The Update

         I’ll never forget it. The day my wife and I were baptized. We were driving to the church building and my son, asks me where we are going. I tell him we are going to the church building. Then he says to me, “Oh, yeah, you are going to get updated”. We chuckled, but he was right. In today’s technological world we rely on computers, much like in the Old testament they relied on farming, except we can’t eat our computers. Jesus told many parables about farming because that was what the people knew and understood. Unfortunately, there are not a lot of us who know a lot of the farming terminology anymore but we are more familiar with technology terminology. So when Ayden said I was being updated he was right.

         We can think of God as our Master Programmer, He programmed us and gave us a purpose. Genesis tells us how God programmed the whole world to work in the way it does and setup all the scheduled tasks for the world and everything in it to work perfectly. For those unfamiliar with the term scheduled tasks, they are tasks setup on a computer to start at certain times, a lot like our days, weeks, months, seasons, years. It is also like our lifecycle how we grow and mature at certain times in our life. So God coded this perfect world and gave it instructions on how it is supposed to work. Then when the serpent tempted Eve and Adam to eat from the tree of knowledge their code got corrupted. Sin is a lot like a computer virus once it gets in it is almost impossible to get rid of it completely. You can think of satan as a hacker, he tempts us with these neat programs that seem harmless and then when we get some kind of virus that we can’t uninstall it, similar to getting trapped in sin.

         So how can people fix their code once it is corrupted? By being baptized. When we get baptized we sync with God, we make that connection, and He wipes our hard drives clean. Throughout our life God works with us and starts to remap our drives, as long as we let him. What I mean by remapping our drives is that we let God choose our path rather than trying to do things on our own. When you remap your hard drives you are changing the path names of the drive so that your paths line up correctly on a server. So when we follow God’s plan, our path is made straight and we can get to where we belong.

         How do we know what to do after we are synced up with God? Well obviously we need to read the README.TXT, you know that text file that gets downloaded with most every piece of software. That README file tells you exactly how to use the program and how to deal with issues if and when they occur. I know it is obvious but I have to say it, the Bible is like the README file. The Bible contains all the information we need to know about everything that matters. If we don’t read it then we won’t know how to deal with issues when they pop up.

         So after were baptized then everything is all fine and we don’t have to worry, right? Wrong, life is crazy. You could be going to church every sunday reading your bible everyday and satan will still try tempt you. He will pop up out of nowhere, much like pop ups on the internet. We have to make sure we close out all the pop ups that come about, without giving it a second thought. Pop ups are like temptations that you struggle with, they are there to make you stronger and learn important lessons. But we can get tripped up on these pop ups and fall into temptation, if that happens we need to do a system restore, ask for forgiveness and get back on track.
Jesus gave us that utility when he died on the cross to overwrite our sins. The difference being that a system restore sets a system back to a point before there was a virus in the system, Jesus overwrites the virus code for us so we know it was there and we can learn from our mistakes, but the virus itself is overwritten.

         So, when Ayden told us we were getting updated, he didn’t know how right he was.