How Good Is ‘Good Enough’?

… and the slides are here:

1. Step up to your wrongdoing – own it.
   • “If my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land.” – 2 Chronicles 7:14
2. Repent of it & confess it.
   • I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not cover my iniquity; I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the Lord,” and you forgave the iniquity of my sin. – Psalms 32:5
   • If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. – 1 John 1:8-9
3. Trust in God for forgiving and forgetting.
   • I have blotted out your transgressions like a cloud and your sins like mist; return to me, for I have redeemed you. – Isaiah 44:22
   • The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit. – Psa 34:18
   • “For I will be merciful toward their iniquities, and I will remember their sins no more.” – Hebrews 8:12
   • as far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us. – Psalms 103:12
   • For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. – Romans 6:23
4. Stop bringing it up – start living. You’re free of it.
   • There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. – Rom 8:1-2
   • Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. – Romans 5:1
5. Make sure you do your bit too – forgiving others is essential.
   • “For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.” – Matt 6:14-15
   • Then Peter came up and said to him, “Lord, how often will my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? As many as seven times?” (22) Jesus said to him, “I do not say to you seven times, but seventy times seven. – Matthew 18:21-22
   • “So also my heavenly Father will do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother from your heart.” – Matthew 18:35
6. Why forgive?
   • Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children. – Ephesians 5:1
   • But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. – 1 Peter 2:9
   • See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are. The reason why the world does not know us is that it did not know him. – 1 John 3:1
   • Applying to temptation resisted, sin confessed and life lived in Christ Jesus:
     Little children, you are from God and have overcome them, for he who is in you is greater than he who is in the world. – 1 John 4:4
7. Summary.
   • Your best is never so good that you can redeem yourself; your worst is never so bad that God won’t redeem you.
   • The devil wants us to stay focused on our sin so we don’t focus on God.
   • If we are truly children of God, then we are princes and princesses of His family for all eternity – immortal. Isn’t it time we acted like it?

I was caught by the exquisite imagery that the NEB offers for this verse – ‘girdled the ocean with the horizon’. Anybody who’s been at sea or just stood on the shore can appreciate it – there is a line far out there where the sea just … stops. After that is sky.

It all reminds me of the Psalm:

Which is quoted 25 seconds into this otherwise missable clip from the movie Mrs. Miniver by Henry Travers (the next section is much more pleasant after the first minute, so go watch that too!):

@votd John 3:16 esv > @tom, @dick, @harry

votd will look up the verse, send the original back to you, and retweet it on to the addresses you listed.

See the help page here.

Step 1 is being on Twitter. If you’re not a Twitterer yet, this step is fairly easy…go to http://Twitter.com and sign up. That’s all.

Step 2 is to type in the reference like this:

@votd john 11:35

After a while votd will wake up (it does this once a minute), see your message, interpret it, reply to it, and you’ll see this come back on your Twitter client:

John 11:35 - Jesus wept. (KJV)

In its basic form, it’s really that simple.

Verses that are longer than 140 characters (Twitter’s message limit) are wrapped into 2 (or 3, 4, 5 or even 6) messages.

By connecting to the Blue Letter Bible’s site and using the interface they provide to other sites, their translations are also available. If you want to read your verse in Latin, try

@votd john 11:35 vul

And it will come back with the Vulgate translation – BLB has 14 versions that they make available this way (besides the KJV which I have on my own site).

If you want to set a different version to be your default translation, type this:

@votd pref rsv

… then when you send in a verse request without a version, votd will use the RSV.

You can also subscribe to the automatic transmission of the verse of the day (that’s why it’s called ‘votd’, after all!) this way:

@votd pref votd=on

And, starting that night after midnight EST, votd will Twitter you the verse of the day, each day, until you unsubscribe.

Finally, if you’re not sure of your settings, or you want more detailed help, send this:

@votd ?

And votd will tell you what your defaults are and where the help page is.

Pretty nifty, no?

This is Jesus speaking. He’s just cast out a demon and some of the bystanders had accused Him of having this power from the prince of demons; other wanted Him to do signs (as if casting out demons wasn’t enough!). He responds by speaking of Satan as a strong man, but of Himself as the stronger, who takes from Satan all his armor and spoil (v. 21-22). Then comes verse 23, “Whoever is not with me is against me”. Two chapters earlier the context, interestingly enough, is also the casting out of demons – the disciples saw someone else doing the exorcism, someone they didn’t recognize – and they tried to stop him. Jesus’ response is listed in verse 50:

In both verses, Jesus identifies a three-state environment – (1) the ‘withs’, (2) the ‘againsts’, and (3) the unknowns. And it seems as if in chapter 11 He says the unknowns are to be thought of as in the ‘against’ group, while in chapter 9 He says the unknown are among the ‘withs’. It seems contradictory, but here’s the key: who is it that these people are ‘with’ or ‘against’? In chapter 11 Luke is talking about Jesus on a war footing. The Son of God has no problem determining what side the unknown person is on – He knows exactly what is in each heart – their allegiance is only unknown to us. Chapter 9 speaks of the disciples in a ministry setting. They cannot be so insightful, so as a result they are to be more liberal in their estimation. If they see others appearing to do God’s work, and there is no basis for believing these others to be against God, they should let them get on with it.

These thoughts resurfaced recently when a friend showed me a site that seemed to illustrate perfectly this issue of chapter 9. It was a purportedly Christian site raging against the work others are doing in the name of Christ. It saddened me to see so much effort wasted by Christians in hating other Christians – effort that could be wonderfully effective if it were only rechanneled constructively. It connects so well to chapter 11, too – it gave me a real sense that Satan was the strong man guarding his house.

More thoughts to come…

To create a Twitter-bot you need to be a web server. By definition, web servers are passive – ‘send me something and I’ll reply to you’ sort of thing. By definition many Twitter-bots are also passive – ‘I’m waiting for your command to obey it’, but some Twitter-bots are active. There are 2 types of ‘bot invocations:

• A ‘push’ sends a broadcast message. That means that the push functionality has to wake up at a time (say midnight) and push the message out to all subscribers (friends) … again, waking up to send a message is not a typical web function, but at least it’s only once a day.
• A ‘pull’ waits for a request and fulfills it. That’s great, just like a web site.

Unfortunately, it appears that initiating a connection between the user and my verse of the day ‘bot requires the user to add the ‘bot as a friend, and then the ‘bot has to add the user as a friend. How does the ‘bot know that the user wants it to add him as a friend? IT HAS TO LISTEN TO A ‘befriend_all’ LINK EVERY 30 SECONDS!!!!!

Gack! This is the old ‘poll’ technique that was kicked into the trashcan back in the ‘80’s (think RJE stations). It means transmitting an active message twice a minute from the passive web site. Not a smart design. (BTW, it doesn’t have to be 30 seconds, but – as I understand it – that interval gives reasonably responsive feedback to the user so he/she can see that they’ve been added and prevents frustration and multiple messages.) It also means that every Twitter-bot everywhere is sending Twitter an automated message every 30 seconds (or what ever their interval is) – just for a response that is almost always ‘no change’. No wonder Twitter is crashing so much from overload – every ‘bot in the Twitter-sphere is polling it every 30 seconds to check for a message that might show up a dozen times a day!

(I’ll insert my disclaimer here: the documentation for Twitter-bots is {or was!} very sketchy – basically just an API at the time I was investigating doing this – so I may have mis-read how the thing works.)

I wanted to do both: pull – serve a verse from the DB when the request came through from anyone, and push – serve the verse of the day from the DB at midnight to everybody subscribed.

Now Twitter handles different end-point devices differently:

• When someone is subscribed as a mobile phone user and is added as a friend, Twitter sends the ‘add’ message out to them.
• When someone is subscribed as an email user and is added as a friend, Twitter sends the ‘add’ message out to them.
• But when a Twitter-bot is added as a friend, Twitter makes it come look for the ‘add’ message. Why? Isn’t this a staggering waste of traffic?

So I propose a new type of ‘bot – the 2bot, if you will – where Twitter owns the timer and control feed. Here’s how it would work:

1. When I register my 2bot, I tell Twitter it’s a 2bot, and possibly the wake-up time (midnight) and/or the frequency (86400 seconds, in my case).
2. Every time someone wants to subscribe to my service, Twitter sends the 2bot their name and, like a good little web site, I’m woken up and register them, sending them a friend request in reply. When they accept back to me, I send an acknowledgement and go back to sleep. No more polling 2880 times a day for a dozen messages!
3. When they want info (pull), I reply as before.
4. When it’s time to push, I get Twitter’s chron message and send the broadcast out – actually, with this architecture the push just became a pull, didn’t it?

Result? A simpler web site on my side without chron cards – I go back to being a basic web site doing only what I was supposed to do – and a much, much lower load of traffic on Twitter’s side; both benefits leading to less down-time.

I think they should pay me a few mill for this.