(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 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 than 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.
