Musings: 6/08/08; Coercion or Christ. by JAH

Every day I get some really nice and helpful items in my e-mail. I enjoy them, and sometimes I am surprised and amazed at the content. God is great, and God is good, and God is love, all these appear from time to time in different and ingenuous forms. I love getting them.

What I don't love is the bottom line, such as: "If you love Jesus, you'll send this to 10 friends in the next sixty seconds," or "You don't love Jesus if you don't send this to 10 friends in the next sixty seconds!" These little things, and of course they appear in several more different forms, is that I feel the author is coercing me, trying to force me to do what he wants.

I believe that the body of the text is spiritual, the way of the Lord, but that last paragraph is the way of the world. I don't understand how a Christian following Jesus can suddenly switch gears and go the way of the business world. I put in the same category as a child telling his mother, if you don't give me a cookie, I'm going to beat my head against the wall!

Some of these things I might happily forward, and occasionally I do, but I suspect I would forward more of them if the authors depended on the Spirit of the Lord to lead me to do it. The poet said, "The world is too much with us late and soon...." That's always true, and I guess I do understand this thing about switching gears because we all do it on a daily, maybe hourly basis. We are spiritual one minute, and the next we may be almost the total opposite. There are times during the day that I think I can almost hear the Lord say, "Why call ye me, Lord, Lord, and do not the things I say?" (Luke 6:46). And there are times when His words come clear and plain to me, "Let not you heart be troubled, you believe in God, believe in me." (John 14:1) God's Word is constantly there to draw me back into the way of the Lord no matter how much the world is with me, and I am supremely thankful for that.

One thing these coercive missiles do for me, they remind me not to coerce anyone, but to let God's Spirit convict others of their needs. My task is to be a witness, not a prosecuting attorney!