Forwarded Messages

Is your computer safe? Do you know who might be lurking in your files, swiping your private information, accessing your financial records? Is someone stealing from you? Studies say that one out of every twenty Americans has suffered some sort of identity theft. Smartphone users were one third likelier to be targeted by thieves. There are approximately 378 million victims per year, or more than 1 million each day and 12 per second. Have I made you paranoid yet? In Jesus' day, identity theft wasn't a problem. Computer hackers didn't steal information. No one worried about cyber crime. Yet Jesus issued a security warning. He said, "Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal" (Matthew 6:19). Even then, almost two thousand years ago, people had to worry about having their treasure stolen. Jesus had a solution as to how to prevent that: "But store up for yourselves trea...

I think sometimes that I don't understand anything about prayer. I pray a lot, mind you. It's just that I don't understand a great deal about it. I sometimes pray for good things, and they don't come. At other times, I pray for myself or others to be spared bad things, yet they still happen. How does prayer work? How do I know what to pray for? Do questions such as these ever bother you? Maybe at least part of our problem is in praying for wrong things. If that is the case, then I can certainly begin to see how praying could be confusing. When we are wrong-headed in what we ask, we can hardly blame God for failing to answer. Let me try to make sense of what I am struggling to say. Back in the earliest days of the church, Peter and John were called before the religious authorities of Jerusalem. They were ordered to stop preaching about Jesus in the city. They were, in fact, threatened that bad things would come down on them if they didn't stop. Duly wa...