Can Your Smart Phone Do This?

James 1:19-27

 (Use the link below to read the verses.)

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=James%201%3A19-27&version=NIV;MSG

  

Think about how many different ways you use your smart phone. Most likely talking is only a small percentage. There’s social media, taking pictures/selfies, your calendar,

paying your bills, storing your airline boarding pass, texting, checking your email, checking the weather, checking Google... You get the idea.

 

For many people, their smart phone is their brain. Without it, they would be lost. With it, they are in constant contact with everything and everyone that is important to them. Your smart phone makes your life more convenient and efficient. But, and you knew that was coming, can it do this? Can it reflect on who you are?

 

This past Wednesday, Ash Wednesday, was the beginning of Lent. Lent is a time of

repentance, fasting and preparation for the coming of Easter. It is a period of forty days, not counting Sundays, set aside for self-examination and reflection.

 

James wrote about the importance of not just reflecting on God’s Word, but being transformed by it.

 

^22-24 Don’t fool yourself into thinking that you are a listener when you are anything but, letting the Word go in one ear and out the other. Act on what you hear! Those who hear and don’t act are like those who glance in the mirror, walk away, and two minutes later have no idea who they are, what they look like.          MSG

 

If there is anything that is antithetical to the norm of our culture, it is reflection. Just try it. It feels impossible sometimes to slow down the pace of life; to cut back on activity; to turn the TV, the radio or the smart phone off. In a word, to be quiet.

 

During Lent, many people have the tradition of giving up something, or even fasting. What’s important is not what you are fasting from, or giving up, but that you take this season of Lent as an opportunity to reflect. Reflect on who you are? Whose you are? And whom do you serve?

 

 

(If God has spoken to you through this devotional, please feel free to share it with others.)

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The Twitter of Life

Revelation 20:11-15

  

Our culture is changing in quantum leaps! Wasn’t it just yesterday that every kindergarten student read “Dick and Jane”? While last year my granddaughter, in her kindergarten class, used Chromebooks – whatever that is.

 

¹² I saw the dead, great and small, standing before God; and The Books were opened, including the Book of Life. And the dead were judged according to the things written in The Books, each according to the deeds he had done. ¹³ The oceans surrendered the bodies buried in them; and the earth and the underworld gave up the dead in them. Each was judged according to his deeds.                  TLB

 

Is it possible that the Living Bible, or some other hip modern day translation, might

eventually refer to the “Book of Life” as the “Twitter of Life” or “Facebook of Life” or some other social media?

 

At the risk of sounding sacrilegious with this suggestion, just think about it? What is it that people post on social media other than what they’ve been doing? But do they tell everything that is happening; their every action, every thought, every desire, every emotion? No. Because if they did they wouldn’t have any friends left!

 

On the other hand, the Book of Life will. In social media we tell what we want people to know about us. The Book of Life will tell, as Paul Harvey used to say, “The rest of the story”. Or David may have said it better with this abbreviated quote.

 

O Lord, you have examined my heart and know everything about me… You know

when I sit or stand; my every thought; where I am; what I am going to say before I even say it.                                           Psalm 139:1-4 TLB

 

The Twitter of Life may sound catchy, but final judgement is definitely not. It is a reality that all of us face, and it is only by God’s grace that we are free from “the lake of fire”

as our destiny. Instead, our destiny lies in a “new heaven and a new earth” living in the eternal presence of our loving Holy Father.