John Newton extracted this principle from the Israelite’s hoarding of manna:
The truths by which the soul is fed,
Must thus be had afresh;
For notions resting in the head,
Will only feed the flesh.However true, they have no life,
Or unction to impart;
They breed the worms of pride and strife,
But cannot cheer the heart.Nor can the best experience past,
The life of faith maintain;
The brightest hope will faint at last,
Unless supplied again.
We need a daily supply of grace. Newton firmly believed that with each new day we must encounter the God of grace anew. Otherwise we will wither. We cannot maintain a life of faith drawing on yesterday’s manna. Our God is a daily God.
Blogging is often used by God to bring us our daily manna.
If you aren’t aware of this (and at home with this) as a blogger you will get burned. 95% of what you write will disappear into the wasteland only a few hours after your write it. A few people will read it. Some will feast. Others will skip right over it looking for bread elsewhere. And then it’s gone.
If you write to be epic blogging will be a discouraging enterprise. For every article that has decent reach you will write a hundred more that only your mom will retweet. Such is the nature of manna. It seldom seems like much at the time but it is subtly sustaining people in their walk with Christ.
Therefore, write to give people daily grace. Be comfortable that at most you will only be used by God to sustain someone for the day.
Now there is one sense in which blogging is nothing like manna. In actuality what you write doesn’t appear into the ether. It gets swallowed up and stored somewhere in Al Gore’s basement—forever able to be accessed. In this sense what you write doesn’t get maggots and eventually disappear. It stays forever.
While it is true that our blog articles usually vanish from people’s minds this does not mean that we do not need to be careful and Christ-honoring with all of our words. What we say stays forever. And therefore we blog with an eternal perspective all the while knowing that the Lord is simply using us at times to provide daily grace.
