To lure a mouse into a trap, you’ve got to put there a piece of sausage or cheese. Fat may do too. You don’t expect mice to cram in traps where you put cats, bare iron springs or bones picked bare. Mice are no more stupid than we are.
For a commercial to be effective you have to promise something good. Dirtiest clothes getting clean, ugliest ducks turning into beauties, abundance out of nowhere. No one will be attracted by a commercial in which dirty shirts get still dirtier, ugly ducks — still uglier, no one will be set ablaze with excitement with a gray, untidy commercial that doesn’t play all colors of the rainbow and doesn’t enchant you with clinging sounds. If you don’t have all this, you have anti-advertising that won’t attract a sane person, but will scare him (or her) off.
"So what?" you’ll say. "Even a fool would understand this."
A fool would. A Christian wouldn’t.
Way too often Christians are running around not advertising, buy anti-advertising Christianity. And influenced by such anti-propaganda many believe that Christianity is super-masochism, that Christians get kicks and highs from suffering, that genuine Christianity is when you’re hungry, but you persist in fainting and feeding on your saliva, when you feel like singing, but you choke the song in your guts, when you feel like living, but you go straight to the monastery or to the coffin. A trademark of a decent Christian is considered to be head-deep-in-the-shoulders, ominous look and malicious smile. I remember once passing by a church when they were singing there the song "Joy, joy, praise the Lord..." I came in — those singing "Joy, joy..." lifted their eyes up from the songbooks and looked who on earth there was... You could have found anything in their looks but not an atom of joy. A sane person would have never crossed the threshold of that church again. I was already insane by the time, so I still come to that church from time to time about Christian "business". Sometimes I even experience genuine joy in that church, because people in that church are absolutely normal, nice folks they are, indeed. But someone has taught them that a Christian’s face should be awry with suspiciousness, skepticism and pessimism. Someone has taught Christians to anti-advertise Christianity.
Someone has taught them that. Christ and the Bible have not, because they teach just the opposite. Christ and the Bible teach Christians how to advertise Christianity and to carry your commercials wherever and whenever you can. And Christians have something to advertise, for God had created this world and Christ had died on the cross not so that we scare people with our sour faces and horror stories about hard Christian life.
There is something to advertise too, because Christian commercials are not the Jeff Peters’ kind of commercials that promise you Dr. Waugh-hoo’s Resurrection Bitters and you get "two dollars’ worth of fluid extract of cinchona and a dime’s worth of aniline"
Christian commercials don’t bamboozle you, they give you 100% guarantee and you may "bite the bait" without fear — you won’t have to go to court. First of all, because it’s no use going to court with God, secondly, because He is the Highest Judge Himself, and thirdly, because you will NEVER be frustrated with the results.
And the Bible pages are overpacked with commercials that make your heart jump out of your breast and it’s just foul to glare at others like a tiger after having read words like these:
Sermon on the Mount, the Constitution of the Kingdom of Heaven... a commercial of this Kingdom
"Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened." (NKJ)
No end of tangible blessings. All your boldest desires, dreams and fantasies coming true. In fairy-tales and anecdotes they give you 1 or 3 wishes, but here you have a blank check. You can ask every day round the clock — you’ll never exhaust the resources, for there is no limit and no credit cards. It’s not the question of His believing us, but of our believing Him. Apart from this there’s no lack of anything. You need something — ask! You lost something — seek! You want to get somewhere — knock! And it will be given, and you’ll find, and it will be opened to you!!! Most assuredly! The company guarantees. And the company is not just "one of", it’s "God and Son" in alliance with the Holy Spirit.
But people find it hard to believe. This doesn’t happen to them. What does happen is just the opposite: you ask your whole life — and you don’t get a thing, you seek and seek — and you don’t find a penny, you knock your fists off — and no one cares to open. How can you believe then that it will be given, that you’ll find, that it will be opened? We are serious folks, we Christians are! And you have to be a fool to believe it’s that fairy-talish simple.
You don’t have to be a fool. You have to be something different. We read the commercial of the Kingdom of Heaven further on:
"Or what man is there among you who, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will he give him a serpent? If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask Him!!"
To believe all this, you don’t have to be a fool at all, you have to be a son (or, physiology-wise, a daughter). A normal son with normal relations with the Father.
In the Old Testament there are 2 most interesting verses on who can eat the holy offering. The holy offerings were the sacrifices that people gave to God. And God told them to give some of these sacrifices to the ones who were not supposed to have any business, gravy train or extra pots, who were just to serve God — at the tabernacle, the altar and the holy of holies. These sacrifices were God’s good gifts to His ministers of the time — physical pieces of meat with blood and fat dripping, physical loaves, cakes and wafers of bread with oil etc.
So, here are the two verses:
"No outsider shall eat the holy offering; one who dwells with the priest, or a hired servant, shall not eat the holy thing.
But if the priest buys a person with his money, he may eat it; and one who is born in his house may eat his food."
In those far-away times God’s permission to use physical blessings, specific tangible gifts was extended to those who were bought by the priest with all their guts and to those who were born in the priest’s house. Those who just "dwelt" with the priest or were hired by him were not supposed to treat themselves to the meat of the holy sacrifices.
What does this queer Old Testament passage mean to us at the end of the 20th century? What does it mean to all Christians since the first through the 20th century?
Our Priest is Christ. He is praying for us to the Father. He accepts our offerings. He distributes our blessings — a piece of meat to some, a piece of Pentium III to others. But the shoe pinches and it’s crucial to know where it does pinch. God tells those who proudly show others their Christian ‘registration’: "It’s not my business. Residential blessings are dealt with in offices other than the holy of holies." To those who want to earn a solid and well-fried piece working for God, who want to be hired by God, He says: "That’s cool. But the work is tough. The requirement is you do ALL of My Law, from A to Z. The liability is that for just one fault, one bit of neglect you get the death sentence. It’s an either-or job."
I will tell you as friends: not even a smell of chances for us there. With our behavior and our brains we will never earn a breath of thin air from God. So, don’t waste your time. Christian business is a most hopeless kind of business. All Christians have gotten all their blessings, all their pieces not as a salary, but "sola fide".
Chances appear with those whom Christ the Priest has bought with their guts at the price of His blood. Chances grow with those who are born in Christ’s house, who are sons and daughters of the Heavenly Father, who are younger brothers and sisters of Christ.
And here we are talking not just about hypothetical chances. Here we are talking about confidence, absolute confidence, with absolute guarantees. As the Jeff Peters of Russian literature once said: "Don’t be a chicken, you’re not in the church, you won’t get fooled." Christ has bought you and He has sealed the bargain with His blood. You are to seal the very same act with your faith, genuine living faith. Those who have been born from the Holy Spirit into God’s family have become His family members, part of Christ’s household. Ask and receive blessings, just so, free of charge, because God has promised them to you.
And if you happen not to have ever sealed the bargain yet, if you don’t feel at ease in God’s family, consider all that has been written here to be a commercial for Christianity, a commercial word by word, letter by letter, jot by jot composed by Christ. And believe God’s commercials and not the human ones:
"Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened." But for this you have to be God’s own man or woman not by where you live, not by for whom you work, but just God’s own family — a son or a daughter.
And that’s all there is.
Yuri Smirnov