Remembering a profound personal lesson from the PCG’s copyright victory
January 16, 2015, marks the 12-year anniversary of the day I received a very important telephone call from Mark Helm, our principle lawyer at Munger, Tolles and Olsen. It was Mr. Helm who spoke so brilliantly for us during the many hours of depositions and courtroom hearings during our court case.
I had been out of the office when the call came. When I received the message to call him, I did so immediately. Mark’s secretary put me through to his office. “Are you sitting down?” he asked me. I said, “Well, yes, what’s on your mind?” “You got it all,” he responded quickly, “not just Mystery of the Ages, you got all the written works you asked for … all 19!”
My heart skipped a beat and I was lifted into another world. I still cannot describe in words what a spiritual high I felt during that phone call. I was dazed, much like I was on my wedding day. I knew God had just given His Philadelphia Church something really big and fantastic. What miraculous and wonderful news. It was a long time coming—six years in fact.
I knew it was January 16, the anniversary of Herbert W. Armstrong’s death. Pastor General Gerald Flurry had stressed for years that we all should pay close attention to that date because an event like the death of God’s end-time Elijah is important to God. So, I was looking for something to happen. Well, it happened!
I think back on that day and the other astounding events of the court case often. God gave me a unique experience working with the lawyers and being directly involved with the main participants of the case from both the Philadelphia Church of God (pcg) and the Worldwide Church of God (wcg), now called Grace Communion International (gci). Stephen Flurry has ably recorded for us the notable spiritual details of the court case in Raising the Ruins. Now would be a good time to read this important book if you have not already done so. Of course, re-reading it would be good. Why?
Ponder the Magnitude
“The way we fought in the court case is the crown jewel of our conversion—a real demonstration of our love for God, for each other, and for this world. This identifies us to the whole world,” Gerald Flurry stated in his article “The Mantle of Elijah” (Royal Vision, July-August 2003). Mr. Flurry was not just talking poetically here. The leaders of the wcg were hell-bent on grinding the pcg into the ground, never to rise again. The court case was a real fight for the survival to do God’s Work of keeping His message alive and active on Earth.
All of us who worked on the case know that it was God who gave us the victory.
“We all need to pray and ponder on the magnitude of what happened with this victory. I don’t thinkpcg will ever experience one greater,” admonished our pastor general in this same article. We need to fully believe what Mr. Flurry says here. How excited are we about our right to print and distributeMystery of the Ages and the other 18 works of Mr. Armstrong?
I visited our lawyers in August 2003, some seven months after the court case victory. Kelly Klaus, a second lawyer assisting Mark Helm with our case, confided in me that he had never worked on a case like ours before. All of the cases he was currently working on he considered routine—even boring. Over lunch with our lawyers, we had a rousing discussion about the major events of the case. I could tell they all missed the excitement of working with Mr. Flurry, his son Stephen and me. They were still excited about the case and what was happening in the pcg as a result.
What about you? Are you still thrilled to remember our court case?
If you invest the time to study and reflect again on this victory, God will reignite your excitement and passion to completing God’s Work. To help you recapture the significance of the case, I will relate a personal spiritual lesson that I learned while working on the court case.
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