January 30, 2012
No Pat Answers
Recently I listened to a presentation on Hospice, where speaking to a
largely secular audience about death, the presenter said, “There really are no pat answers on why people die.” Knowing that the speaker is a person of faith
I wondered how difficult it must be for her to talk generically about death. For
the believer we need only go to Scripture to find the pat answer for death. “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift
of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 6:23 NIV)
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Gail;
-----I experience a lot of guilt when I talk generically about what I’ve learned more particularly from the Bible. Any communication must consider its audience to deliver a message in understandable terms. My temptation is to describe what I mean if I can not conveniently find an expression my audience understands. Then I wind up spending all of their attention span on what becomes a message about an expression I needed to make for saying what I never got to say. I have always lacked smarts enough to figure this problem out and was too unwilling to just drop pat expressions and continue. So I decided just to bore people one at a time.
-----I’ve started looking for expressions which will at least deliver enough curiosity that my listener might ask about it. But that option is not available before a public audience. The folks who began deconstructing our society in the 1960’s have done a very Satanically crafty piece of work. They deliberately destroyed useful meanings of many expressions which our Christian culture had accumulated over centuries. They broke into pieces the tools which the knowledge of God had used for efficient communication throughout the general population. Today it is difficult to find any words that the non-Christian public understands correctly regarding even the more elemental concepts of Christ, truth, and love.
-----Then, if that were not enough, an even more subtle social eraser was carried through the churches last decade. It erased all of the music from the church which had gained a very clear, emotional understanding in the public heart. This last glimmer of emotional memory left in the public psyche was then replaced in the churches by mundane tunes of generic meaning. Instrumental portions of melodies like The Church in the Vale, We Shall Come Rejoicing, The Old Rugged Cross, and Amazing Grace can still be heard here, there, and yond in movies and TV programs. The public still remembers. These emotions being too elusive for Satan’s Progressives to destroy as forwardly as they did the linguistic terms and expressions, required a craftier back-door solution. That solution was to simply unhook the tunes from their source of meaning - the church service. The general public and the worshipping church held the old hymns in common sentiment. It is sad the church backed away from one of its last points of contact with the very people they were sent to evangelize. It may not be many more decades before the emotional meaning of God fades from these tunes within public sentiments. Then we might have no expressions about God or His godliness remaining in general circulation for use in our communications to them. This is called being ostracized.
-----It must behoove us not to surrender to avoiding God’s concepts in our communications. We must be crafty, too. We must find generally used terms by which we can relate godly concepts to the public mind, and we must refill useful old terms with the public meanings they once had by using them publicly. (God bless Tim Tebow.) And we must be willing to just take a moment and describe some of what we mean.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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