By Not Known
How many emails do you get? Many
email in-boxes are packed night and day. (You may be surprised at how
much church business is done by email in the ‘wee hours’!) Many check
work email from holiday destinations because otherwise it’s an
electronic tsunami when they return. Email is a wonderful tool, but
managing it well is one of life’s hassles.
What do you do with new email?
Some people are endlessly on-line and bounce back replies within
minutes. Others are more selective. Some emails go straight to the
delete bin. Others wait because they are too hard or too unimportant,
or because this sender annoyingly tags every email as ‘high
priority’. Emails from family and close friends grab our immediate
attention. We read and re-read them, savouring every word and
imagining the expressive face at the other end of the digital
strokes.
Now let’s think about the
Scriptures. They are God’s ‘mail’ to us. Because God wants us to know
him and to know the way to him through Jesus, he made himself known
in ways that we can understand. Through his Holy Spirit and human
writers, he gave his message to us in words of our languages and has
given us the technology to preserve and reproduce his messages in
various forms. God’s message is always accessible to us in the Bible,
which is his book in the fullest sense.
But what do we do with God’s
message to us? Psalm 1 gives a model approach. It introduces a man
who is blessed and successful in all that he does (w1&3). The
secret of his success is in who he listens to. He does not pay
attention to the messages from sinners or mockers (v1). The first
lead us to do evil. The second lead us to cruel scepticism and
scoffing. The blessed man opens God’s mail (v2).
Sometimes we read email messages
quickly and move on. But we should not do this with God’s message. It
is worth re-reading with a careful pondering and meditative attention
(v2) because it is God’s message. Let’s take time with God’s
message. Let’s invest prayerful and careful attention to it, so that
we hear and understand all that God is saying to us.
A final thought. Grandparents know
what happens when we get an email with the latest news and picture of
our ‘little one’. We rush to share this joy with others. Do we all
also rush to tell the good news of God’s messages to us so that
others can share our joy?