Daily Jewel

by Pastor Carnell, McAlester, OK
Nov. 9, 2011

“Spiritual Spam!”
“She (folly) calls out to men going by who are minding their own business.” – Proverbs 9:15 (NLT, emphasis mine)

Don’t you hate those nightly phone calls from tele-marketers that just do not seem to care if you are on the “Do Not Call” list or not? I get about two or three a day at the Church and at least one or two daily at the house and I would love to find a way to prevent this from happening. Somehow or another these companies have found a way around the law and invade my space with their annoying sales-pitch.
And then there are the “spam” messages that invade my computer! Spam, also known as junk email or unsolicited bulk email (UBE), is where third party companies or individuals send nearly identical messages to numerous recipients by email.
Spammers collect email addresses from chatrooms, websites, customer lists, newsgroups, and viruses which harvest users' address books, and are sold to other spammers. They also use a practice known as "email appending" or "epending" in which they use known information about their target (such as a postal address) to search for the target's email address. Much of spam is sent to invalid email addresses. Spam averages 78% of all email sent. According to the Message Anti-Abuse Working Group, the amount of spam email was between 88–92% of email messages sent in the last half of 2010.
Most people I know with computers despise these creatures!! They are useless—unproductive (at least to me) but considering the fact that they continue to go out every day there must be those who choose to open them up! And not only open them but inquire or buy into the products they are selling!
You may have on your computer a “spam-guard.” A setting in which any email that your computer does recognize goes directly into a special folder that either immediately eliminates them or keeps them unless or until you physically go in and permanently erase them. I have an email account that I set up when I went back to school and used it for correspondence to my professors. I had not checked it for some time and when I did I had over 800 messages waiting for me…all of them spam!! GRRRR!!!
Why is this a problem? It is a major distraction! (Like from yesterdays message). It can be time consuming removing these rogue messages from your inbox and should for some reason one of them gets opened up that contains a virus, then you have opened yourself up to a whole host of problems! If you have ever gotten a virus on your computer you know exactly what I mean!
Spiritual spam can be messages that contain temptations that draw our attention away from what the Lord is working to instill into our lives. They can be messages that remind us of our faults—failures—broken relationships. Their intended purpose is to get us to check them out and maybe, just maybe buy into their product.
In an earlier Proverb, Solomon encourages us to “guard our hearts.” (4:23) In that chapter we talked about all the various ways that the devil attempts to get our eyes (and hearts) away from being at the place where we were designed to live—and that is close to the Heart of God. And like what Solomon has been saying over the past several verses, folly (evil), the opposite of wisdom (good), will use every available tool and technique to get us leaning into her direction.
It could be through jealousy (the idea we are not getting what we deserve); fear (that we are going to miss out somewhere, somehow); pride (we don’t need God to get what we want); or busyness (we don’t have time to follow God.) Any of these are spiritual spams that when opened up will shut our system down!!
Just for the record…I love email! Most of you reading this message are reading it via email. It is one of the greatest tools ever invented for communication purposes—but it can also have its flaws. It can be misused which means we must use every tool available to us to guard our computers from harm. The same applies to our Spiritual lives and hearts. Don’t let folly send you her spam messages. Don’t open them up!! Erase them as soon as soon as you get them. You’ll thank me later!
Pastor J. T. Carnell