You’ve got mail

6 November 2002, Volume 4, Issue 46

When I asked for prayer last week for direction on how to proceed with this series, I was wondering how and when that answer might come?

As I was driving home last Wednesday night, the answer seemed to come as a thought out of the nothingness of my driving mind. That was it, this was the path, but then came the questions, how did this illumination take place? It had to be an answer to my prayer, but did it occur in response to someone else's prayer at that time, or was it a cumulative effect of many prayers of intercession by others, or was it just directly from God?

However, that whole concept of unseen communication got me to thinking about this method of email that has superseded all other forms of communication in our digital age. I’m thankful that I no longer have the virtual voice of AOL saying . “You’ve got mail.” It seems that most of the time I check, “I’ve got mail,” its just that about half of it I don’t want, or wasn’t expecting, but when you get right down to it I get very little spam.

Anyway, the answer to prayer didn’t come from email, but from Pmail. That of course standing for prayer mail. But prayer mail is not the only mail you get from God, but all God’s communications are in some ways personalized for you and your specific situation at that definite time. So Pmail (Personalized mail) is just a holding name for all communication from God to His people and to humanity as a whole. Email can include messages from friends, ecommerce, and news and other information. Also Pmail comes from a number of sources, from the word of God the Bible, from creation, and from prayer. As a rule, generally just those three, directly or indirectly, but they serve to illuminate many aspects of our lives, past, present, and future.

This week we will just touch on these three, but will develop them more fully as we continue to form a broader context of community creation.

Sinful man, does not want to hear directly from God. Because we don’t want our transitory life interrupted by the eternal, we are mad when in various ways we are reminded that this life takes place in the Valley of the Shadow of Death. It is just like, if I never think of my mortality, by some miracle, mortality will go away. These responses are just as prevalent within the church as they are in the outside world. Hence, the church just develops, or adopts Christianized programs from the greater world’s constructs and then asks, “What would Jesus do?” This of course equates our response with equality with God, a blasphemous form of pride.

The Reformation traditions would teach us that today the saints, the sheep, are not sufficiently catechized, which is true. So instead of a disciplined approach of catechism for both youth and adults, we are left with revivalist gospel training such as EE (Evangelism Explosion) to teach gospel basics, under the guise of sharing one’s faith.

Testimonies, while they have their place, many times focus on the arrogance of my past personal sinfulness, ergo my current holiness, to be of little heavenly good. And for sure they place the emphasis on the temporal, at the expense of the eternal election of God. “I chose God, he didn’t choose me.” This heresy encompasses all of redemptive history, not just our current opposing poles which we call Arminianism and Calvinism. It also misses the point that some of these “mistakes” are all allowed by God, so that we are able to minister to others in their time of suffering.

God can, and will change, as He wills, a lot of this provided we are willing to move beyond the limitation of our self, not in redemption, as in the Arminianism and Calvinism fiasco, but in the area of progressive sanctification, or as I prefer to call it Obedient Faith.

In the creation revelation if you do not know the God of the Bible you will create a god(s) for yourself. This is what led to the origin of sin. In the wonder of the Garden of Eden, both Adam and Eve, didn’t understand the unlimited nature of God in nature, so they decided to help God out, thus bringing evil into a world that was created by God, “very good.”

In the revelation of prayer, the same situation occurs, if we seek answers to prayer in ways we can understand all sorts of evil can develop. This, as in the original garden episode, having its origin in Satan and his demonic angels, but because of our now fallen nature, we are quite capable of producing all our own sin, independent of Satan’s help.

Therefore, the lack of Obedient Faith in the church stems primarily from one source. From our lack of knowledge of the word of God, the Bible. Sure we play lip service to its primacy in all aspects of life, but that exhortation from some pulpits, doesn’t get into the distracted minds of the sheep, hence they remain stupid sheep instead of being recreated into the image of Jesus Christ.

“Wow Jerry, how did you just make that step of logic?”

Through a Pmail revelation. Just to see if I could get you back to the point and alert, for I do not want you to remain forever distracted sheep. The bigger picture, is our need to have absolutes in our life, and from those absolutes to develop a structure, to truly discern the good and evil of this world, within a paradigm outside the restrictions of our feelings, hopes, and desires. This eternal paradigm development only comes from our continuing understanding of the entire revelation of scripture, not just the verses we like, or we are told to memorize, and not just within the New Testament dispensation of grace.

I’m a hopeless romantic, I suppose that is why I like a lot of the movies by Tom Hanks. Starting from his unfailing devotion to Jenny in “Forrest Gump” the eternal goodness of love, and its power, is manifest as the fate that brings the diverse and the conflicts of true love into real life. At least on the real life illusion of the cinema screen and video. These power of true love episodes, reach their zenith in the movies in which Meg Ryan plays the female side of this mutual love opportunity. From “You’ve got mail,” we have arrived at the title of this message.

“You’ve got mail!” What if this was Pmail instead of email, what kind of love story would we have? I bring this up because the Bible is really a love story from God to his bride. Open honest communication that all can see and read, but so few understand. It should follow if you never checked your Pmail, you would never understand the true love that awaits from this little act of obedience. But often this is the case and we wonder, plan, and scheme about why the church has lost its effectiveness. These results point shamelessly to the fact that no one reads, or in our modern world, listens to their Pmail.

Now for my testimony. The Bible is what changed my life. It was not anything else. No other programs, no nothing. It will change your life also. The only thing that brought about the Reformation, was not it’s wonderful leaders, it was their absolute reliance upon the word of God as the absolute by which everything else is judged. Absolutely, no other standard, absolutely. When they (or more directly their followers) personally got in the way, do we see the elevation of doctrines, good and bad, above the authority of scripture.

It takes about 20 minutes a day to read through the Bible in a year. If you buy an audio series you will have about 60 hours of the spoken word. One hour a day will therefore give you about three times reading, or six times listening. Not such a difficult commitment, if it could (or would) change your life. But start with a reachable goal, once per year, by some method.

Now before you use the lame excuse you don’t have that kind of time, let’s see if we can put this into a “You’ve got mail” plot.

The movie runs about two hours. Life runs on average over seventy years. In the movie Hanks and Ryan work through the impossible nature of their similarities and disparities to find the oneness of true love. At the end of the movie we are left with the illusion of marriage and the life of happiness forever after, as the power of love brings temporal security.

Now, if we give the nature of this film a ten on some rating basis, then when we change from an email plot to a Pmail real life adventure, we can expect the wonder of the love and life to change from a ten to a thousand. I base this upon Matthew 19:29, and Mark 10:30, as well as other Bible references signifying a hundredfold return on planting in fertile ground. What more fertile ground is there than the ground of understanding the depth of love.

I am convinced that every God ordained marriage has this potential. Just because most marriages never get beyond a seven, signifies poor personal choices in a mate and/or the selfishness of one, or both actors. Thank God, for Meg and Tom.

As the creator of this plot, I would have the two characters, for they would definitely have to be characters, communicate exclusively through Pmail. Through the word of God, through prayer, and an understanding of the depth of God’s creation doesn’t leave much room for being the charming, sensitive guy, or the beautiful, gracious woman. Roles we all know we can fulfill at least as well as Tom and Meg.

In order to make this work, I would have to move the setting of the movie from New York City, and I suppose combine it with the plot from “Sleepless in Seattle.” But the capital city of “tickle the bears” environmentalism, or any city for that matter, probably doesn’t produce the need for God like “Joe and the volcano.” But that law of the violence of nature really is only part of the creation revelation. Hence, I would have to put, at least in the background of the players, an upbringing in the land west of the hundredth meridian and east of the coastal mountains. Capturing this from my earlier writings on the subject of the arid west, I suppose one of the characters must suffer from “Montana Mentality” the other from “Swept Away Syndrome.”

So where does the love come from? With no direct contact it would be impossible, except for God. God is the unlimited Personality behind all the Pmail. Not only that, it is only His love that is infinite in the story line. Consequently, even a limited taste of God’s love for the other person, God’s true agape love, is greater than the limited nature of the personal love the couple could achieve on their own.

So leaving within your imagination the seed to develop this plot in your Ben Had attitude, I must augment the title to keep you thinking about the possibilities of this adventure occurring: “You’ve got Pmail, that allows you to sleep peacefully in Seattle, knowing that the promise land of love is wider than the Montana skies, and deeper than the deepest ocean (that part is stolen from another plot) and more powerful than a Mt. St. Helen’s eruption, focused into the infinity of God’s love.”

All this can happen, not because we can envision, or write the script. It can only happen through the power of God’s love manifest in His Pmail Personality. The reason we don’t experience that love, is we only envision love stories created in the mind of men and women. These by nature make the nature of love, as some power of fate, because the alternative, that it is a result of God’s personal love to each human being, would result in each human, being accountable to God for your handling of that love. And for passing this love on, in service to others. As long as we remain fearful in our own understanding of the nature of things, the true love of fate is all we can hope for, and because of God’s sovereignty in all things, that is all the love we shall ever achieve.

The primary means to overcome our limitations of love is for us to develop the discipline of direct Pmail from the word of God, the Bible. Once that occurs, the other forms of Pmail and the programs that followwill become the driving force in our life and allow us to become a more important part of God’s historic community. To be the personality God created us to be, to see it change the world, not by might, nor by power, but by the spiritual nature of God’s love, that is the promise of God’s idea of, “You’ve got mail.”

Seeds for prayer

One of the very interesting aspects of writing this weekly message is many times finding, after the fact, something important that was just mentioned in the flow of words. Last week that dealt with the “wonder” of Ben Had for today, giving strength for tomorrow.

Wonder has been killed within the church through lack of personal Biblical discipleship. And as a consequence, wonder has also died in our whole culture. From the word of God, encompassing the written Bible, creation, and prayer flows the life of wonder. Wonder springs from the Sovereign goodness of these creations. This wonder is demonstrated in hoped blessings and the vague understanding of God’s love in the unfathomable depths of observed and created circumstance.

I talked earlier this morning with a gentleman in Vancouver, BC. This conversation concerned what has flowed out of that Wednesday evening Pmail and our need to understand afresh the concept of wonder. His enthusiasm for this potential deep sea adventure seems to indicate that the opportunity is definitively there, the development of the application would require about $3 million. But the difficult part I believe is not raising the money, but God must assemble a support community to bring an undertaking of this magnitude into existence.

The development and understanding of God’s community structure includes all aspects and the integration of the three Pmail’s we touched upon this morning. Coupled within the structure of a real expedition, we can move beyond personal and collective expertise into a situation that deepens our understanding of our natural world, because the results quickly move beyond current knowledge.

Ruminated, this wisdom in turn can dramatically bring change to our man created world’s of New York City, Seattle, Paris, Moscow, and other cities, in which we find the need to bring the understanding of God’s love to each human being. Please intercede on behalf of this request.

In order to upgrade the Web Site, and consistent with other ministry upgrades, we have ordered hardware and software to accomplish that task and to be able to produce web based materials and enterprise opportunities as the Lord may direct. Please pray for this work.