Is the Revelation being Diluted?

I have a good friend.  He is a wonderful man of God.  He hears God clearly most of the time and about most things.  I always look forward to our times visiting each other. 

My friend is an older man who has been privileged to pass most of the work of his business on to his sons.  Those sons are also men of God.  They are competent and diligent.  As a result there is not very much day to day work that my friend is required to do in the business.  He is free to do what elders should do – to go and sit in the gates of the city.

But, my friend has a computer.  He reads with interest from many sources around the world wide web.  Moreover, he is a sensitive and compassionate man.  As a result, he comes across countless stories, pictures, messages, etc. that are interesting to him because of the way they have touched him.  Some are pictures of exquisite beauty.  Some are stories that teach a timeless truth.  Some are messages of real truth that should be seen in the society of today.  All of them are as individual pieces poignant, amusing, or instructive.

Alas, my friend loves to attach these gems to emails and send them out to his email mailing list.  He sends many such emails, often as many as six or seven in a single day.  He is at least kind enough that he usually cleans up all those extraneous headers form the prior senders.  He occasionally also types an introduction that expresses his feelings about the piece he is forwarding to us all.

I have also another good friend.  This one a brother I am committed to watch over.  This man sends me copies of all sorts of letters and emails that he sends or receives.  Virtually all of them are in one way or another, to his mind, related to some success or failure or problem in his life.  When he sends them to me, he almost never writes anything to me about why he is sending them or why they are significant to him.  He, I presume, expects me to understand or expects God to reveal the mystery to me.  He also sends several such emails each day.

If you were in my situation, how would you react to this onslaught of electronic missives?  One option, of course, is to enjoy reading and thinking about each one.  But, that would consume significant chunks of very limited time.  Another is to dismiss both friends from my life.  But, that would cut me off from men that God has made very precious to me.  A third would be to try to get my friends to change their emailing practices.  But, after discussions with each about the problems involved, I cannot detect either desire or intention to change in either of them.  Alas, what to do?

While there are many things he says with which I disagree, television personality, Jon Stewart, at his recent rally said something very poignant.  He pointed out the truth.  If we amplify everything we will be unable to hear anything.  We see this truth at work in many settings.  It is well known to people who obtain “cheap” hearing aids.  If the aid does not distinguish among the kinds of sounds it amplifies it not only does not help the wearer, it actually makes it harder for him to hear.  If you go to hear a speech, but the microphone picks up the background noises and amplifies them too, it is almost impossible to understand the speech.

We see the same basic dynamic in raising our children.  What happens when every night Dad comes home and yells about something or another that he sees as wrong at home?  Soon, his children simply tune out the shout.  They simply do not really hear him anymore.  We see this again with our President.  Because he has given speech after speech after speech, we as a nation no longer believe that what he is talking about is really important.  In contrast, a generation ago, when for the President to speak on television was a rare event, virtually every adult American wanted to listen and hear what the President thought was important.

Think about your friends for a moment.  There are some who rarely speak, but when they do you listen.  In a regular Sunday night gathering we attended for a while years ago, the leader said that my wife, Joy, was like E.F.Hutton of advertising fame.  She rarely spoke, but when she spoke everybody listened.  There are other friends who remind you of the proverb, “A word aptly spoken is like apples of gold in settings of silver.”  They may talk a bit more often, but the things they say have real value to you.

So, what do other people experience from your words (spoken or emailed)?

Are they wishing they could put your email address into their spam filter list?  Or, are they opening your emails with a burst of faith that they are about to hear something from God?  Do they turn and look at their text messages as you talk with them?  Or do they turn and look you intently in the eye as you speak?

One of Satan’s schemes does not require that the revelation of God be denied.  Rather, the revelation simply becomes so diluted that it is no longer recognized.  Jesus set the example for us.  He never spoke a word except he first heard it from the Father.