A Burning Candle

I remember once, many years ago, someone was hurt by something I’d said and what they told me has stuck with me to this day; To make your candle look brighter, you don’t have to blow mine out.

I still like to jest and have a laugh with my mates, but this has stuck with me and made me think about many of the things I say and do. Am I saying something because I feel it contributes to the conversation and will have a positive effect, or am I trying to make myself look better at the expense of someone else.

Ecclesiastes 4:4 mentions something along these lines; “I have seen that every labor and every skill which is done is {the result of} rivalry between a man and his neighbor. This too is vanity and striving after wind”. (NASV)

Our greatest scientific discoveries have been built on the back of warfare, a desire to be stronger, smarter and all-round more powerful than someone we hate. Even the wonderful discoveries made in space are built on the back of a desire to beat the Russians and have better weapons than them by using technology used by the Nazis.

I’m not saying that technology is evil, but when I see that the best mankind can do is done because of hate and distrust, I wonder if there can be any hope for humanity.

Do people write theological masterpieces to oppress segments of society, to scientists try and work something out in order to ridicule the people they despise, do you want to excel in your work to belittle that chap who gets on your nerves?

The Bible says that as a person is in his heart, that’s him.

So what are you like, in your heart? Who are you really?

Web Browsers and Forgiveness

The UK is up in arms at the moment because of an illegal trial of software which monitors people’s behaviour on the internet. By knowing what web pages people have been visiting, this software can target advertising just for their tastes.

Understandably, people don’t want other people knowing where they’ve been on the internet. Now, I’m sure that many of these have legitimate human rights concerns, but let’s be honest about this and accept that if the biggest internet searches and image transfers are naked ladies, then what many people don’t want to have exposed is that they’re looking at pornography.

Christians can be just as tempted as anyone else and don’t have a moral barrier which makes them invulnerable to the temptations of good looking women who are also naked, and Christians can be just as careful to try and cover their tracks.

The usual habits are to try and use an anonymiser service which will block your traffic’s traceability from your ISP, separate credit cards to pay for access in a way that the wife won’t find, cleared out browsing history and even a Safe Browsing mode in your web browser which blocks all history and cookies (but leaves whole chunks of time where it looks like no browsing was going on at all).

All this in order to ensure that nobody can see where you’ve been. Hiding; intellectually denying guilt but repressing the destructive feeling of it all the same.

As with most posts here, I’m aiming my comments at priimarily at Christians but the promise is truly open to all humanity; I’m fascinated by how we can be so concerned at a man in an office knowing that we’ve looked at a picture of a naked lady while caring nothing at all of the fact that the Holy Spirit not only knows that we’ve been looking at it, but was there when we were looking at it.

This is serious and this isn’t in any way limited to pornography. Any sin which we want to keep secret is actually known of, in full, by the One who we claim to love above all others.

But guilt and condemnation are not His tools for bringing us out of these traps. His tools are confession and forgiveness. You see, if you’ve ever been to any of those websites, you may have wiped your browser history, but somewhere, there is a record that you looked at those photos. On a server, sitting in a server access log somewhere, there’s a record that you visited that website.

Yet, the really important log, the one that will hold against you in eternity can be cleared. The fact that you’ve ever looked at, thought about or considered anything even remotely questionable can be cleared from the records of eternity, if you believe what the Bible says;

1John 1:9 ; “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”

The fact is that the one Person who does know about everything you’ve said, done, thought and gone wrongly, selfishly, perversely, spitefully, arrogantly etc…. that one Person who knows all this in its entirety is willing to wipe it all out, and not to bring it back to consideration, as thought it never happened, and all you have to do is take it all to Him, admit it and He will forgive you.

How is this even possible?

God had established that the list of wrongs against you has been paid for and dealt with by His Son, Jesus. When Jesus died by crucifixion way back when Romans were still doing their thing, He took our record of wrong with Him, carrying it as though it were His own, and taking it beyond our reach. It says in the Bible;

Colossians 2:14 “having cancelled out the certificate of debt consisting of decrees against us, which was hostile to us; and He has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross.”

So, you may want to clear that web browser’s history one more time, but then take your issues to Jesus in prayer, confess that you’ve done wrong and walk away confident that there is no record in Heaven that you ever even opened Internet Explorer for anything more dodgy than checking out the New York Times.