The last three weeks I’ve been thinking about what a godly man’s walk with God really looks like.  What characteristics does a Godly man have?  Is there a suitable illustration for such a walk, and how can we remember the keys to continuously growing in and through God?

While thinking all this through I realized that a man’s walk with God is hindered most often by pride.  Man’s pride has many different appearances and can many times hide behind other faults.  But when it comes down to it, men are far more susceptible to failing due to pride than women are.  We thrive on our accomplishments, our hunts, the chase and the race, our dreams and our offspring.  Man’s ability to continue on through life depends on our confidence and respect from others.  It’s too easy for us to slip over the edge of being confident and bold to being proud and individually too loud.  We’re expected to use our giftings and reach our God given goals in order to let his light shine, but our nature is to grasp on to that glory and being proud of our role.

The end result of pride is hurtful sin.  Pride causes collateral damage.  Because of our pride men are more susceptible to falling for sexually sin.  The pride makes us better than our convictions, our family’s reputation and our laws.  Why do so many influential men of God fall for money and sex?  It is because they grasp the glory too much and built up their pride to the point that they were too proud to face the consequences.

Man’s walk with God isn’t a razor edge because of the balance between successfully doing God’s works and fighting our pride.  Man’s walk with God is the razor.  The best illustration of a man’s walk with God is one of the “manliest" things, a straight razor.

Our walk with God has so many commonalities with a good straight razor. 

• We have to be soft to reach our maximum effectiveness.
  A good straight razor is made of softer iron or steel rather than hard and unforgiving stainless steel.  While the stainless steel blades can become sharp enough to shave with, they are not soft enough to get and keep proper edges through stropping.  The metal is just too hard for the leather to help clean the edge to an ultra-fine point.  Stainless steel also eats though the finer honing stones and requires more work on the stone to get to the place that it is sharp enough to cut hair.  The stainless steel is just too stubborn.
  As men of God, we have to be soft enough to work with God’s changes in our lives.  Being honed to the point that God wants us isn’t easy, and we lose parts of who we were, but when we’re malleable enough to be honed quickly, then we aren’t up against the grinding stone as long or as often as we would need to be if we’re as stubborn as stainless steel.
• Even a new and faultless blade isn’t ready to use right away.
  We all still depend on God from the beginning.  A Christian is never finished growing, learning or changing for God.  A brand new blade still requires stropping before use, otherwise the precise and clean honing done on a good blade will be lost against the stubborn grain of the beard.  Regardless of our past, or our anointing, we are still dependent on our relationship with God to continue to maintain and perfect the edge in our life.
• A good edge requires a polished finish.
  A good, sharp razor edge isn’t just ground against any stone, they are honed against several increasingly fine grit flat stones.  The further along in the process the less metal is being removed from the edge and the more the blade is being polished.  In order to obtain that razor edge the blade has to be honed on polishing stones, otherwise the edge is to broad and coarse to shave.  Without the polishing of the ultra-fine grit stones the razor is as useful as a pair of scissors when shaving.
• The blade is supposed to be straight.
  A properly honed and prepared straight razor is just that, straight.  The razor’s edge is formed to the flat stone used during honing.  Regardless of the curve or nicks in the blade, when it goes through the honing process the blade begins to lose the defects and faults in the edge.  The key to removing those nicks and chips is using a very coarse and strong stone on the blade until is wears the fault out of the blade.  This can result in significant changes to the blade and all of the old edge of the blade being lost.  Just as the blade is shaped to the stone, a Godly man is shaped to God during our honing process.
  The straight edge is important for a proper shaving since every step in the process requires an even pressure on a surface, even the shaving process.  Without the flat and straight edge it would be much easier to carve up the face while shaving instead of removing the hair.  The flat blade also increases the performance while stropping and reduces the wear on the leather strop.  A chipped blade will begin eating the leather strop during the stropping process.  Because of our defects we can hinder God’s work in our lives and the lives of others, which is way we have to be willing to allow God to work our defects out of us.
• The edge is delicate.  The blade will rust.
  Since a good razor is made of softer steel or iron it is susceptible to rust.  The blade has to be cared for before and after the shave, including oiling the blade and proper storage when not in use.  The very environment the razor is made to be used it is harmful to the overall integrity of the blade.  Just like a good razor, the working environment we were created for will eat away at us without the proper maintenance and attitude. We depend on God’s constant work in us in order for us to properly allow His work through us.  Without it we begin to decay as a result of the environment we’re in.  The world will cause us to begin to rust and decay, and the more we attach ourselves to the world and its ways the faster and more severe the damage will be.  Just like the water left on the steel razor due to poor drying and maintenance, the world will eat away at us and rust the blade shut.  We become ineffective and even unusable when we separate ourselves from God’s cleaning and maintenance because we refuse to work on our relationship daily.
• Our walk with God should allow us to cleanly cut through the crud of the world. 
  As anyone that has used a knife knows, a sharp edge is most effective for clean cutting.  There are many surfaces that can cut, for example, you can cut your finger tip open with a piece of paper or you can slice your knee open with a edged rock while hiking.  But unless the edge has been prepared and sharpened with the intention of cutting, the edge does more ripping than cutting.  That paper cut hurts so much because the serrated edge of the paper chewed through you skin instead of really slicing through your skin. A surgeon's scalpel is dependent on the sharpness of the blade just as much as it is dependent on the cleanliness to prevent infection and to allow for proper healing post-operation.  If the surgeon used a butter knife to saw open a patient the wound would take longer to heal after being closed back up because the knife would have torn up the flesh rather than slicing through the layers of flesh with little resistance.
  One of the biggest causes of defects in our edge is pride.  Men are in a constant battle between being bold and confident in Christ and falling to our pride.  Our pride warps and chips our edge, as a result our cuts to clean up the world and people around use have impression and defects in them due to our pride and defects in our edge.  An apple sliced with a serrated steak knife might have proper slices, but the flesh of the apple will show the serration of the blade along the cut.  In the same way we leave grooves, grids and marks in the surfaces after we’ve done God’s work, those defects interfere with the clean cut God had planned.
• The chips and nicks need to be completely worked out.
  Chips and nicks result in problems during shaving and when the blade is used to for clean cuts.  When shaving those nicks will increase the chance of cuts, reduce the effectiveness of the blade and require more passes for a proper shave, and will leave marks in and irritate the skin.
  The nicks, chips and other defects have to be worked out of the blade.  The process for removing those defaults requires the blade to be honed with a very coarse stone and then worked back all the way through the honing process again.  Similarly, our pride results in us having to be broken down again and often times taken back to day one of our relationship with God.  The process isn’t fun or easy, just as the coarse stone isn’t soft on the blade.  The deeper and bigger the nick, the more of the blade that will need to be lost to properly edge the razor again.  The deeper and bigger the pride, the hard our process and the more of ourselves we have to lose to recover who we are in Christ.
• The relationship has to be a constant and proactive preparation on a daily basis for us to be most effective.
  To properly maintain the razor edge the blade has to be stropped before and after shaving.  Without stropping the blade has to return to be honed more frequently and the less effective the edge is during the shave.  Stropping is the perfect metaphor for our on going, day-to-day relationship with God.  We have to constantly be praying and communicating with God in order to maintain our edge.  Without it God has to put us through harder times to break us down again and work us till our edge returns again.  Daily devotion, a constant prayer talk with God and frequent praise sessions are essential to being prepared and keeping your edge in life.

 

A sharp edge razor isn’t always used for shaving and here are some important points with that in mind:

• The sharper the edge, the less the edge is misdirected and distracted by the ruts and grooves in the surface being cut.
• Dull edges require speed and force to perform their cutting operations.  Speed and force reduce the precision and increase the damage caused by the cutting while increase the effort and energy required.
• You don’t use force and speed to perform the slicing in a delicate surgery.  For that reason you don’t use an axe for open heart surgery.
• Almost sharp enough blades get stuck half way through, over come by the force and friction around it.
• Axes have their place is bringing down and tearing down things.  Sharp blades are used for creating, building up, and correcting things.
• A good meat clever is still sharp enough to properly slice through a tomato and onion.  Even with huge gifts and weight behind us, to properly do the job we need God with us to keep the fine edge.

I'll start off by saying, I already use Vista.  I use XP.  I use Windows 2003 Server and Windows 2008 Server.  I beta tested every version of Windows since Windows95, so I've had my experiences with beta operating systems.

Windows 7 is nice.  The taskbar takes a little getting used to, but it works.  The updated versions of the included apps aren't anything to really write about, they are still too under featured to evaluate in comparing operating systems, but they are nicer looking and work very well.  Mind Sweeper now requires a GPU for it's fancy effects, but they aren't required to play the game.  The HomeGroup feature looks kind of nice, but I'll have to setup another VM to see how it really panes out.  MediaCenter updates are nice too, but it crashed while I was playing with it.

 All in all, it is nice and stable, but I think I'll install the 64-bit version on one of my laptops to give it a fly one a more general usage, including some development work.  My experience in the last three hours hasn't differed from that of the 98, XP or Vista betas.  A couple of "oh cool" moments and very few problems setting it up, but it will need to be really used before the real evaluation occurs.  Windows98 beta worked great until you selected a video in explorer.  XP beta worked great until you tried to install certain apps.  Vista's beta was actually on of the more stable betas, but driver support and some legacy apps didn't work.  Windows 7 looks like it will be more like the XP beta since there are fewer architecture changes.

With the many different financial and employment situations people are dealing with lately, it isn't a surprise that so many people are looking for change.  Every Presidential election has Change touted as its main purpose, but this election for so many meant something more than it has in most recent history.  It didn't surprise me that Obama was elected, nor did the fact that the media played such a large role in the election shock me either.  It did how ever baffle me that so many "sources" were pushing, and still are pushing Obama as a change leader.  I don't have anything against the man, nor do I think he will fail, but I do think he will fail to meet expectations.

The media isn't helping Obama now that the election is over, instead they are over hyping and over inflating the people's expectations.  Every news story that comes out from sources such as MSNBC,  CNN, and the New York Times are pushing him further and further up the ladder of unrealistic expectations.  The media served their own agenda in getting him elected, now for their own health and his ability to get work done, the media needs to step back and off of the topic for six months.  As it is, Obama's supporter will be ready to crucify him in six months if things are drastically different than they are right now.  The saddest part isn't that this is an unrealistic expectation, but that the majority of Obama's blind voters were lead by the media and are too ignorant to know enough about the complexities of our government, our economy and the intertwined relationships of our economy with the world's.

The financial "crash" hurt other countries as much as it hurt the US.  When the number one economy trips up after drastic and overhyped inflation, it takes the rest of the world with it.  Some are impacted more than others, but the countries that aren't impacted are either completely isolated or are hurting too much to be hurt farther.  As a result, unlike other "crashes" and "crisis" times, this one will take longer to recover from.  Inflation has taken its toll on the world, and as a result our paper, our time and our possessions are worth less now than they ever have been before.  No President could ever fix that.  Our Government can't fix that.  It requires the people to regain confidence and start over to rebuild the country.  It takes all the selfish and blinded people of the US to take action on their own, which isn't something that the generations outside of nursing homes have every had to deal with.

I'm confident that things will start turning around within the next six months, but they will not be fixed.  The stock market will recover in the next 4-5 months and indexes will rise above what they were a year ago, but there will still be people without jobs and even more people struggling to put their lives back together.  The last 10 years have seen too much exponential growth in too many areas for us to just get up and walk away.  The housing market blew up.  Health coverage has blown up, and continues to rise.  Until the entire world start to struggle the oil market was trying to gouge the world for its own gain.  As a result of impatience and greed, the world's economic stability tripped on its face.  Now everyone has to begin to fight for better deals, work for better, more healthy profits and actually work for a living.

The next country that will fall on its face within the next 10 years will be India, then followed by China.  The difference is, India's and China's struggle will be a result of the US companies tightening belts and cut the fat.  Less money will be throw away over seas for whatever comes across the board room table.  India's exponential salary growth and inflation will do itself in, causing the outsource industry to crumble, and therefore causing the companies depending on that industry to re-allocate jobs in other countries and move them back home.  China's manufacturing industry will begin to lose out to "greener" manufacturing processes and see it's thin profits eaten away by the cuts for green production and less production.

 The housing market will begin to build nice, but smaller homes for energy and financial reasons, which will lead to less people buying for the fun of shopping simply because of less living room than the exponential housing market lead people to believe they needed.  This will lead to companies manufacturing smaller quantities of their key products, which will also lead to less manufacturing over seas.  China's factories will not be able to handle to small production runs and be able to move on the next project without increasing costs, which will begin to drive productions back home and to other countries.

 I've wrote all of this to say; if the media wants to help Obama, they need to stop hyping him and start praying for him.  There isn't a man on earth that is going to fix this problem.  There isn't a cabinet of people that can fix this problem within a year.  The only one that can pull us out of the mess is the one that can see all of the mess, and that is God.  Along those lines, it is time for all of us, whether we voted for him or not to pray for our next President and his advisers.  They will need all of the help they can get, and when it comes down to it, we're all in this mess together and we all have to work together to get each and everyone one of us out of it.  There wasn't a single person or group of people that got us into this mess to begin with and there isn't a single person or group of people that will get us out, unless that group includes everyone.

Greed, pride and selfishness were the things that got us in this mess to begin with, it's time to run away from those three poisons and work together to get us back where we need to be.

Cloud communities will begin to alter our interaction with other in our day-to-day routines.  If you look at how the Japanese culture has been overrun by the cell phone and all the standards that have arisen from the innovation there, then you’ll begin to understand the impact that the Cloud Community will have on our lives.  The URL will no longer by the destination or address used in advertisement, nor will the physical address and telephone numbers.  The information will be based off of the 2D and 3D barcodes on the advertisements.  Even television will begin to be altered by the changes.  Why try to dump the contact information on your market and use up space and time that should be used for sharing marketing material?  The recipient isn’t going to remember your contact information or take the time to record it when they are being bombarded by information at every turn.

On top of the marketing material, the marketer has to also consider the community aspect of the campaign.  The viral marketing campaigns used frequently within the last 4 to 5 years have already reached their limits and have saturated the market.  The idea that “any press is good press” is not true, and often times, the more attempts to persuade the consumer a marketer uses, the more the market begins to feel like it is being vomited on.  Good old fashioned word of mouth is going to be the single most affective marketing technique as we move into the cloud community era.  The more friends, co-workers and communities link to each other online, the larger their influence and voice will become.  Not only will individuals influence stick with them as the move from one community to another, but so will the market voice that follows them.

A perfect example of this has already been seen within the last two years.  Microsoft’s Vista campaign wasn’t a failure due to the techniques, the information or even the product.  The campaign failed as a result of communal voice, the media wolf pack ran together and spread the news louder and faster than any marketing campaign with any budget could counter.  The result this time around is that Microsoft has been forced to listen to the voices around the Internet and be more open with it’s progress for Windows 7.  Another aspect of their altered campaign is that they are showing off the improvements and featured in a more controlled environment with the “louder” voices on the Internet.  This helps reign in the mass negative wild fire that spread even before Vista was launched.

So, what does this mean to the smaller businesses, the blogs and the other organizations out there?  Simple, it means that while you might have a loud voice, if you have the influence, there are a lot of other loud voices out there, and your influence is more important than the volume and the information you provide.  The inter-personal relationships and virtual friendships will be more valuable that the money spent doing character campaigns, information dumps and bribing the world towards your side.  Essentially, you have to have friends on your side that have influence themselves.  This also means that fan boys are counterproductive and harmful to your message, because they will push people away and reduce the effectiveness of your communities ability to communicate to the world.

The Good

The changes and influences of the world and the information age don’t all negatively impact our ability to minister.  As stated in the previous entry on the topic, the tools that the internet provides make it easier for our leaders and the pastors to keep each other in touch and accountable.  Services like X3Watch and other accountability tools help keep everyone accountable to each other, and protect us from ourselves.  Communities like Facebook and Twitter help keep each of us connected and provide a simple and easy to use tool for share resources, information and planning.

There are hundreds of sites that help with ministry planning, ministry organization, idea and creativity resources and multimedia resources galore. Anytime the week has been to chaotic or hectic to right a sermon or prepare visual aids, there is always a solution found somewhere on the internet.  The online communities allow us all to gauge how the community is doing, what is most affecting them and how we might best impact our fellow believers.  They also offer easy means of providing feedback from the community after events and activities.

The Bad

We all know that the overly connected world can do the exact opposite and be very destructive too.  We hear far too often about an adult being arrested for pursuing a minor or crossing boundaries.  The anonymity of the Internet tends to cause even the most mature adult to regress into their juvenile self and believe that they are invisible to the consequences of their actions online.  The scariest part is when it translates into everyday life and the user’s corruption and baggage online becomes real-world corruption and baggage.

Pride always leads to a downfall, and the large majority of those downfalls are sexual in nature.  When you are too proud to answer to others, to do what is right and to protect yourself, then you are also too good to obey the laws of your heart and the laws of the land.  This translates directly into sexual sin against oneself and others, and then can quickly resolve in to sexual sins involving others.  Sexual sin and pride do not require the Internet to sprout from seeds easily planted in one’s heart, but the Internet, the anonymity and the plethora of porn in every imaginable taste, make it too easy for the seeds of corrupt nature to grow violently.

This is where the honesty and accountability really come into play.  But…  The reality of it is, that if the person, your leader, doesn’t want to get caught, they do have the smoke and mirrors to hide behind now.  They are less likely to get caught surfing for porn and downloading pirated content over the Internet than they are to be caught walking into an adult bookstore or the shady side of the flea market.

The Unsettling

There is also the unsettling part about the Internet.  The information part.  I’m not referring to the information and communities that you don’t agree with, I’m referring to the life and lack of death of information.  Almost everything said and uploaded to the Internet is cache, archived and indexed in some form or fashion.  Every stupid mistake, every angry word, every incriminating photo, and every vocal opinion.  Individuals cannot escape their own sin now.  Not only does the Internet remove the personal connection between people and make it easy to judge them without regard for their well-being, but it also provides a wealth of information from everyone’s past to feed our opinion and desire to judge the “soulless” personality some where out “there”.  We’re so removed and disconnected that even the person down the street can be viewed as an object and not an individual simply due to the proximity vacuum produced by the Internet.

Everyone’s mistakes and pain are indexed and searchable by everyone else on the Internet.  This means that anyone that has ever had a past that isn’t perfect will be haunted by when their move on to do God’s work.

The Baffling

The baffling part is that our reach may extend far beyond our physical community.  Our stray words on our blogs, websites, community forums, and other social networks can spread like wildfire and reach people in other countries, cultures and places in life.  Our light can shine farther and faster than ever before, even in the overly black and life sucking void of the Internet.  Your pray, encouragement and relationship with God can influence someone in Japan, China, South Africa and Chili the same way it can impact your neighbor down the street.  Due to the technical nature of the content of my blog I’ve had several people visit my site from all over the world.  The largest international groups have been from Denmark and Japan, but I’ve had several visitors from Brazil and other countries around the world.

It is just as easy to provide inspiration for believers all around the world as it is reaching your leaders and members of your congregation.  And the larger the impact you have in your local community, the larger the impact you’ll have online.  If you can balance both your communities local relationships and growth with the influence and connectivity within your online community then your impact on the world will become a lasting one with far reaching arms and exponentially warm hearts.

Updated July 25th, 2007

I've noticed something recently; there has been an overwhelming number of Fair Eagle ads showing up all over the place.  This occurs on my Mac and my PC and after investigating the issue further I've found that the ads are being appended to all .com domain HTML requests.  It appears that this is the result of a proof of concept from an advertising agency which will append the JavaScript for the advertising to every .com site's HTML.

The code is on every website from penny-arcade to apple.com, but it doesn't always show the ads.

This really frustrates me, and to an extent is a violation of our contracts with the ISPs.

It’s a possibility that the proof of concept uses an exploit for firewalls or other networking equipment, but I just feel violated.

I’ll post more when we find it.

Here is the JavaScript being appended to the HTML files:
<script language="JavaScript">
nebuad_c="P10025";
nebuad_d="00000046";
nebuad_u="3464188158";
nebuad_v="1.2";
nebuad_ts="1182529944";
nebuad_g="6286";
nebuad_p="aHR0cDovL3d3dy5tc24uY29tLw==";
</script>
<script language="JavaScript" src="http://a.faireagle.com/a?t=s&c=P10025&d=00000046&u=3464188158&v=1.2&ts=1182529944&g=6286&p=aHR0cDovL3d3dy5tc24uY29tLw=="></script>

 

Update: It turns out this a is a hardware solution for ISPs to make backend revenue.  Apparently the money you pay for their service isn’t enough.  This is the case for both personal and business customers of Redmoon in DFW.

More info can be found here:
http://jaiku.com/channel/twit/presence/4880265

Update 2: They have turned the ad injection off.  As to whether or not the hardware is still sitting on their network and sniffing out data, I don’t know, but the ads are gone.  Either way this has left a bad taste in my mouth and I plan to switch providers.

Update 3 (July 25th): The University of Washington security and privacy research group and ICSI have created a measurement infrastructure to help answer these questions. By visiting their web page, you are helping out with our experiment. http://vancouver.cs.washington.edu/

Update 4 (July 16, 2008): http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080715-congress-goes-after-nebuad-again.html