Spiritual Corrosion! Or, “Is there anything showing on ‘your screen’?”

For some time now we have been struggling at home to get a good picture on our TV. The picture would be there one day and partially there another day, but in the end it packed up altogether. I checked that all the cables were still connected – they were. I then feared the worse and thought that a new TV might be necessary – not a happy prospect in these recessionary times!

But there’s also a decoder between the aerial and the TV, which translates the aerial signals into meaningful channels and pictures. It was a cheap one when I first bought it, and replacing this little box of tricks is nowhere near as expensive as a new TV, so I plumped for this being the cause. With new decoder in hand I returned from the shop triumphant, thinking that I had solved the problem. But I was soon to be disillusioned. The new decoder was no better than the old one!

Next step was a phone call to a techno-savvy friend who immediately correlated the symptoms with our excessively wet weather in the UK and suggested that we might have water coming down the aerial cable from the roof of our house – something that would never have occurred to me. So the next call was to Mark, our friendly local aerial man.

When he came, and listened to the story so far, it took him all of thirty seconds to pull out the cable connector and show me the tell-tale greeny coloured signs of copper corrosion, caused by water ingress into the cable. Dampness must have been coming down the cable for months, probably years. In spite of the dampness, the TV had continued to work fine for a long time. But eventually the hidden corrosion  on the inside of the cable had reached a critical point, the signal had shorted out and as a result the whole TV system had been rendered useless.

As I watched Mark at work replacing the cable, connecting it to the new ‘electronic box of tricks‘ and finally to the TV, I was impacted by his confidence that everything would now work OK – and it did, first time. I was very impressed, but through this whole saga God had been speaking to me about His Church and His people.

In many ways every Church and congregation is intended to be like a massive TV screen,  faithfully rendering a picture of God’s truth to the local community, the nation and the world at large. But for a long time now, the picture has been getting progressively bad and in many places the picture has disappeared from the screen altogether, so that the Church has become like my defunct TV system – having all the physical components in place but totally dysfunctional spiritually and effectively useless. There are no pictures showing on the screen!

The problem with my TV system was corrosion in the aerial. The aerial represents the spiritual core of our being, through which we should be picking up God’s signals and passing them through our ‘decoder’ so that we can display a true image on the ‘screen of our lives’ of who God is and what He is saying to the world today.

As I looked at the green-coloured corrosion affecting my TV aerial I began to think about the dangers of spiritual corrosion affecting the spiritual aerial through which God desires to speak to us personally and, through us, to the world. Just as corrosion in the aerial cable had rendered the TV useless, corrosion in both the spiritual life of the Church and in our individual lives can have a similar consequence.

It was obvious that the aerial cable must have been subject to water penetration for months, and probably years, before it eventually ceased to function. In a similar way there can be ungodly things going on in our own lives and the life of the Church for a very long time before the system finally breaks down and the ‘screen’ bears no semblance of spiritual integrity and ceases to be a living witness.

As I said goodbye to Mark, and thanked him for getting our TV back on for the Christmas holiday, I was challenged to take time over the Christmas break to take a long, hard look at my own personal spiritual aerial, asking the Lord to show me any areas which need repair and renewal. The Lord had shown me how important it is that no impurity should be given access to the core of both our lives and the Christian ministries we are involved in. I grieved at how much pain we must cause to Father God, if he looks down and sees that there is no picture showing on our screens. We would, literally, be robbing God of the opportunity of showing His love to a broken and desperate world.

The prophet Malachi was challenged to voice the question, “How are we robbing God?” A modern day answer could well be “by having nothing to show on our screens!” I pray that you will want to take some time too, over the holiday period, to check out on the condition of your spiritual aerial before we enter the New Year of 2013. I pray that 2013 will be a season of great fruitfulness in your life and that the picture showing on ‘your screen’ will be a good one!