Terms And Conditions: Take A Break Series

If you follow me on Facebook, that’s assuming that you’ve read the terms and conditions for Facebook and agreed to them, then you might have seen some of my posts from the Babylonian Bee, which is a Christian Satire site, recently this one struck me as fitting.

BOSTON, MA—Local man Justin Fuller immediately fell dead after clicking “I have read and accept these terms and conditions” when installing a new piece of software Friday morning.

The Lord and Sovereign Judge, from which nothing is hidden, could tell Fuller had not even glanced at the twelve pages of legalese, and thus his checking of the box was a lie against which God took immediate vengeance.

“This is very scary,” said software analysis Terrell Bennett. “It makes me wonder if other people have not been reading the end-user license agreement. It’s an important contract between the licensor and the purchaser, and it could be chaos if people didn’t understand all the ramifications of what they were agreeing to. If you click you accept those terms and conditions without having read them, you’re lying to the software vendor, to your MacBook Pro, and to the Creator of us all who is always watching.”

CompuGlobal, the maker of the software Fuller was installing, has informed Fuller’s wife she will get a full refund for the computer program since the EULA was not properly agreed to. “Hopefully everyone in the future will take the time to read the terms and conditions,” said David Zimmerman, the lawyer who wrote the EULA.

“When we put the contracts in the install step, we assume everyone reads them and it is legally binding,” Zimmerman added before immediately falling dead.

This is week 4 of Terms and Conditions and in week 1 we defined Terms and Conditions this way; Rules by which one must agree to abide in order to use a service.

In week one we talked about the terms and conditions in the beginning that man and woman were created to be in fellowship with God, there was just one thing on the terms and conditions, don’t eat from that one tree, you can eat from any other tree in the garden, just don't eat from that one tree. And you know where they went fruit picking.

And because of their disobedience, humanities relationship with God was damaged.

The next week we looked at the terms and conditions for worshipping God, that is meeting him in a restored relationship. And we discovered that God not only wants our relationship with him to be right but also our relationship with others to be right. And we talked about apologies and forgiveness.

Last week we looked at the terms and conditions for Evangelism, remember Evangel means good news, so these are the rules and conditions for telling people the good news about Jesus. And we started with the observation that God cares about lost people and wants them to be found. The T & Cs of that is that in order for someone to hear the message someone has to share the message. And out of that, I shared the vision and mission of Cornerstone.

Today we are going in a little different direction. In the scripture that was read earlier, we heard these words, Isaiah 58:13-14 “Keep the Sabbath day holy. Don’t pursue your own interests on that day, but enjoy the Sabbath and speak of it with delight as the LORD’s holy day. Honour the Sabbath in everything you do on that day, and don’t follow your own desires or talk idly. Then the LORD will be your delight. I will give you great honour and satisfy you with the inheritance I promised to your ancestor Jacob. I, the LORD, have spoken!”

So, let’s start with The Service The prophet tells the people of Israel that if they fulfil the terms and conditions the service that they can avail themselves of is the delight of the Lord. But what does that mean?

Perhaps the “Delight of the Lord’ is most evident when it’s missing. And most of us have felt that absence at times.

You ever feel like the Rabbit in “Alice in Wonderland”? You know the one, he’s always rushing this way and that looking at his watch and muttering, “I’m late, I’m late”. It seems that every hour of every day is filled to the limit with things that need doing and we never seem to have enough time to do it all. How often have you caught yourself wishing for more hours in the day or more days in the week so that you could finally catch up and finish everything that you are supposed to do?

That wouldn’t do any good though, we all know Murphy’s law and some of us know about Newton’s law of gravity, but how many of us are familiar with Parkinson’s Law? It was first set forth in the middle of the last century, 1955 to be exact, by C. Northcote Parkinson. And Parkinson’s law states “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”