Naija NEST

Most of us wrestle with our temptations and problems, thinking that if we can defeat them, we will be able to live in a godly way. Galatians 5:16 says the opposite. It teaches us to focus on walking in the Spirit— and then we will not fulfill the desires of the flesh. If we are doing the right thing, there is no room in our life for the wrong thing. If we think about good things, there is no room in our mind to think about bad things. Susan’s story makes this point well:

{Susan’s Story}

"I was in addiction for thirty years. I was a functioning addict. I worked, but any life outside of my work focused on me. When you’re an addict, your life revolves around getting high. I don’t know any addict that doesn’t think about themselves excessively. You just want to feel better, but you never feel better because of the guilt and shame of getting high, so it’s a vicious cycle. When I gave my life to Christ and accepted His love for me, He not only set me free from my addiction, but He taught me an important lesson about love for other people. Had I not developed a lifestyle of helping others, I could have fallen back into addiction. God knew I had to get my mind off myself and onto others to live the life I’m living today. I realize now that the number one reason for staying in bo***ge is keeping your mind on yourself too much. God has taught me that it’s not all about me and shown me the importance of realizing that He is God and that He loves me. I’m important to Him, and other people are just as important to Him. I am to love those people as He loves them and to try to bring honor and glory to Him through the way I act toward others. I started jail ministry about three years into my salvation. I felt God called me to serve in this way, even though I have never been incarcerated. Because of my battle with addiction, I can relate to the women in jail and often understand what leads to their time behind bars. I would say that 90 percent of the women I talk to deal with substance abuse. So many people in this world just need a helping hand. They need someone to help. What I have, I have because God has blessed me, and so, with that, I want to bless others the best way I can."

Credit : Joyce Meyer

A MESSAGE FROM TELEGRAM CEO, PAVEL DUROV.

❤️ Thanks everyone for your support and love!

Last month I got interviewed by police for 4 days after arriving in Paris. I was told I may be personally responsible for other people’s illegal use of Telegram, because the French authorities didn’t receive responses from Telegram.

This was surprising for several reasons:

1. Telegram has an official representative in the EU that accepts and replies to EU requests. Its email address has been publicly available for anyone in the EU who googles “Telegram EU address for law enforcement”.

2. The French authorities had numerous ways to reach me to request assistance. As a French citizen, I was a frequent guest at the French consulate in Dubai. A while ago, when asked, I personally helped them establish a hotline with Telegram to deal with the threat of terrorism in France.

3. If a country is unhappy with an internet service, the established practice is to start a legal action against the service itself. Using laws from the pre-smartphone era to charge a CEO with crimes committed by third parties on the platform he manages is a misguided approach. Building technology is hard enough as it is. No innovator will ever build new tools if they know they can be personally held responsible for potential abuse of those tools.

Establishing the right balance between privacy and security is not easy. You have to reconcile privacy laws with law enforcement requirements, and local laws with EU laws. You have to take into account technological limitations. As a platform, you want your processes to be consistent globally, while also ensuring they are not abused in countries with weak rule of law. We’ve been committed to engaging with regulators to find the right balance. Yes, we stand by our principles: our experience is shaped by our mission to protect our users in authoritarian regimes. But we’ve always been open to dialogue.

Sometimes we can’t agree with a country’s regulator on the right balance between privacy and security. In those cases, we are ready to leave that country. We've done it many times. When Russia demanded we hand over “encryption keys” to enable surveillance, we refused — and Telegram got banned in Russia. When Iran demanded we block channels of peaceful protesters, we refused — and Telegram got banned in Iran. We are prepared to leave markets that aren’t compatible with our principles, because we are not doing this for money. We are driven by the intention to bring good and defend the basic rights of people, particularly in places where these rights are violated.

All of that does not mean Telegram is perfect. Even the fact that authorities could be confused by where to send requests is something that we should improve. But the claims in some media that Telegram is some sort of anarchic paradise are absolutely untrue. We take down millions of harmful posts and channels every day. We publish daily transparency reports (like this or this ). We have direct hotlines with NGOs to process urgent moderation requests faster.

However, we hear voices saying that it’s not enough. Telegram’s abrupt increase in user count to 950M caused growing pains that made it easier for criminals to abuse our platform. That’s why I made it my personal goal to ensure we significantly improve things in this regard. We’ve already started that process internally, and I will share more details on our progress with you very soon.

I hope that the events of August will result in making Telegram — and the social networking industry as a whole — safer and stronger. Thanks again for your love and memes 🙏