April 12, 2007
Guilt Free Forwards
Sometimes I’ll get a forward I really enjoy - that is until I get to the end and find a message that says, ‘If you love God, you’ll help send this message around the world.’ Or, ‘If you send this to 10 people in the next 10 minutes you will be blessed.’ Urrg! It’s irritating and I doubt God’s impressed with men’s attempt to prove their love or secure blessings. Really, I don’t get the school yard mentality of a document creator trying to bully recipients into passing on jokes and pictures under the umbrella of spirituality. Trust me, if the message is good I’ll forward it to my friends and relatives without the promise of a blessing - and without someone telling me to do so.
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1 comment:
Gail;
-----We are all so incredibly walled off by the limitations of our physical nature that we become fooled into thinking that what we experience is of great importance to everyone else. It is an easy mistake to make, because all each of us knows is what we have experienced. That is the entirety of each of our individual worlds. My guilt in this will serve as a good example. In my life, I have experienced the importance of interpersonal relationships. This translates into an acute focus on fellowship in my church life. I approach most topics with that on mind. I think it is important, and I think that many problems in the church would be solved if people became more sincere about what the Word means by looking to the interests of others. People probably detect that in most of what I talk about, and are mostly bored with it.
----But there is so much more. And there are so many other people. And they all have experience with the Lord and the world in their lives, each unique and different in many ways from what others have. So when someone is enamored by an idea, the size of that idea fills his world. It is natural to assume it would be important enough to fill everyone’s world. The mistake is not in seeing the importance of the communication. It is very important. The mistake is in the attitude that it is the only communication that is important, and the world must hear it.
-----The next step is easy and false (a “false step” is an athletic term meaning a step taken that fails to achieve an intended purpose.) If it is so important, then it must be from God. If it is from God then you must deal with this message as being important, too. Unfortunately, most preachers emerge from their Semitary training with this attitude. Rather than settling for being the minor augmentation of the church the Lord intends each of us to be, they believe they have been called to be a major addition to the church. Rick Warren, for example.
-----But, bless our hearts. We take our lives in the Lord serious (and often ourselves in those lives too serious.) And we take our ideas serious, and the necessity of them too serious. But at least we pass them around, albeit with a virus of arrogance attached.
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