P.O. Box 53055    
Los Angeles, CA 90053   

A BOOK TO IGNORE #5

HATING THE WINDOWS ‘95 HANDBOOK

Wall Street Journal correspondent Jim Carlton has a few sad computer stories to relate, just in case you think you're the Windows 95 dummy of the universe. Apparently the Compaq Corporation finally decided to stop telling people to "Press Any Key," because they kept getting calls on their toll-free line from people who complained: "I can't find the ‘ANY' key."

Another irate customer was told to mail in a copy of her defective floppy disks. A few days later the company received — sure enough — Xeroxed copies of the floppies. A man who was mad at the Dell computer folks said he couldn't get his computer to fax anything. After 40 minutes of trouble-shooting over the phone, the technician found out the man had been trying to fax a letter by holding the piece of paper up flat against the screen and hitting the "SEND" key over and over without noticeable results.

Probably the saddest story of all happened to a very nice lady who called the computer company and said, "My brand-new computer won't work. Just won't work." She'd unpacked the unit, hooked it all up, plugged it in, and then sat there for 20 minutes waiting for something to happen. So the mystified toll-free advisor said to her, "Well, what happened when you pressed the power switch?" There was a long pause. "Uh, what power switch?"

And so it goes. The rest of us, with our own booting-up problems and error messages, will gratefully hide in the shadows of anonymity!

We've been saying this week that learning out of a certain owner's manual called the Holy Bible can be hard. Even those big yellow books, "Windows for Dummies" and "Word Perfect 7.0 for Illiterate Radio Preachers" . . . are difficult to learn. Very quickly, as you start reading, you kind of bog down. So many chapters are about things you know you'll never need, but the things you do need — you can't find them. Plus it's so detailed and complex, hard to follow, even in the Dummies versions. As a result, many of us give up.

Now, am I talking about the computer books or the Bible? Well, the same complaints come in about both of them. Hard to understand. Huge sections not relevant. Can't find what I need. Written to people with a different mindset than me. I call a toll-free number for help, you know, Dial-a-Prayer, and the line is busy.

You know, the Bible itself confesses that reading it is hard. Some parts aren't easy to get through. In the apostle Peter's first letter, chapter two, he writes:

"Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation, now that you have tasted that the Lord is good."

There are a number of places in Scripture where a split diet is taught: milk for newborn believers and then solid food — meat, Paul says — as we grow up. And notice that both Peter and Paul encourage us in the direction of growing up. "Take the milk so that you can grow up," Peter advises. "Growing up in your salvation, now that you've tasted — through the milk — that God is good."

Let's stay with the computer metaphor here for a few minutes — and if you disagree with me, you can zip off a response to our Voice of Prophecy Web site at "www.vop.com." As hard as Windows textbooks and King James Bibles are, one thing is assuredly true: great benefits and rewards come to those who do study and at least begin to master bits and paragraphs here and there.

Even our Voice of Prophecy offices have been revolutionized by people who have learned something about computers. Every single employee we have is on one; every radio script is written on a laptop. I wasn't kidding about that Web page at "www.vop.com." Book requests are tabulated on computers; even our Bible school workers compose letters to your prayer requests on computers, sometimes using e-mail to get back to you quickly.

And for every person who uses a computer, there's been that painful learning curve, moving up from Word Perfect 5.0 to 6.1 to 7, going from DOS to Windows, learning how to get on that Internet. But now that they can, the benefits are there. More work gets done, more scripts written, more requests handled, more people blessed.

And the same is true with Bible reading, as we've been saying all week. Even if it's hard — which it certainly is in many places — our first tentative steps bring advantages. The first glimmers of truth immediately set us on a better path, bring blessings into our lives. Our spiritual walk is enhanced from that very first verse we look at.

"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth."

And right away we're blessed. Page One, paragraph one: God is our Creator!
You know, doctors have been saying for decades now that if a person quits smoking, the benefits begin the very first day! The body starts healing itself within the first 24 hours. Now, those first few days are hard! But it helps to know that the lungs are already starting to turn pink again, the body's already made a good dent at flushing out the nicotine.

We mentioned just the other day the New Testament story where a jailkeeper in Philippi was converted to Christianity one evening. It was an earthquake conversion, to be sure, but Paul gave him that classic one-sentence sermon:

"Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved — you and your household."

And the man was baptized that very night! He started receiving the benefits of Christianity within the first 24 hours. Now, the Bible tells us he went on and studied further. And undoubtedly, there were challenges ahead, both with the hardness of continued study and with trying to be a Christian in that rough-and-ragged jail. But the blessings started immediately.

But now to a Part Two of our question. What do we do when that Windows handbook or that "How to Cruise the Internet" manual simply don't sink in. You can't get past the title page; you read and you look and you cry and you throw the mouse out the window, and you simply can't find the power switch to turn things on. What do you do when you grind to a halt?

Most people who are happily computing today can testify that they didn't get that way by themselves. When things were hard, they got help. They asked a friend to walk them through the booting-up process; they called the 800 line, finally got through, and had a technician explain the difference between "SAVE" and "SAVE AS." They might have even prayed for help in figuring out what a path name is!

There's so much we can do to learn, if learning's important to us. Go to a seminar session, get a tutorial video, devote a couple of hours to old-fashioned experimenting; just hit "CONTROL-ALT-DELETE" 50 or 60 times and see what happens. But the point is this: when we're motivated, we find a way.

And can't the same thing be true, friend, in this even more important learning path of life? Are there sessions we can attend in order to make this manual called "Holy Bible" more understandable? Isn't there a pastor every Sabbath or Sunday morning who has spent hours studying on his own, so that he or she can now open up this hard-to-understand Book and make it easier for you? Take advantage of these training sessions!

Or how about a small group study? If four or five people got together around a laptop and explored new computer techniques, you might make amazing progress sitting in with them. The same is true in Bible study, as you discuss and pick apart hard verses. Face it, other people sometimes know things we don't know, and the time-honored practice of one person explaining the Bible to another is found over and over in Scripture itself, with even Jesus helping a couple of Bible illiterates as they walked along that Emmaus road.

You know, I hope even this radio program, the Voice of Prophecy, can serve that function. If reading the Bible is hard for you, give us a try each Monday through Friday and also on our Sunday broadcast, which has that half-hour advantage of a bit more depth. We're digging too, right here at Box 55; why not join us as often as you can and we'll read the manual and swap hard-drive-crashing stories with each other. I know we often get mail from listeners and our Bible School enrollees . . . and those letters open our eyes; that's for sure! And bit by bit, working together, the mysteries unfold, the foggy becomes clear, and things we might have thought were indigestible turn into nutritious food for the soul.

In our last moment here before the weekend, let me recount the old story where a very secular man received just one thing from his wealthy relative's will. I mean, this person had heaps of money, but he bequeathed to this young worldling instead the old family Bible. That's it: a big, forbidding, leather-bound Book. And the man, thoroughly disgusted, tossed it up on the top shelf, muttered a curse word, and forgot it.

Many years later, this man and his family were down on their luck. A depression was on, he'd lost his job, the heat had been shut off, down to their last bag of groceries, etc. And one of the kids happened to pull out this old, dust-covered Bible and begin leafing through it, maybe just looking at the pictures.

To his amazement, there were twenty- and fifty-dollar bills tucked all through the Bible. On virtually every page, there was money. From Genesis through to Revelation, there were multiplied thousands of dollars. It would have been enough, all those long, painful years, to live in complete comfort.

But what's more, the truths in the Bible could have created such a different story. Even more than those dollars, the promises of Scripture, were hidden in that old Book.

Friend, how about us? There's a power switch very close at hand. Why don't we reach out and turn it on?