The Bible has been updated. It’s true. It happened this morning. I had a message on my phone that said, “Successfully updated ‘Bible'”. I am not sure what updates they have made, but it will be interesting finding out. Perhaps they have taken out the gory bits or the sexy bits or the difficult bits.

Or perhaps, as seems more likely, it was simply my phone alerting me to the fact that the Bible app I have installed on my phone has been updated – to fix a bug, for example. In fact this morning it was one of four apps that were updated.

Yesterday afternoon I had a frustrating time with my emails. I have two accounts – a personal one and a work one. The work one kept working (appropriately) but the personal one decided all of a sudden to become impersonal. It stopped receiving emails and kept asking me to enter the password as if I was entering the incorrect password, even though I knew that it was correct – after all “password” is not too difficult to remember is it?* I was getting frustrated by this and restarted the program several times to no avail.

In the end I decided to try a trick that I learnt from an amazing computer support man I knew. I turned the whole machine off and on again. As I was doing this I noticed that it wanted to install some updates. So I told it that I was happy for it to do that and guess what? When it restarted after installing the updates the email program worked fine for both the work and personal accounts.

Because technology is so integral to our lives nowadays, so too are updates. Bugs need to be fixed, potential security weaknesses need to be strengthened, incompatibilities with other programs need to be resolved, and (just occasionally) an update enhances the capability and look of the program or app. Sometimes these updates happen behind the scenes, without us noticing. Sometimes they need to be authorised by us, or we need to restart the machine to make the update effective. I wonder how many years of our lives are lost while we are waiting for technology to update itself?

To update a Biblical description of what the Holy Spirit does, he is constantly applying updates to the lives of people who have given him permission to do so (generally known as ‘Christians’). A lot of the time we are not aware of the updates happening because they are small, gentle enhancements or fixes. But there are other times when the Spirit makes us aware that we need to be updated to fix a significant issue, to help us to resolve a potential security weakness (avoiding temptation) or to help us with our incompatibilities with other people. And sometimes he provides an update that enhances us and our capabilities (spiritual fruit and gifts).

In those cases, when we need to take action ourselves, we are responding to the Spirit’s prompting but the update won’t happen without our involvement because we are not machines or technology to be updated by a software update program but are human beings in a relationship with the Living God. Because he has given us autonomy and free will he will not force us to be updated, but he will recommend it. Do you need to respond to any update messages today?

Be blessed, be a blessing

*I hope you realise that was a joke!