February 18, 2008
Stinker
I just received an email Urban Legend about a worker who had a heart attack at his desk and it took five days before coworkers noticed he was dead. As the story goes, 51 year old George Turklebaum was always absorbed in his work and kept to himself. No one thought it was unusual that George stayed in the same position and didn’t say anything. In an article debunking the story we’re told that a dead body starts stinking after three days, so his coworkers most certainly would have noticed George had a problem. I got a chuckle out of this fabrication and then I considered the possibility of a spiritually dead person setting in a church pew for five weeks before any of us noticed him. I know it’s not our job to judge whether or not someone is spiritually dead, but we might be a little more attentive to them if they’d start stinking.
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Gail;
-----We make casual reference to spiritually dead people, as if they are the other category of the brotherhood. But in reality, everyone who has come to the Lord has been made alive in the Lord. None of His are spiritually dead. This is important to remember, because we must share His attitude towards one another, and we must keep our sanctuaries cleaned of true corpses. His attitude was never to push someone away because of their inappropriate activities, but to call them from those activities. When folks came to Him for healing, He received them and healed them first, then He told them to sin no more. The message of “come as you are,” in our world-friendly purpose-driven churches is a Biblical message. But the silence thereafter speaks the unscriptural message of “stay as you are.” One of the behaviors of our new lives is encouraging each other and stirring each other up to good works. While another is avoiding those who refuse to obey the Word and who practice immorality while proclaiming to be His.
-----The cleanliness of the Temple is in the care of all who form the Temple. History yields little doubt that Temple cleaning has been a vigorous activity. The sad result of those who historically cleaned the Temple with fire-hoses, bulldozers, and ditching powder is the unwillingness of anyone today desiring to even tidy it up a bit. Where the janitorial activity of the past went wrong is that it first was not applied to the janitor’s own heart and mind sufficiently to bring the Scriptures into a true and living effect. When I worked as a janitor I learned well the principle that you can not achieve cleanliness with a rag and water dirtier than the surface to be cleaned. When one has come to a Scriptural, spiritual vitality, the cleaning task becomes encouragement, influence, and inspiration rather than criticism, judgment, and separation.
-----Then again, although the apparent stiff in the pew next to you may be spiritually alive inside, the mind can be resetting onto carnal things such that its new life is dwindling down to a precarious ember. Personally, I believe those embers can go out, leaving dead someone who once had been made alive. So His Spirit gives gifts that prepare some with the ability to gently fan embers back into flames, and others the ability to discern when the life of the ember has chilled to the point the body has become toxic. Although criticism, judgment, and separation are not the tools for cleaning living surfaces, the dead surfaces must be carried out of the Temple when death has become apparent. I cringed at the illustration of the life-house on the beach to where the victims of the shipwrecks were brought. Much was made about the sea weed, moss, mud, and smelly saltwater that came into the life-house with the people, and how the mess made in the life-house was the testimony to its success. No doubt those who are being called come into the church drenched in smelly saltwater, muddied, mossy, and draped in kelp. But if the person’s love for those trappings causes him to cling to them tightly, it is not the Word of God that instructs us to stink up the Temple by welcoming his presence. Though we are to be gentle as doves, we are to also be wise as foxes. After we have helped him to shed those smelly trappings, they are no trophy to leave drooping over the pews and smeared around the floor and upon the walls. The disgusting mess of sin is not the proud badge of success for His Holy Bride. No! She is expected to be wise enough to clean herself to the point that she can, as quickly as she can, casting the seaweed and mud back out the door and washing away the moss and smelly saltwater.
-----We are called to give respect and shelter to the life of that ember inside the ones He has made alive. He gifts us with different abilities for fanning and stirring it to flame. In a small and subtle way, we each share a bit of responsibility for the motionlessness of the body beside us.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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