Standing in front of a soda vending machine, I was looking for a can of soda to quench my thirst and headache, after a busy day of work. Coincidentally, a colleague also stood next to me warming up his cup of water in a microwave oven. I put in coins and selected a choice, the deliver chute of the vending machine slowly moved up to a position in order to catch the can of soda of my choice. Suddenly, I find that the can of soda dropped in an “odd” way – it slanted incorrectly and stuck on the face plate of the vending machine. At this moment, the deliver chute has no choice but to return to its original position. “Uh-oh”, my colleague and I both sighed.

So, I used the old mechanic’s trick pounding the machine twice to try my luck. To my surprise, the pounding caused the soda wiggle a little bit and then it dropped onto the deliver chute which is at the bottom of the machine. My colleague and I uh-oh again. It looks like I am going to be out of my luck. To our amazement, the deliver chute decided to wake up and moved to its delivery position. And “Voila!” –it delivers the dropped soda. My colleague exclaimed, “Wow, this is good!” “It is like an instruction retry!” I nodded and responded. Apparently the vending machine is smart enough to figure out that there is a weight on its deliver chute and it retries the delivery.

“Instruction retry” is a terminology that has been known for more than 40 years in the computer industry. It is a recovery design feature for high end computer servers. It was firstly published in 1973. The feature is designed when Central Processing Unit (CPU) of the server encounters an error in instructions, due to circuitry malfunctions and workload backup, its recovery circuits would temporarily take out the CPU and reset it in order to prevent any error propagation to the other parts of the server. This is a reliability feature in the server to guarantee “integrity and error-free” completion of pending instructions on the CPU.

In your life journey, have you seen a similar function of “instruction retry” in your life? My answer is “yes”, especially if you have children. In fact in the area of parenting, you probably have already experienced more frustrations than you would have desired 🙂 because you need to repeatedly tell your children to follow your instruction almost constantly, if not daily. If it is not working, you probably would employ a “recovery design feature”, which is called “discipline”, to ensure your “instruction retry” procedure is working, ha..ha..ha..

Maybe you already thought about this, “Isn’t it great if our children would always follow our instruction?” The truth is it is not possible because of rebellious gene from our forefathers, “Adam and Eve” – they disobeyed God’s first instruction for not eating the fruit from the tree of knowing good and evil in Garden of Eden, from the very beginning. Their rebellion results in the fall of humanity and henceforth, we inherited this sinful nature.

Despite of Adam and Eve’s disobedience, God devised an “instruction retry” for us – that is to have His only begotten Son, Jesus Christ, to die on the cross, in place of us. This washes away the iniquities and transgressions that we have committed in order for us to reconcile with God. In other words, when we decide to believe in Jesus Christ, we are accepting God’s recovery design which enables us to go back to the right path of His plan – to receive the eternal life. What a marvelous grace!

After we have received Jesus Christ, God’s second instruction for us is to conform to the image of his Son Jesus Christ (Romans 8:29). The reality is as we are still in this world with fleshy desires, we continue to have difficulties in following God’s second instruction. Besides, the evil one has also worked diligently to prevent us to do so. All these challenges us to live a style that is in accordance with the Spirit. Of course, God loves His children dearly. His discipline, can be viewed as a mechanism of recovery design, works on each one of us. This is the reason why the author of the book of Hebrews encourages us that we should not make light of the Lord’s discipline, and do not lose heart when He rebukes us (Hebrews 12:5). Because we are the one He loves!!

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Disclaimer: The sharing is pure from my personal view; therefore, please don’t take it to be absolute. Thanks.