No Admin in the Room

I have a small confession to make. One of my vices is a fondness for a certain voice chat area on the Internet. I go there and I can talk to friends from all over the world. It is not like the text chat rooms where you have to type everything you want to say into text. In the voice rooms, you speak into your microphone and the others in the room can hear your voice in "real time" chat. It is kind of neat. I have met folks from England, Wales, Ireland, China, Australia, New Zealand and other places. Like I said, it is neat.

Now, each voice chat room is opened by an "admin" who has the power to police the room and make sure people obey the rules. If rules are broken, the admin has the power to "dot" a person, which takes away their ability to talk or post in a text box in the room. If a person misbehaves badly enough, they can be "bounced" or "booted" from the room. This keeps them from returning to that particular room for 24 hours. Repeat offenders can be banned, which bars them from ever coming in again. So, the admins have the power to see that everyone behaves well.

I was in a room the other night when the admin's voice capability went out. He could not hear anything being said. He left the room so that he could reboot the chat program to see if that would fix the problem. The second he left the room though, someone said out loud "There is no admin here right now." The implication was that now that there was no one in charge, we could all behave badly. Now, in the room I was in, we did not indulge ourselves. But it got me to thinking...

Our Christianity is easy to live out when we are around other people, people who can keep us in line. But the real test of a Christian is the type of Christian we are when we are alone. Many of us Christians live with the motto "Out of sight, out of mind" when it comes to God. We don't see Him with us so we tend to do what we want when we are alone. I am reminded here of a Martin Luther quote "You say you are a child of God? Good. Now go live as you wish." Of course, he means go live as you wish in light of the fact that you are a child of God. That ought to be our heart when we are in a crowded church and when we are alone in our cars, or wherever we are at the time. In a crowd or by ourselves, our deepest desire ought to be to live as though we are children of God.

Beloved, we are the people of God. Kings and priests in the kingdom of Heaven. Slaves of the Lord Jesus Christ. His brothers. Adopted children in the family of God. We shouldn't have to have an "admin" to make us behave. It ought to be our nature.