The development of communication technology represents, as someone said, "improved means to unimproved ends." Let us remember that to engage in communication technology as such, apart from our daily necessities, is a food offered to idols.

The Internet is making it possible for us to preach the Gospel of the Kingdom to all nations. Although we have been on the Internet just a few years we already have been visited on our site by over seventy countries, and the list is growing. This is in answer to a prayer uttered more than twenty-five years ago that God would enable us to preach the Gospel of the Kingdom wherever people breathe the air. We are well on our way, thank God forever, to doing just that. This prayer was spoken, of course, before personal computers were available.

However our primary communication is to be directed toward the Lord.

Pursuing excellence in music and other art forms. The author of this essay has had fairly extensive training as a pianist. He is aware of how easily the pursuit of excellence in the performance of music can become an idol. There is little value in the development of artistic excellence unless the Lord should guide the individual into such an enterprise.

If a person were to perfect his performance of Beethoven on the piano so that he performed the sonatas far better than any other pianist of history, he would have accomplished little. He would perform before audiences of people who would be entertained, and then go out and live lives that are not pleasing to the Lord. The virtuoso has spent numerous backbreaking hours mastering Beethoven, only to die and find he has wasted the time on earth allotted to him. He or she has succeeded only in scattering the things of Christ.

The Lord Jesus commanded us to seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness. When we do not do this we are wasting our time on the earth.

The pursuit of musical or artistic excellence for its own sake is a food offered to idols.

The love of excitement and thrills. The people of the large nations of Western civilization seek after excitement and thrills. The lust for greater and greater thrills has led the motion picture directors to produce films about violence, gruesome death, monsters of the spirit world, and other forms of shock and horror. Each film strives to stimulate more shock and horror than the previous.

Often we hear believers refer to a church service or program as being "exciting." People want their church activities to be exciting. Young people seek thrills of one sort or another. After our basic needs of food and shelter have been provided we look for something to relieve the boredom.

Oswald Chambers in one of his books mentions that boredom is a major foe of the Christian believer. This is the truth. Christian character is formed in the patient, plodding, day-to-day obedience to the words of the Apostles. We must always live as though God is using us in a tremendous manner even when decades pass without our being called on (as far as we know) to do anything of significance.

To be continued.