Feb. 25, 2007

Psa 73:27-28 ESV
(27) For behold, those who are far from you shall perish; you put an end to everyone who is unfaithful to you.
(28) But for me it is good to be near God; I have made the Lord GOD my refuge, that I may tell of all your works.
Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version, copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
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Since I work with computers, I tend to think of things in a computer way some times. In computers we have a command called ping. It is used to see if two computers can talk to each other on a network like the Internet. If I wanted to know if the Google site was available to my machine I would type ping www.google.com. It would send a packet of information to the remote computer and then the remote computer sends it back. In this way the time can be measured for how long it takes to get between the two computers. In theory, the further away you are from the remote computer, the longer it will take to receive the signal back.

It is kind of a good test for Christians also. Have you tried to ping God lately. How long does it take your signal to get through to Him? More importantly, how long before you get a reply from Him. To me, God is always near me. It does not take long for my signal to get to God. He is never far away from me at all. Sometimes I tend to wander away from Him. Somehow, someway, He can be close enough to hear me, but there is some interference in my getting the signal back from Him. I may be watching to mutch TV, to involved in my work, or anything else that keeps me from spending time with God each day. As this continues each day, though I may say a quick prayer, do I really expect a response.

There is another command we use in computers. It is called tracert and stands for trace route. Like the ping command it sends a packet of information to a remote computer. Instead of getting a reply from it though, it gets a reply from every computer that it has to go through to get to the remote computer. Of course, the more computers it has to go through, the longer it is going to take to go through things. As noted above, God may have to get through a lot of stuff to get to me. Each layer that I add on, it takes that much longer.

So what is your ping rate with God? Better yet, what would a tracert show?