Don't Touch My Space!

I just returned from spending a couple days at Camp Au Sable where I was a breakout session presenter for Teen Bible Camp. I must say that speaking to teenagers can be a challenge as it is not cool for them to act very interested. However, I did have a few thank me for the presentation. My session entitled, “Don’t Touch My Space!” was packed out.

My topic was a take off the very popular MySpace website. I was shocked to learn that MySpace is the 6th most popular website in the world and 3rd in the U.S. (after Yahoo & Google). There are 154 million users with estimates of 300,000 new members a day. What interests me most about MySpace is that it really is a snapshot picture of the personality, values, and interests of a person. As one teenager put it in an article I read, “Your page is your personality.”

It got me thinking about what Jesus said in Luke 6:45, “out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.” For many their MySpace page is really a look into their inner self. And so I told the teens that each of them really has a “My Space” – that inner self where they store their pictures, videos, memories, values, interests, favorite music, beliefs, philosophy of life, etc. What Jesus calls our heart, we could call in the modern vernacular our “My Space.”

But there is someone who desperately wants to get into our My Space and defile it. That person is Satan (1 Peter 5:8). There are only five gates through which he can enter your My Space – those are your five senses. For the remainder of the presentation we talked about the ways the devil tries to sneak in through each of these gates and defile the purity of our My Space by foods/beverages we eat, certain perfumes & colognes, music, books, movies, TV, and video games. We also talked about physical and emotional purity in relationships.

I'd like to share with you two statements that I read to them that speak so strongly about our need to guard these gates into our My Space.

“It is the devil that wants the brains of man. He wants to cobweb your faculties and your thinking forces, and he wants to send disease between the fluids and the solids of your body, that you shall not have health, and that you shall be in the slavery of a perverted appetite, an appetite which has no foundation in nature and the most difficult to break from because the enemy has woven his threads all about you to bind you to the habits which will ruin both soul and body. {1Sermons &Talks 257.2}

And about watching questionable movies …

“Angels of God are commissioned from heaven to guard the children of men, and yet they draw away from their restraining influences and go where they can have communication with the evil angels. And then the evil angels fasten impressions in their mind that they will never get rid of so long as they live, just as going to the theater, billiard hall, and all such places led them from the path of God to Satan under the black banner of the prince of darkness. Oh that we might all obey the injunction of the apostle ('Come out from among them, and be ye separate, and touch not the unclean thing and I will receive you.’ 2 Cor. 6:17, 18).” {2Sermons & Talks 68.2}

Solomon gives us this wise counsel.

“Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life.” Proverbs 4:23

We need to tell the Devil through our words and actions: DON'T TOUCH MY SPACE!