many different people wondering where I was and why the daily bread was no longer being posted. I was…shocked to say the least. I knew 1/2 people who would retweet what I said but I had no clue all these people were reading every day and depending on me to see the lesson of the day. I was thrilled. At this point I figured it didn’t matter whether or not I posted the daily bread and these people let me know that it did matter. How amazing! It put me in a position where people would direct message me to ask me about my decision to live for Christ, which gave me a chance to share my testimony. People ask about certain situations they’re going through, questions about God and the Bible and every once in a while I get a “thank you for being such an inspiration” message for someone. It’s nice to know that it makes a difference in someone’s life.
Even though I get really good responses sometimes, I also get bad responses. I’ll give you a couple as an example. I was contacted on twitter by someone that I don’t know and he doesn’t know me. He apparently was an atheist and saw my tweets about God. He was extremely upset about what I was saying on twitter and lashed out on me pretty heavy because of it. The thing is that, he wasn’t even following me, so in order to see my tweets he must have been purposely seeking out tweets about God and found mines. The second example is a little closer to home. This is someone that I actually went to school with and knew me during my unsaved says. We were cool. This person followed me on twitter for a while so was well aware of my tweets. He reached out to me via twitter and asked me if I was comfortable with sharing the gospel knowing how I used to live, to which I responded yes, as I was not the same person that I was in college. He responded by telling me that he didn’t think I should in the manner that I did. If people asked me about God then yes I could say something but tweeting everyday was not ok. I was forcing God on people and it was hypocritical of me seeing that I lived in sin before. This made no sense to me because 1) sinners being saved and redeemed is the entire message of the New Testament and why Jesus came 2) Saul (turned into Paul) was the main persecutor of Christians and the Lord chose to use him to preach the message of the gospel to Jews and Gentiles 3) I don’t force anyone to read anything. You choose who you follow on twitter, if you don’t like their tweets, you unfollow and wala! You no longer see their tweets. 4) If you choose to continue to follow, you can skip over my Jesus tweets or mute me. So anyone that reads what I write is reading of their own free will. Finally, 5) Hypocritical would be me telling people about Jesus on twitter but still living in sin. Which I don’t. My words match my actions. If they don’t I have women of God in my life who will check me and put me back on the right path (amen for them). Of course this is a very summarized version of the story but I just wanted to give you the gist.
To be honest, I felt attacked and hurt. I wanted to cry, I wanted to say “how dare you?”. I wanted to be mad and tell him about himself. I wanted to tell the atheist about himself too. At some point though, you have to learn to control your emotions and tell them to shut up (I learned this from Heather Lindsey’s blog “Tell your Emotions to Shut Up”. Please go read at heatherllindsey@blogspot.com). The atheist didn’t hate me, he hates Jesus. I just happen to be the vessel that’s attacked. I’m not really sure how to explain the situation with the other guy but deep down I don’t think he hates me. I think that he may be misinformed, confused or (this is what I think most) God is stirring something up in him and there is a spiritual battle for his soul and the devil doesn’t want God to win. The devil also knows that the Lord has something great planned for me or I might be on the verge of a tremendous blessing, so he’s going to use any and everyone to come at me in an attempt to stop me.
Knowing this, I HAVE to be careful as to how I respond to people. My flesh automatically wants to defend myself by fighting back and hurting the way these people hurt me. If I do that though, I lose the chance to share the love of God with them. Besides, there’s nothing spiritual about lashing out at people. In both these situations I tried my best to choose my words wisely and respond out of love. If it seemed to be a back and forth situation where we weren’t agreeing then I would respectfully find a way to end the conversation. Arguing is foolish to me. See my job is not to save people, God saves people. My job is to plant the seed. I’ve said what I needed to say, I’ve planted that seed and now I’m going to walk away praying that it will grow and bear fruit.
If you have experienced something similar, I want you to know that you are qualified to spread the gospel. If in Mark 16:15-16 Jesus says
“And he said to them, “Go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned.”
Notice that He doesn’t say preachers, priests etc, He just says “GO”…all of us. Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t tell others about God because of your past. We all have one and we are all sinners, but that does NOT define you. The enemy is a liar and he will say or do anything to make you stop talking. If God says go, GO. If God says do, DO IT! Regardless of what others say.
As time goes on I get over these situations. I’m not mad about anymore. Granted I’m human so I really do have to spend time with God to get back into a good place where I am no longer offended. It still hurts but I’m not mad at anyone nor do I have any problem with them. I just pray for them daily, that’s all I can do at this point. If people persecuted Jesus, they will persecute you. It says so in His Word. So strap up and get some thick skin, it comes with the territory. It hurts me but I will never regret my decision to follow Christ.
xo
Tasha
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