Let me set the scene. It was a slow day at work so I decided to spend a lot of time on my mobile phone arguing with various atheists on twitter. I was getting carried away and getting aggressive. There was one atheist in particular who kept, at least in my opinion, committing logical fallacies with his arguments. I started ridiculing him, mocking his intelligence and was just generally being a jerk. Now he wasn’t making very good arguments but that’s not the point, what I was doing was totally unnecessary.
About an hour later I signed into the blog just to see if there were any new comments and to my surprise I had 100 comments waiting to be moderated and had just about 10,000 pageviews on the day. Slightly above average since a typical day yields about 65 views. I started looking through the comments, and I would say probably 90 of the 100 were negative. Most were just insults, some were thoughtful responses. I looked at the article that the majority of the comments were geared toward and noticed a few mistakes in the way I worded things, though generally the article was good. Then I got a tweet. It explained that someone (not the person I was mocking) posted the article on some atheist board or status update with the intention of mocking me personally. Now I have pretty thick skin anyway and I have Jesus, so the posting of the article did not have the desired effect of the perpetrator, but I did start to second guess how good the article was and frankly how smart I thought I was.
Then I felt the Lord pressing something onto my heart. I kept thinking of a verse that fully exposed how desperately sinful I was behaving. It was 1 Corinthians 4:7 “What do you have that you did not receive? If then you received it, why do you boast as if you did not receive it? “
Why was I acting so arrogant? Why do I think I am smarter than everybody? As if me, in my wisdom, decided that I would seek after God and I found him because I figured out the right arguments and logic. That’s not how it went down at all. There was nothing special about me. The Lord was telling me, “Look Adam, you only have me because I gave you myself. That’s it. You are not smarter than everyone else, if not for me; you’d be just as lost as those you are insulting.”
As if I needed
any more, a few verses down there was an example of what a true servant of
Jesus acts like, “When reviled, we bless; when persecuted, we endure; when slandered, we
entreat. We have become, and are still, like the scum of the world, the refuse
of all things.” I felt the Lord tell my
heart, “Adam, what are you doing? Do you
love me? Or do you love being
right?” Hear that sound? That is the sound of me being smacked upside
the head by the Gospel.I immediately got on twitter to apologize to the atheist I had sinned against. He readily accepted the apology and apologized back, showing more Christ-like grace than I had showed him earlier. I hope that you all can learn a lesson from my mistake. When we engage unbelievers we really need to lean on the Lord to keep us humble and loving. I was grateful for the reminder.
As for the atheist who tried to set me up to be mocked by his buddies, I really have to thank him. Not only did I get a ton of people to see the site and some of its contents, but a few of the 100 comments were very positive. Also, I can now go back and refine my argument and make it a little better, using all the negative feedback I got. So thank you. Lastly, if I have to be mocked by 10,000 people to possibly get a chance to introduce 1 person into the eternal kingdom of God, I will take that deal every single time. God used you powerfully this week buddy. God bless you and thank you.
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