Unfortunately, many people attend a Christian church regularly (or attended one in the past) but have never been clearly taught what the Bible stresses as the most important decision that one could ever make. It is only in making this decision that one actually becomes one of God’s children and is “saved” from His eternal judgment. This decision deals with what is referred to as “The Gospel”. If you have never heard “The Gospel” before, here it is. Around 33 AD, Jesus Christ, who is God incarnate, paid the price for every single person’s sin in history by dying the death of crucifixion at the hands of the Romans. He willingly died for every person’s sin that has ever lived and every will live. That includes both you and me. He willing died a death that we deserve for our moral failures in life. Jesus was brutally beaten, whipped, mocked, spit upon, nailed to a wooden cross, and then died. Three days later, He rose from the dead, as He foretold His disciples (group of followers). Jesus then ascended into heaven forty days later. He currently lives with God, His father, in heaven today. During Old Testament times (times prior to the birth of Jesus Christ – B.C.), people had a keen awareness of their moral guilt, as any honest person still does today. I know that I have wronged many people and have felt a deep-seated guilt within many areas of my life. Many people during Old Testament times sacrificed animals to God as a form of limited atonement for their immoral actions. God often accepted these sacrifices, but only in a temporary and limited way. Over time, God changed this extremely limited form of atonement, as He had planned from the very beginning of time. Moreover, God sent His one and only son Jesus Christ down to the Earth. Since Jesus was both sinless and blameless, He willingly died on the cross as an unlimited atonement. It was in God’s will for His son to die in this way. This unlimited atonement is available to any person who whole-heartedly repents of their sins (moral failures) and then asks God to personally apply Jesus’ undeserved death and resurrection as a payment for their sins. It is imperative here that one believes the crucifixion of Jesus Christ was ultimately an act of God’s grace. God did not have to offer an escape from our moral guilt and eternal punishment. However, God is gracious. He has a compassion and love for people that is indescribable. God wants to “wipe the slate” clean for us, in regards to our moral failures. Through this action, we could then enter a personal relationship with His son Jesus Christ and escape his eternal judgment. The Bible refers to moral failures as ‘sin’, or missing the mark of God’s perfect standard of morality. “Sin” is an ancient archery term for an arrow that missed the target. God is loving in the purest sense of the word and would like to grant us victory over the sins that still haunt us from our past. All we have to do is accept this gift of grace from Him. It is free.

God promises us a way to become morally blameless and gain entrance into heaven after living our physical live here on Earth. Here is what we must willingly do on our part. First off, we must truly believe that God is gracious and extended His grace by allowing His one and only son to die as a ransom for our sins on the cross. We must admit to God that we have failed morally during our lifetime and that Jesus Christ’s brutal death on the cross is the only sacrifice that could ever forgive our sins. After making this decision (accepting God’s grace), we are immediately forgiven of all past, present, and future sins. In addition, we would be guaranteed entrance into heaven after our physical death here on Earth. We would then live with both God and His son Jesus forever. We would be guaranteed to see all of our loved ones who had made this decision during his or her physical lives on Earth.

You could make this decision today. Please do not wait for the “perfect time”. You could ask God for eternal forgiveness through applying the death and resurrection of Jesus to your life within the quietness of your bedroom tonight. This is the most important decision that you will ever make.

So you might be asking, “Where in the Bible does it explain what has just been summarized?” Here are some passages clearly stating that Jesus seeks a personal relationship with us:

“that if you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved; for with the heart a person believes, resulting in righteousness, and with the mouth he confesses, resulting in salvation.
– Romans 10:9-10

“Therefore repent and return, so that your sins may be wiped away, in order that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord; “
- Acts 3:19

“For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.”
– John 3:16

As long as you repent of your past sins (moral failures) from the heart, confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, and apply Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection on the cross as a payment for your sins, you are guaranteed eternal life with God in heaven. You can make this decision at any time, anywhere. You can make this decision alone with God or within a group setting.

Please know that one cannot sit the fence on making this decision of accepting God’s gift of grace. If one chooses not to decide, he or she has still made a choice. This would be like receiving a check (hearing “The Gospel”) but never endorsing and cashing it in at the bank (personally applying Jesus’ death on the cross and resurrection towards one’s sins).

“He who believes in Him is not judged; he who does not believe has been judged already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.”
- John 3:18

The result of not choosing to accept Gods gift of grace, which offers eternal life with both Him and Jesus in heaven is clear. You will live the remainder of your life here on Earth apart from Jesus Christ and His empowerment. You will then follow your life plan and not His plan for you. After you physically die, you will then be brought to a dark place where there is “weeping and gnashing of teeth”. It is a place of eternal regret. Here, you will remember this very letter and how you were told the truth but chose not to repent and begin a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Remember, if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. You could be diagnosed with a terminal illness tomorrow or be the recipient of a head-on collision while returning home on that all too familiar, two-lane highway this Friday night. If you are considering starting your personal relationship with Jesus Christ, please do not wait to make this decision. You never know what tomorrow will bring.

The following passage outlines the only requirements Jesus Christ has set to both gain eternal life and begin a personal relationship with Him while you are still alive here on Earth. He makes it crystal-clear in the Bible what is required…

“that if you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved; for with the heart a person believes, resulting in righteousness, and with the mouth he confesses, resulting in salvation.
– Romans 10:9-10

God has a plan for your life. You can watch this plan unfold once you accept His gift of grace. This great plan involves your life experience while here on Earth and continues after your physical death on into heaven.

“For I know the plans that I have for you”, declares the Lord, “plans for welfare and not for calamity to give you a future and a hope. Then you will call upon Me and come and pray to Me, and I will listen to you. You will seek Me and find Me when you search for Me with all your heart.”
- Jeremiah 29:11-13

Please consider what I have said here. I am not sure if you have ever made this decision before, but I needed to make sure that you had the facts. If you should decide that you want to learn more about the life of Jesus and gain a better understanding of authentic Christianity, I strongly recommend reading the book of John within the Bible (NASB or NIV translation).

In closing, here is a verse that someone once shared with me that finally brought me into a relationship with God during an extremely low point physically and emotionally. The understanding of Jesus’ desire to know me personally changed my life forever. Here it is:

“Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and will dine with him, and he with Me.”
- Revelation 3:20

You’re 100% right, the data matters. Not just where one gets it from (Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, Forums, Etc), but also how much data one examines to find trends and insights. At Network Insights we capture almost two billion posts per month and have data that goes as far back as five years. The next question one should ask, now that I have access to all the best data across the social web, is how do I analyze it in a way that’s efficient and helpful to brands. At Networked Insights we use Topic Discovery to quickly find data patterns and cluster conversations around topics. Finding relevancy requires analyzing social conversations in the context of an audience, not just looking at the aggregate across the web. For example, a baby formula brand wants to know what Mom’s think about their product or category and doesn’t want that data skewed by conversations about milk or formulas that may be referencing totally different products.

Paul, you bring up some great points. Uncovering actionable insights is hard work and we’re lucky to have some great analysts that have experience using our technology tools to make deep research look easy. The task for brand marketers today isn’t finding out what consumers want because they now tell you all the time with implicit and explicit data. The new challenge is applying all that data to marketing decisions so you’re choices are aligned with your consumer’s preferences.

The one big difference is that in Baseball, you have all of the data you need, you just need to evaluate it differently. In Social Media, we are still trying to figure out how to capture all of the relevant data. Like Baseball, those that make the best sense out of the Social Media data will be the winners.

Whether one uses a sophisticated automated solution (relying on NLP, Machine Learning, etc.) or relies on a manual approach (having people read and classify sentiment), we believe there are fundamental issues with the way the sentiment problem is phrased. If one is not careful, sentiment analysis can ignore a majority of the available data and the results can largely be left up to chance. The cause is the inherent subjectivity of sentiment analysis. These conclusions come from a statistical analysis of the sentiment problem itself and apply (at least in some degree) to all solutions.

Sometimes sentiment analysis is the right tool for the job. However, it is important to understand when it is the right tool because ignoring data and measuring chance more than anything else can drastically reduce its value.

As for your other points, the value in moving beyond the positive/negative/neutral categories and the value of neutral posts are essential points to our paper. Variations on analyzing positive and negative posts is the type of sentiment analysis requested most often, in our experience. We strive to show our customers what is possible when we move beyond that narrow view of meaning.

Further, neutral is useful information in some business applications.

Seth, http://twitter.com/sethgrimes

I know Harry very well – and we use MEV as well to judge the effectiveness of social efforts but we also have a concept we call Social Lift that measures how much lift you are getting from your advertising in the social space

thanks again for commenting!

Another term, coined by Harry Gold of Overdrive Interactive … MQV .. media equivalent value .. meaning, what would you have paid to get those 2 million impressions you just got over social media for free? Telus for example, generated about two million impressions when it launched its new blackberry. I’ll spare you the details, but by engaging the blogosphere, CMO Jeff Lowe generated comments, fans, likes, tweets, re-tweets and YouTube buzz … two million impressions in all. He historically spends about a dollar per impression through his paid media campaigns; hence his campaign through the blogosphere generated an MQV of two million dollars.