2 questions
a good friend recently asked me two questions & i like them:
1. How can our lives speak prophetically concerning God’s love and justice in a culture of diverse, competing, and contradicting ideologies?
God and love, yeuh! well the great part is that love is more than something God pulls out of his bag of tricks. beyond that it’s more than an attribute that you would have to balance over against, say, judgment.
God = love. he never moves outside of love. the love that God is and has…it never sours, never fossilizes, never runs out. you can’t paint a better picture of divine love than what we’ve got in matthew mark luke john.
to speak prophetically out of God’s love today - we’ve got to be totally convinced that the one & only source of true love is God. other ideologies are really passing smokescreens. the idea isn’t to cross swords over what’s true love & what isn’t, nor is it to phrase things just perfectly so nobody’s feathers get ruffled. religiously belligerent or religiously political human words can’t touch the glory of divine love.
the idea is to be so saturated in God’s love that there is no argument against it! look at steven standing in front of the sanhedrin with his face shining with the glory of heaven. we’ve got to allow ourselves to marinate in God’s love. we speak of what we know & testify to what we have seen…heard…felt >>
2. What does God’s kingdom breaking into our culture require of the Christ-follower?
see…hear…feel. enter the kingdom of God, & go deep. way way beyond mouthing God-concepts. eat his flesh. drink his blood. speak out of heaven. hear what the Father says so we can say it along with him. see what the Father does so we can do it with him. feel God. my-soul-thirsts-for-you, my-flesh-longs-for-you feeeel God.
the reason the church is having trouble touching culture today is that people in the church haven’t really let themselves touch anything, especially God. we’ve given hell all the tangible stuff - our passions, our urges, our good times, our secrets, our emotions. this explains why you see church-people still visiting hell periodically to feel something, anything …or you see church-people opting to become cold emotionless drones.
Jesus didn’t live like that at all. he didn’t touch hell, he didn’t relate to hell, he didn’t respond to hell…he plundered hell.
Jesus touched heaven. heaven touched Jesus. Jesus spoke to heaven. heaven spoke to Jesus. so he could put his hands all over sick demon-riddled broken-hearted paralyzed dead people & see them set free. he lived in that realm that Jacob saw in his vision sleeping on a rock. we’ve been in the house of God & didn’t even know it.
honestly, if we already had the juice and we just needed to package it right, i’d give my 2 cents on packaging. but God knows we as a church need the juice like never before. we’ve got to allow ourselves to m-a-r-i-n-a-t-e >>
Yes! Actually EXPERIENCE HIM. First-hand.
I know trials will come, please don’t run from Him. He knows what He is doing. Be patient. Things will not be as you thought they were. Please continue. You are not alone and the Lord sees all.
Much love!!!!!!!!
That’s it. It is way too easy to be overwhelmed and run. Some people hear “there’s more!” and start jumping up and down for joy - they want more. Then there’s other people who hear “there’s more!” and immediately think “what? so then what i’ve got isn’t good enough?”
The call to go deep in God is all about love, all about experiencing God’s death-defying love and really getting to know him there. There is no condemnation there.
The trick is learning to never hear God’s calls or challenges as criticism. We live constantly taking hold of the lifeline of God’s word and being pulled into a realm (called the kingdom of God) where we have absolutely no natural means of functioning! All of hell can try to get in the middle of that and make God’s miracle lifeline look like a whip exposing your failures, but know that God has thrown himself headfirst into seeing you walk as he walks in the realms of the supernatural. He’ll win, hell won’t. No matter what it looks like now.
Please please infinitely please learn to love the impossibility of it all - that’s the place where God’s glory can truly be revealed in you.
Yes. Yes. Yes. His intention is more. There will always be a moving to more. He is doing so in love. Like a father teaching his son/daughter. It is done in love, not to condemn. He does so for positive reasons. To obtain the FULLNESS of Christ!
Bro thank you. Glory be to God. But I do want you to know that there are brothers and sisters that are truly reading/listening.
“the reason the church is having trouble touching culture today is that people in the church haven’t really let themselves touch anything, especially God. we’ve given hell all the tangible stuff - our passions, our urges, our good times, our secrets, our emotions. this explains why you see church-people still visiting hell periodically to feel something, anything …or you see church-people opting to become cold emotionless drones.”
This has been in my head for days. It’s so true. It’s really easy to assume if I’m excited enough about something, or interested in something enough, that it’s going to get in the way of God and I’ve got to stop. I think a lot of people in the church are on a mission to train themselves to be confined, associating almost every good emotion with the devil. It is easy to worry about accidentally being too flaky with God though.
That’s just it. Somewhere along the line we bought into the idea that intellectual discipline would make for a deeper more consistent relationship with Father than coming to him with our passion, urges, good times, secrets, and emotions totally given over to him. Some philosopher somewhere said these were the baser parts of humanity, and imagined that God would want something loftier from us.
Human emotionalism is flaky. But God’s emotions are pure, intense, beautiful - they know absolutely no bounds. He literally wants us to feel what he feels. He looks after us with such passion, such inexhaustible affection; there is absolutely nothing he won’t knock over to be with us in the pure place of Spirit and truth.
He’ll be patient, he’ll draw us along with cords of lovingkindness and tender mercy. But we just can’t settle out for a surface relationship with him any longer. All this time he’s been reaching out coaxing us into moving like he moves, speaking like he speaks, feeling like he feels, thinking like he thinks, loving like he loves - really diving headlong into him like he has into us.
There is a place for us in God where we get to completely abandon ourselves. Standing invitation >>