It’s no secret that the dark side of social medias of all types create an unattainable image of what your life should be like. Users end up comparing themselves to the “perfect” lives that everyone else seems to be living. Would it surprise you to find out that Jesus created this feeling of despair first? Long before Instagram perpetuated a desperate craving to be something we are not, Jesus paints a picture of what citizens of His Kingdom are like in the beatitudes and the rest sermon on the mount. The list includes merciful, meek, pure in heart, and other next-to-impossible qualities to aspire to. If that isn’t hard enough, he makes sure we have no possibility of actually being all these things when He simply says “be perfect.” Why would Jesus tell us what we should be like, knowing we could never live up to it? Didn’t He realize that we would give up trying and throw in the towel? The answer is … of course He did. He’s Jesus. C’mon. Here’s how Oswald Chambers puts in “My Utmost for His Highest.”
The teaching of the Sermon on the Mount produces despair in the natural man – the very thing Jesus means it to do. As long as we have a self-righteous, conceited notion that we can carry out Our Lord’s teaching, God will allow us to go on until we break our ignorance over some obstacle, then we are willing to come to Him as paupers and receive from Him. “Blessed are the paupers in spirit,” that is the first principle in the Kingdom of God. The bedrock in Jesus Christ’s kingdom is poverty, not possession; not decisions for Jesus Christ, but a sense of absolute futility – I cannot begin to do it. Then Jesus says – Blessed are you. That is the entrance, and it does take us a long while to believe we are poor! The knowledge of our own poverty brings us to the moral frontier where Jesus Christ works.
So here’s the challenge, next time you are on some form of social media and feel like you don’t measure up, remember this: YOU DON’T! YOU CAN’T! YOU NEVER WILL! And then remember this: it’s this place of despair and “absolute futility” that allows us, the spiritually impoverished human beings that we are, to become Citizens of His Kingdom in the first place. We belong when we realize that we don’t!