Nowadays many of our vehicles, machinery, and personal devices have the ability to interact with us, actually giving us realtime feedback, telling us if things are working properly and warning us of potential malfunctions. The days of the “idiot light” on the dashboard of a car, a light that would only tell you if the car was overheating or low on oil pressure, seem pretty far behind us. In my truck there is even a female voice that comes through the stereo system telling me that I can receive an email on the health and performance of the vehicle. Admittedly, the first time she started speaking, it seemed pretty creepy.
All this feedback from technology got me thinking, “Wouldn’t it be cool if we had something that could give us feedback on our spiritual walk?” Like a built in program that could say, “Dan, it’s time to pray.” Or maybe, “Hey dude, you need to get some counseling, you’re not thinking right.”
The good news is that the spiritual reality is, once we receive the gift of the holy spirit in the new birth, we do have an internal monitoring and feedback system. God tells us that our flesh and the spirit we’ve been given are in conflict, one fighting against the other (Gal. 5:17), but that He, through the spirit, is working in us to want to do, and to do, His good pleasure (Phil. 2:13). This means that we do have a built in spiritual feedback system.
A while ago a warning signal came on in my truck indicating that a rear brake and turn signal bulb had burned out. The problem is that I’ve ignored the warning for over a month now and the other day a man pulled up alongside of me and signaled me that the light wasn’t working. Like the truck warning system, when it comes to the warnings of the spirit I can choose to heed them or ignore them. And when I do, then also like the other driver, God will use others in the Body of Christ to signal us that things are not quite right. Our job is to train ourselves to listen to the feedback system, heed the warnings, and then take the necessary steps to make the proper corrections.
