I believe the long lost art of letter writing can teach us a valuable lesson in how to live our lives. Letter writing is something that is seldom practiced these days. If you are like me, you probably can’t remember the last time you received or wrote a personal letter in the mail. Letter writing has been replaced by text messages, social media, and e-mail.
Yet for all these forms of communication and as great as they can be, I think there’s something unique conveyed through letter writing that makes this seemingly ancient form of communication particularly profound and powerful.
In this podcast, I look at 2 Corinthians 3:1-3, and how letter writing informed the ministry of the apostle Paul and the type of life he lived, and encouraged other people to live as well.
In order to a letter to be profound and powerful, it requires the writer to have a degree of openness and vulnerability about what they communicate from their life, and ultimately, a sense of transparency. Otherwise, the letter is a wasted form of communication, that becomes nothing more than some form of vague spam.
The apostle Paul lived such a life, and I believe we too must be willing to live our lives marked by a degree of openness, to be specific about good times and bad times, and to be vulnerable with others. And if Jesus is alive and working in our lives, I believe our lives will become something of a “living epistle” for others to read, that communicates something of the gospel message in what we have to share in our lives, as Christ lives through us in a very tangible way.
Our lives should ultimately become a letter for others to read.
