HOLY E-MAIL

One day God was looking down at earth and saw all of the rascally behavior that was going on…

So He called His angels and sent one to earth for a time.
When the angel returned, he told God,’Yes, it is bad on earth; 95% are misbehaving and only 5% are not.

God thought for a moment and said, ‘Maybe I had better send down a second angel to get another opinion.’

So God called another angel and sent her to earth for a time.

When the angel returned she went to God and said, ‘Yes, it’s true. The earth is in decline; 95% are misbehaving, but 5% are being good…’

God was not pleased.

So He decided to e-mail the 5% who were good, because he wanted to encourage them, and give them a little something to help them keep going.

Do you know what the e-mail said?

Okay, ……………I was just wondering, because I didn’t get one either.

(Thanks Jeff for sharing 🙂

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I was explaining to the children listening to one of my stories the other day the function and purpose of a “fool” or “jester” in the courts of monarchies in the past.  Of course their job was to entertain and to help people laugh. But there was another function that many of us are not aware of.

A King or Queen’s Fool was very often there to speak truth to the powerful ruler and was often the only one who could do so without losing their head….literally.  Humor can often soften hard truths.  Things we do not wish to face or admit about ourselves and our surroundings can often be softened with humor and wit.  As Mary Poppins says, “A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.”

We often need to be humbled into seeing clearly.  (NOTE: for the record, 100% of people occasionally behave badly according to my world view, so I am assuming the joke above is really only referring to that 5% who really do try very hard to be Christ’s presence in our fallen world 🙂

That said I would like to share something I heard while listening to a sermon podcast by Alistair Begg.  He was teaching from the book of Ruth.  You can find his podcasts here.

He shared one of his favorite quotes from James S. Stewart, the late Scottish Presbyterian. When James Stewart was lecturing at Yale in the 1950’s he stated, “No one knows how to preach.”  Alistair found that most encouraging as you might guess.

Stewart went on to say that it is correct that this should humble us, but wrong that it should paralyze us.

If our belief in God informs our decisions and our behavior we need to remember that being humbled does not mean that we stop acting in accordance to our beliefs.

That, however, appears to be what many are saying in light of the results of the Presidential Election.

For years now I have heard the same thing being said in a myriad of ways; that we need to abandon our world view in order to win elections.  We have been inundated with messages that tell us our world view is outdated and should be abandoned for the more enlightened world view of the Progressives (aka Socialists, Marxists and Communists.)

In a previous post I shared this:

Why does one’s world view matter?  One more quote from How Now Shall We Live (Charles Colson) sums up my response to this:

“We easily forget that every private decision contributes to the moral and cultural climate in which we live, rippling out in ever widening circles–first in our personal lives, and then in the broader society…..every decision we make reflects our world view.  Every choice, every action, either expresses a false world view and thus contributes to a disordered and broken world, or expresses God’s truth and helps build a world that reflects his created order.” (page 294)

Whether you believe in a supreme being or not, truth does exist.  A transcendent truth that is consistent with what we experience in the real world.  To re-phrase something C.S. Lewis said:  The theist, who believes in a transcendent source of truth and the materialist (Progressive for this discussion),who believes everything is relative,  hold different beliefs about the universe.  They cannot both be right.  The one who is wrong will act in a way which simply doesn’t fit the real universe.

Being humbled by the fact that we are not perfect, that we make mistakes and that we sometimes abandon civil discourse in our fear and anger does not mean we should become paralyzed and fail to continue to act in accordance with our beliefs.

There are two clear choices when it comes to one’s world view.  Your world view informs your behavior.  We have too often responded to the tactic of Saul Alinsky that tells radical progressives to “hold us to our own standards” by capitulating.

Finding evidence that we are not perfect does not negate the truth of our world view.  It should also lead us to ask what the progressive standards are and do some reality checks on their behavior.  Good luck with that.  Their world view is relative and changing.  There are no fixed standards to inform their behavior even if they claim that there are.  Every person holding to a world view that is not based on a transcendent source of what is right and what is wrong, what is good and what is evil will define those terms depending on their circumstances.

That is not to say that there are no “good and decent” people who also happen to hold a view contrary to our own.  That is to say that what guides one’s behavior when the going gets tough is what will determine whether you continue to act in a good and decent manner.

If  you believe that there is a Father waiting for you when you get home who will hold you accountable for your choices your behavior will be vastly different from the person who believes that there is no final authority save what “works for you” and “gets you what you want and need.”

So, being humbled by evidence that I am a flawed human being will not lead me to a paralysis that causes me to cease sharing what I believe to be true.  It will perhaps alter my approach and become more sensitive to the fact that fear of where the progressive world view leads should not be expressed in insults or anger, but in a way that shines the light of God’s Truth into the darkness.