Watch out, watch out…..
I discipline my body like an athlete, training it to do what it should. Otherwise I fear that after preaching to others I myself might be disqualified
1 Corinthians 9:27
Not many people leave comments on this site, and most comments are fairly innocuous. However one came in last week that sort of caught me off guard. It was very flattering and asked if I were a journalist by profession. I am not a journalist or professional writer in any sense so having read this I could feel my head getting bigger by the second.
But that was just the problem. My pride got the better of me. For you see the programme that formats this site had identified the message as SPAM. Now I am not very technically proficient in these matters and I could see nothing wrong with the message, so I let it go. But something inside me had nagging doubts. It was too flattering.
So I investigated further and found that within the post was a link to a web site selling pharmaceuticals. I then checked back on a number of previous comments and found the same thing.
Now maybe this site has some special interest to those working in the pharmaceutical industry, but I doubt it. It may also be that those who sent the comments were totally innocent and their computers are infected, but the incidence of this was very high. Only one external comment was not so affected. I can therefore conclude that this is how some people try to get hidden advertising onto the site, and in that case I can only thank God that the links were not worse.
The point of all this is that the enemy can trick us if we are not careful. He will not trick us by obvious deceits but by very subtle ones. If we are not careful it is easy to fall into sin and before we know it we are trapped.
However, the enemy usually overplays his hand and gives the game away. In this case the flattery was too much.
The answer is to always follow the rules. Don’t try and convince yourself that you are a special exception and that God has given you special permission. He has not. If you stick to the rules you can stay on the path and ultimately you will be happier.
In my case I will take more notice of what the system tells me in future.