Today's Devotional
June 7, 2006
Subject: Based On Your Recent History
2Corinthians 2:11 - "Lest Satan should get an advantage of us: for we are not ignorant of his devices."
I was sitting at the computer with my wife and we were shopping online for a refrigerator. As we checked several search engines, one of them pulled up a page that said, "based on your recent history, you might like these websites." It then displayed a recent history of websites that my wife had visited, because we were actually on her computer account. As we perused her web history, we saw all of the recent places she had visited on the web. The web was then recommending similar places for her. I have a music website that does much the same thing. It will say, "based on your recent listening, you might like these artists." Recommending actions for you based on your history is okay for these purposes, but it is also one of Satan's key devices to keep us entrenched in sin.
Satan is not omniscient like our God is. He doesn't know everything about us, but he does know our history. He knows, much like that search engine on the web, what we've been in to. If we've been looking at things that tempt us into sin, he'll recommend more of that and in Satan's case, he'll make recommendations for sin at times when our recent history might show none.
On the computer, the only way to change the recommendations that you receive from your history is to delete what's in your history. Just as it is difficult to forget your history in life, so it is with the computer too. However, if we want to make Satan's job more difficult, we must delete the bad "files" out of our history folder.
God doesn't have to make recommendations based on your history. He knows everything about you and has a perfect plan for you. With Him, it's simply a matter of daily logging on to His "web page." There every page is a good one to visit and you won't have to delete the history folder. In fact, you'll need it for the rest of your life.
