In my previous writing, I said I would easily recognise an Israeli by the way they drive. Without using indicators and with horns hooting all the time. In the same way, one recognises God’s children by their way of life and by the things they do.

This excludes deception and fraud. Children of God do not do the cheating thing. Children of God are honest and walk the straight path. You don’t have to look up to make sure the sun is shining when they say it’s a beautiful day. Or what do you think?

Unfortunately, this is not the norm today. I get a lot of emails every day. I delete more than half of them immediately because it’s spam. Always such a shining invitation: I’ve inherited money and just need to contact the person, so that he can transfer the money. Or I just need to verify my bank account quickly to prevent my account from being closed. I’ve clicked on some of these links and it looks exactly like my bank’s portal. The difference is that you’re on the spammer’s portal and that’s how they get all your information to access your bank account and take everything.

How upsetting!

Did you know that more than 89 billion spam emails are sent worldwide every day? The worst part is that many people get caught like this. A friend of mine works at a very large company and one of their employees clicked on a wrong attachment to his email.

In this way, a virus got into the company’s servers. The next day when they came to the office, all their files were gone. When they clicked on it, there was a message saying they had to pay millions of rands to get it back.

They refused, because most of the time if you pay, the hackers keep on asking for money. It took them months to get rid of the virus. Almost 50% of businesses pay the ransom.

Even in our ministry, a virus entered when one of our daughters clicked on the wrong link. By the grace of God, I saw the files turn into codes and was able to take all the computers off the internet and reinstall the files from an offline computer.

It makes you tired. It scares you. Then you only want to work with people you trust completely. It makes you tired when someone promises you something and you are badly harmed. What you say to others must be the truth. What you say you are going to do, you must do.

¹… Make a clean sweep of malice and pretence.

The world needs people who are honest and trustworthy. We who are children of God must be known by this. People should be able to be safe with us. People need to know what to expect from us.

Even if it is a little thing, we must not be guilty of cheating. Let your yes be your yes and your no, your no. Let our way of life be an example for others and let it also attract them to the Light.

Scripture
1 Peter 2:1-8

Reflection
Where have you run into people who cheated you?
Where were you dishonest?
What can you do to prevent this from happening again?

Prayer
Father, I want to be honest in all circumstances. My yes must be my yes. Please show me where I’m not doing this and help me drive it out of my life. I ask this in Jesus’ Name. Amen.