I know most intelligent Christians simply press "delete" but I wonder how many people actually read and take on board the underlying message being sent to the readers.
The seriousness of the moral or political issues these emails address are less important - in my view - than the heart of the message that is being sent:This is a quote pasted from an email a family member sent me recently. The email was titled "Disrespecting Jesus" and was attempting to get the US regulators to ban the movie "Corpus Christi" which depicts Jesus and His disciples as homosexuals. I do not approve of the content of the movie but this is what the author of the email wrote as part of the "hard sell" so that Christians would forward their email :
“If you are not interested and do not have the 2 minutes to do this, please don't complain when God does not have time for you because He is far busier than we are”.
This is my prayer to the Lord:“Lord, I promise not to complain when you stop having time for me because I haven’t forwarded this email”
I write this with a great deal of sarcasm of course but I really do question who gave this person the authority to tell people the Lord is going to “stop having time for them” if they do not "make time" to forward the email....
Should we trust these people to speak correctly on behalf of the Lord?
I will have to take a chance that they are speaking on behalf of some other God that I do not follow because I am not forwarding the email :-)
I got another one of these so-called “Christian emails” from someone else yesterday with a guy raving about Julia Gillard being an atheist. He said that on this basis alone Christians should not be voting for the labor party. In the email from Pastor Daniel Nalliah (Canberra minister) the "punch line" stated:
"If you still say 'I will vote Labor' that is your choice. That's the freedom we enjoy in a democracy, but I must say you definitely cannot be a Christian who has a proper relationship with Jesus if you vote this way".
I am no fan of Julia Gillard in the same way I am no fan of a movie about Jesus and His disciples being gay but it bugs me how these influential people go right to the heart of the gospel and question our relationship with the Father. They raise doubts in the minds of believers about their relationship with God.
Casting doubt about our relationship with the Lord is the sort of thing the devil works at day and night. He even tried it on the Lord. He said to Jesus, "IF YOU ARE the Son of God..." shortly after Jesus had been encouraged by the Father at His baptism, "YOU ARE my BELOVED Son in whom I am WELL PLEASED."
What do you hear the Father saying to you? Is He "well pleased" with you? Our adversary has a goal and that is to undermine our relationship with the Father by undermining our faith. He wants us to question if we are a "good Christian" and He does this by drawing our attention to our “poor performance”. The true gospel does not take us on this "mind path". The true gospel is “good news” because our faith says that the Lord loves us and it is the Lord who has "performed" on our behalf. On this rock solid foundation HE HAS made our relationship sound and solid. We are justified (made right with God) on the basis of faith alone. God the Father made Jesus Christ "sin for us" so that we might have His righteousness as a gift for life (2 Corinthians 5:14-21).
At worst these people are undermining this foundational truth of the gospel (something satan would be pleased about) or at best they appear to be manipulating people’s emotions in order to get believers to do something they want (vote in a certain way or forward an email they have sent). Again, our faith does not rely on reaction to emotional issues but the revelation of God's love poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit.
These emails are a form of manipulation which is not what the gospel is about. They are effectively saying to people “if you don’t act in the way I think you should then it is going to reflect badly on your relationship with God” or “if you don’t act in the way I say it is going to cause God to ignore you”. This is human thinking and not from the Spirit of God. It is a false gospel.
What bugs me (more than the moral or political issues raised in the emails) is that the authors are not speaking correctly about the Lord and the believers relationship to Him. Because this is foundational and goes to the heart of the individual believer and the heart of the gospel message it is more important (in my opinion) than the moral and political crusades they are embarking on.... A “right cause" does not justify a "false gospel".
Do these writers really believe their own statements? Do they have a relationship with the Lord that involves “moving in and out” of relationship with the Lord based on what they do or don’t do for Him each day?
Which God are these people following who changes His thoughts toward us and relationship with us on the basis of whether we forward emails or which party we vote for at elections?
Who gives these people the right to speak this way to masses of Christians they email. I am sure that many people have doubts about the Lord's love for them and (as yet) do not know the truth about what the Lord is really like. This is a natural part of an authentic faith journey.
The God these email SPAMMERS are speaking about is not the God that I know. The God that I know does not motivate the people He justified, redeemed and greatly loves into action through guilt and fear and emotional manipulation.
The disciple who knew Jesus loved him - John - wrote, "Perfect love casts out fear. He who fears has not been made perfect in LOVE"
Thanks for reading,
Mark
