Daily Devotional for Friday August 10, 2018

A Sad Day and Another Time I Wish I had been Wrong

(Joshua 1:9)

***DAILY PERSONAL PRAYER: Dear Lord, thank you for another day. Please let me never take a moment of this precious gift of life for granted. Grant me your peace, your joy, and enjoy the abundance this life can offer. Let me live this day for your glory. In the name of Jesus I pray...AMEN!!!

Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be frightened, and do not be dismayed, for the LORD your God is with you wherever you go.” Joshua 1:9

A sad day and another time I wish I had been wrong. It was almost 18 years ago in a Daily Devotional that I shared Liveprayer would be censored and blocked from this new technology called the Internet while pornography and every kind of evil known to man would still exist. Despite not even owning a computer until Liveprayer signed on August 31, 1999, it was very shortly into writing the Daily Devotional each morning on the issues of the day from a Biblical worldview that I immediately realized “they” won’t let Liveprayer do what we were doing forever.

Again, even though the internet was in its infancy and I had zero background in technology, I was seeing each day the impact Liveprayer was having despite the fact we only had a few thousand people who were getting the Daily Devotional. Those who helped us launch Liveprayer told me I needed something on the website that changed daily to keep people coming back to the site. I had over 1,000 sermons I had preached over the first 7 years of Liveprayer so I began by reducing those into what became the Daily Devotional.

Many people emailed saying they loved the Daily Devotional but asked if I could email it to them. Liveprayer literally blew up over the next year with over 100,000 subscribers. Daily, hundreds were emailing us for prayer which I personally prayed over and responded to until it was physically impossible. That led me to put together what has for the past decade become a wonderful dedicated group of retired pastors, now around 700, to insure every prayer request we received was prayed for and personally responded to.

Lives were being impacted. People were finding hope in their most desperate times of life. Through curiosity, people getting the Daily Devotional forwarded to them, we were reaching the ever growing number of people who were NOT Christians. Most important thought, emails came in daily from people who made the decision to come to faith in Jesus!!!

I remember one evening getting ready to leave for the day, sitting at my desk, and spending the next hour writing notes as the Lord was showing me that it might not be tomorrow, or next year, or ten years, but there would come a day when having the ability to boldly and without compromise shared the Truth of God’s word on the issues of the day while helping people face the challenges of life while leading lost souls to faith in Jesus, would one day be shut down.

Because of that, I sat with my head and only tech Mike (who is still serving the Lord here at Liveprayer), and we made the decision to house Liveprayer on our own servers and have our own tech crew. This was an INCREDIBLE expense at that time and to be honest still is. Liveprayer could have been run for 40% less by using other companies servers and infrastructure. However, I knew that we would never last very long due to what the world viewed as our “controversial content” each day and whatever company was hosting us would be pressured to shut us down.

Liveprayer would HAVE NEVER BEEN HERE for 19 years had we not made this move. The bandwidth we have to buy which is how the internet operates, our tech crew, has always been and still is the bulk of our monthly operations. Having control of our website, most important our email infrastructure that we send out 2.5m Daily Devotionals worldwide each day as well as handle 40,000 incoming emails for prayer daily, has been the only way Liveprayer has been able to exist all of these days.

Despite that, numerous times a month people try to hack into Liveprayer. By the way, NO financial data is on our servers, it is all stored on incredibly secure, encrypted servers, at the financial institutions we have dealt with who use the most state of the art security software. We receive numerous times a week what is called DDoS attacks where an outside entity floods your website and servers with millions of attempts which overwhelms the servers and literally shuts your website down. These attacks have shut down sites like Drudge, Ebay, and all major sites with millions of dollars in infrastructure security.

Only God’s hand of protection has kept Liveprayer up and running these past 19 years!!! He has preserved Liveprayer in order to do the work He has called us to do. I remember doing Daily Devotionals over the years warning people about social media sites, primarily Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. I can’t even begin to tell you the daily emails we get from Facebook users whose lives have been greatly damaged. Mostly it is older people who have older kids, stuck in their job, life is sadly in a rut, and all of a sudden they find their high school boyfriend or girlfriend who is in the same situation. You can figure out how that ends up.

Listen, like everything, you can use websites for good or you can get caught up in a trap using them for bad. My other concern though was the fact these are all private companies and at any time they can boot you for whatever reason they decide. These giant tech companies are mostly all in Silicon Valley (San Francisco), all very liberal in their political beliefs, and a huge percentage have bought into all of the social lies of the world that has rejected the Truth of the Bible.

These social networking companies have now used the bogus “Russian interference” scam to do what they have LONGED wanted to do. (For the record, I say that since if anyone thinks a bunch of Facebook ads totaling $100,000 or so had anything to do with the 2016 Presidential election you are wrong.) CENSOR THOSE VOICES THEY DISAGREE WITH!!! That has now started and while the majority has been focused on conservative political speech, don’t think for a second it is not also happening to Christian speech!!!

While we have had our PayPal account closed after 19 years even though we have never had one issue or even contact, there are also hundreds of Christians one Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, PayPal, and other platforms being closed down. I honestly can’t blame these social media sites. They are not shy about their visceral hatred and disgust of a Biblical viewpoint. They can now put that disdain into tangible action because Christians abandoned the marketplace 30 years, no longer having to deal with the world outside the four walls of the church, for the safety, comfort, and PROFITABILITY of the “Christian trough,” ...their own safe subculture.

From 2002-2010, I appeared dozens of times on Fox News’ O’Reilly Factor, Hannity, Cavuto, several MSNBC and CNN programs, national secular radio programs, along with hundreds of newspapers in the US and internationally, dealing with the issues of the day from a Biblical worldview. I still comment on issues for various newspapers, do some radio programs, but for the most part have been blackballed from the major secular media outlets because I never went on one of those programs without working the Gospel into whatever the issue was. EVERN FOX NEWS REALLY DOESN’T WANT TO HEAR IT!!!

Many of the bookers and producers I dealt with told me straight out that I was too “black and white” that I needed to be more accepting of the views of others. For the most part, the major secular TV and radio media operations have shut out a Christian worldview 99% of the time. You have the better percentage of the last two generations who have never even been to church. Sadly, the culture is ringing 24/7 with every lie from satan on every issue, and that lie is virtually unopposed because the Christian view has been silenced!!! That has already happened, and now the internet is the next outlet looking to silence Christians!!!

I love you and care about you so much. Liveprayer will never slow down. We will continue to battle each day to reach the lost and hurting masses with the only hope there is for this lifetime and all eternity...JESUS. This world is lost and in a spiritual abyss because it has chosen to reject the only truth there is found in God’s Word for the lies of this world. Worse of all, souls are needlessly dying daily and ending up in hell for all eternity simply because people are not being reached.

I have told people for virtually 19 yrs now that the ONLY way Liveprayer can be silenced is if we don’t have the funds to operate. After a very difficult last 4 months of 2017 that literally could have taken Liveprayer out, God intervened and after re-working our monthly budget from $65,000 to $50,000 while sacrificing virtually none of our main daily ministry operations, we have worked our way through July with only a $6,200 shortfall. Please pray about what God would have you do to insure we have the funds we need to be able to continue the Lord’s work here at Liveprayer.

In perspective, our monthly budget to reach 2.5 million worldwide daily, respond to 40,000 emails for prayer daily, lead hundreds of lost souls to Christ each week, is apx. the same budget of a local church with 800-900 members meeting once a week. For just under $1,700 a day, God can multiply those funds like the fishes and loaves to feed the masses! IF JUST 30 OF OUR FRIENDS WOULD COMMIT TO MAKE A $1,700 GIFT EACH MONTH TO LIVEPRAYER, WE WOULD NEVER HAVE ANY ISSUES WITH OUR OPEARTIONS!!!

Please be praying as we navigate our way through this current culture that is very focused and smelling blood to silence the message of the Bible in the culture. Trust me, only God and a few on this planet have any idea the battles we have fought, literally daily over these past 19 yrs. The culture could care less what happens on Christian TV, radio, in local churches, since they are simply preaching to the choir and staying out of the way. Please understand, Christians need to be fed to grow, however, since it is easier to stay behind their four walls virtually all churches and ministries have forgotten the lost masses who will die and go to hell without Christ.

We always had to fight just to reach the masses in the marketplace, and now we have to fight that much harder. However, with your prayers, love, and support, Liveprayer will continue to battle for our Lord and His Truth on the front lines as we have faithfully done these past 19 yrs. AMEN!!!

In His love and service, Your friend and brother in Christ, Bill Keller