Advertising in today’s world is a huge enterprise. In every Sunday newspaper ads take up probably twice as much space as everything else combined. Turn on the radio or television and commercials are stacked on top of each other four or five times in each hour. Every time you turn your computer on and see an item or topic in which you are interested, it will be surrounded on every side by an endless number of ads. Advertising dominates the landscape so thoroughly that you cannot be unaware of it.
Both my house phone and cell phone are listed on our government’s “Don’t Call List” – the list is a joke! I still get at least one or two sales calls every single day. As if that were not enough advertising to face, I get a huge amount of it placed in my mail box every week. I realize that advertising is a legitimate way to sell things, but I receive so many ads promoting everything from hamburgers to Caribbean cruises that most of them elicit little or no response from me. That is, until a certain pamphlet arrived in my mail box.
It was obviously designed by Madison Avenue advertising experts, mass produced, and mailed with the latest equipment. It was mailed by a Christian evangelist who said I could have anything I wanted. He mentioned one person who had asked God for a $40,000 automobile – and got it! All I had to do was to draw up my want list and send it to him. Each request for material things that anyone mailed in to him would be prayed over by him personally – and, pronto, God would provide it. A grandiose promise, to be sure.
Located in the same section for writing my prayer request for things I wanted filled by God was space to indicate the amount of money I was going to send to him. I was encouraged to pledge an amount every month. He even suggested specific amounts. My volition was not trusted to choose the amount I would send. A few verses of Scripture were then thrown in — taken out of context, of course. This was to make it sound spiritual and to increase my guilt complex should I not send him an amount he considered to be adequate.
Answered prayer for sale! It was as though God would not answer my prayers without his help. Manipulation of other people’s want list — for his personal profit! Such an idea attempts to make God our servant by having Him do our will. Prayer doesn’t work that way. The preachers who send pamphlets like the one I received will one day have to give account to God on the Day of Judgment.
Normally I am a moderately composed Christian minister. I don’t get my hackles up all that often. But I must confess that this self-styled prophet for profit caused me to lose my composure. I immediately wrote him a personal letter. I even quoted some Scripture verses myself. They compared his enterprise with the moneychangers mentioned in Matthew 21 and Mark 11 whose tables Jesus overturned when He was in the Temple. God’s Temple was designed to be a house of prayer, but the priests had made it a den of thieves.
This modern moneychanger did not reply to my letter. I really didn’t expect him to, but I felt a lot better. I was hoping that it would cause him to have second thoughts about His business of packaging the King of Kings in a Madison Avenue campaign for the primary purpose of increasing his own bank account.
Yes, even religion is available through the mail for the convenience of anyone who wants to be vaccinated with what is, at best, not even a mild case of Christianity. The tragedy of such a vaccination is that it could keep you from catching the real thing. God’s blessings cannot be purchased through the mail. They are available – if they are within His will — to every person who will claim them by faith (see Matthew 7:7).
The Paper Pulpit 
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