Daily Devotional for Friday November 19, 1999

A Sign of Spiritual Maturity

(Hebrews 11:13-16, 33-40)

It is appropriate that today's devotional is taken from one of my favorite chapters of the Bible, Hebrews 11, and on the subject that challenges me daily, faith. The most motivational verse in the Bible for me is Hebrews 11:13. Just because we have the promise of ultimate victory in relation to our eternal dwelling place if we know Christ as Savior, that doesn't insure we will always see what the world would call "victory" in everything we do for God. A sign of spiritual maturity is knowing that the things we do for God are not "end-all events", no matter how large a ministry we may have, or how many people we may touch. Our work is only a small piece of God's overall plan and purpose and much of the time it may look to the world as if we failed when we did exactly what God needed us to do in relation to His overall plan. So were the lives of many heroes of faith talked about in Hebrews 11. In our day of instant gratification when we have to have everything we want when we want it, how we want it, where we want it.....where the world judges everything by how big, how many people, how much money....God tells us that many heroes never got to see the fruits of their earthly labor. Despite not seeing the fruits, they never wavered or held back from giving God their very lives. I ask myself daily, can I ever have faith like that. I challenge you today, do you have faith like that?

As most of you know, right before Halloween someone went to our Liveprayer.com website and added many witches, warlocks, satan worshipers, and other anti-Christian people to start receiving our daily devotional. Of course these people never asked for the devotional and immediately began a campaign to hurt our work alleging we were sending SPAM. Rather than just unsubscribe or ask us to unsubscribe them, they launched an all-out effort to destroy us. I have come to realize that there are many dark and evil forces that dwell within the Internet world. It is no accident that as much good as the Internet can be, it has been used as an incredible tool to propagate pornography, hatred, and every kind of perverted thing imaginable. The "chat rooms" have become fertile grounds for the destruction of marriages, as people get into bondage in a fantasy world that becomes real with very damaging results. In speaking to Internet veterans who know Christ, they told me from day one I had no idea what kind of attacks I was in for when I launched Liveprayer.com. Not minimizing or criticizing the tremendous efforts of very powerful and talented Christians, most Christian sites are "static" in the sense that they have information and have few ways of reaching out to impact lives. As you know, Liveprayer.com not only has the Internet's first LIVE 24/7 video feed where people worldwide can log on and be prayed for in their hour of need, but through our daily devotional we minister to several hundred thousand people worldwide every single day. In the first 8 weeks, you can not imagine the number of lives impacted by God through this website.

Under the weight of the SPAM complaints, our host ISP and mail ISP were very close to taking us off two weeks ago. However we agreed to go to an opt-in phase so people who signed up for the daily devotional had to then receive a confirmation they need to reply to before they could actually start receiving the devotional. That seemed to satisfy everyone and as we removed the people causing us problems, it looked like we were over that hurdle. But the complaints continued. It was beyond my understanding how they were still complaining, but one evening, the Holy Spirit told me to go to the office and log on to the NEWSGROUPS area. The Spirit then led me to various newsgroups frequented by wiccas, anti-Christian groups, and others like that. As I scrolled through the posts, to my horror, I started to see many, many posts to those newsgroups of how people could destroy Liveprayer.com and "blow us off the Internet once and for all." It encouraged people who never had any contact with Liveprayer exactly what words to use in their complaint, an extensive list of email addresses of every ISP that has any connection at all with our website or mail. Digex, who supplies bandwidth to our host ISP, contacted them yesterday and informed them that they were going to cut off our host ISP's bandwidth if they did not pull our website, due to the number of complaints they were getting about our website. Our host ISP really had no choice but to pull our site. You may remember just 2 weeks ago when the initial problems occurred, they only kept us going at that time after we paid them a $5,000 deposit they would hold for 6 months against future complaints. Of course, I am assuming they will keep that money.

I have to admit, last night was a very difficult night for me. I committed all of our ministry resources, as well as the personal resources my wife and I had to come up with, the $100,000 it took to launch this site. Under the tremendous financial pressure was even greater pressure from the incredible numbers of people who we were ministering to every day. Since we launched this site August 30, it has been 7 days a week, at least 16 hours a day to oversee the live prayer part of the site, personally respond to the majority of the email that came in, try to develop some key relationships with other Christian sites, and raise the finances to continue this cutting-edge, fast-growing ministry. My first reaction was to walk away from it. God knows I have done my best, why stay and fight and deal with the incredible daily ministry pressures, and then have to fight every kind of perverted, depraved individual who had no life other than to try and destroy the work we are doing at Liveprayer.com. I have never been a quitter, and I wasn't going to start now.

The ISP that handles sending out our mail has agreed to host our website. It may be 2-3 days to get the domain registration transferred, but we WILL be back up Monday. We are not backing down, we are not going away, and we are going to keep on ministering the hope we have in Christ to the world via the Internet. 2000 years ago, Jesus went into the tomb, and three days later he rose and came forth to show this hurting and dying world He was the Son of God. Because He rose, we have the blessed hope that when this life is over, we too will be perfected and live for eternity with the God who created us. On the third day, Liveprayer.com will rise as a testimony to the forces of evil on the Internet, that God is real and will not be defeated. His work will not be stopped.