Information about a snake in your bedroom is healthy, 34 snake news notifications on your handset every hour isn’t. But such is an age of newsfeeds without good news.

It’s almost impossible to keep up the news and also remain happy at the same time today. Hardly a day passes by when I don’t want to react to something I strongly feel about on social media for example.

But as I recently learnt from Ligon Duncan, for some posts on social media, you only need to starve them of attention, and they will wither and die – right before your eyes.

The Internet has changed everything, In fact, nobody foresaw ‘everybody’ as a potential broadcaster 20 years ago. Now everything has gone, yes, to everybody, but at what cost?

This LinkedIn report puts it this way, “The great thing about social media is that it gave everybody a voice, the downside of social media is that it gave everybody a voice.”

If I told you where I first typed the first draft of this article, you might cringe, but that’s what it has come to.

Everybody is a producer, anchor, editor, broadcaster of their own good life, (or supposed) nobody waits for the newsman anymore. The bulletin is often blaring in our back pocket.

Talking of news should remind us of another news announcer from centuries ago – Isaiah. Right before he opened a messianic and prophetic announcement that would change the world in Isaiah 53, he asked, “Who hath believed our report?” (Is 53:1)

And if redemption, edification and worldview are not often part of that goal, won’t the barrage of breaking news from a fallen world soon drown us all?

If we do not process bulletins through the state of a fallen world and the good news of Jesus Christ, reconciling sinners to God, the tumultuous tides of top stories will surely snuff our joy out.

Blessedness in the scriptures is promised to those who believe without seeing, not to those whose eyes are fixed on the seen, the temporal. On the contrary, our heightened news age lures with a promise of joy in keeping up with everything the eye can afford.

You’d even argue that the point of information is to make us well rounded wise people, but when information is laced with entertainment, infotainment they call it, isn’t a wasted life on the horizon?

Instant connectivity has left us disinterested in the mundane, it’s as if looking at car adverts is more interesting than talking to the woman you promised to love across the room.

If being human includes fully living in the body, as our Lord Jesus did, then attempting to be socially omnipresent as social media often offers will constantly draw us away from what it means to be human—and eventually, what it means to embrace a saviour who became fully human.

But what if our appetite for what’s new, like in Isaiah’s day, is intrinsically an appetite for a coming Messiah, a desire to finally escape this weary world, a desire to hear about the kind of change that will permanently alter our lives,  our distorted nature?

CS Lewis is renown for chiding humans far too easily pleased with the world, rather than with who God is. What if we are far too easily informed?

New Testament writers, for example, insisted, even under a repressive Roman environment that no matter how broken things were downtown, a believer’s ultimate citizenship, and joy, were rooted outside this world, in a coming inheritance.

Yes, you may feel obligated to pray about a failing State, but discernment may mean you don’t stay tuned to every headline about an obviously fallen and the falling world.

After all, your good news is – no matter what’s featuring on the stock market, you have an obligation not to worry about food and drink, seeing that the birds aren’t.  And No matter which emperor you find yourself under, Jesus will always remain King.

Yet again, this doesn’t mean there are no believers interested in current affairs, it only means believers have a constant bulletin amidst bulletins, namely, Jesus is risen and will all ultimately turn out fine. This is a bulletin not controlled by dollar rates and fire departments, but the Lord God who says things like, the earth and the fullness thereof are mine. 

To remain happy in a rampant news cycle, Christians need a worldview embedded in these reminders.

Life in his name.

Because in an era of words, words imbibed in videos, status updates and Tweets, it is important to remind ourselves of another set of words whose purpose is described by John this way.

“But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.”  (John 20:31)

John sees true life in believing Jesus as a consequence of words, true life-producing, shaping and influencing words eternal.

And now that the digital age traffics in a different kind of verbiage, John’s words are a wake-up call for Christians to watch whose words are consistently supplying our life.