While in high school, I visited The Lord’s Gathering, a church where I had my first and only vision for many years. The body of Christ was coming to maturity. I cannot explain how it happened or how I saw it except that it was like a picture in my heart.
I have not seen how God would bring about the maturity of His people being built up in love with each member contributing by the grace God gives—until now.
What Once Was Is Again
The 1980 winter olympics arrived against a landscape of national crises and a mood of pessimism. Muslims had taken hostages at the American Embassy in Iran. Service stations rationed gas because of fuel shortages. Social unrest spotted the nation, drugs were rampant, a president had resigned in scandal, and high tensions accompanied the cold war with Russia and their troop deployment in Afghanistan.
The goal of defeating Russia on ice drove coach Herb Brooks to handpick college hockey players for what they could uniquely bring to the USA team. All the players were young. Many were cocky. In order to stand a chance at competing with the Soviet Union, the coach believed his team had to adopt a hybrid style of hockey completely foreign to the style the boys had been playing all their lives.
The goal was to deeply instill a team mentality, demand exceptional fitness, and teach the players a whole different philosophy of moving on the ice. The question was how to get the players to be better than they thought they could be. First the coach had to destroy the fiercely independent attitude of the American players before they could coalesce into a team with the ultimate winning chemistry. Out of brokenness, the players arose together with an unparalleled combination of talent, heart, and skill that produced the first gold medal for the U.S. hockey team in 20 years of olympic competition.
Our nation today faces even worse obstacles than it faced in the 1970’s but in many of the same areas. Social unrest in the streets of the United States is happening frequently. The moral fabric of society is unraveling. Increasing numbers of the general public do not trust politicians and understand that most if not all of them are behooved to their donors whether or not those lobbies are backed by groups with ties to radical Muslims, socialists, communists, or others with nefarious motives. World geopolitical issues range from the slaughter of Christians to mass migration of Muslims. Terrorism is also spreading like fire, and more and more signs appear daily that the American economy is on the verge of collapse.
Collapse and Rebuild
Against this backdrop of today's collapsing western culture is the spiritual condition of believers in Jesus Christ. The Christian martyrs mentioned above who have gone before us in heaven having been killed for their faith in Jesus Christ, His death on the cross and resurrection from the dead, and who did not love their lives unto death, inspire those of us who remain and aspire to live faithfully for Jesus our Savior.
Two things appear to be happening simultaneously. As the world watches tragic events unfold across the earth, God is using the events in the lives of His people to bring us to life and maturity.
A New Command
The love we have for God either shows itself or does not show itself in our relationships. Self-will, the antagonist to God’s love, disregards the line God sets between our relationship with Him and our relationship with others. It negates the word of God in exchange for exaltation of self.
Self-will strikes with a stick, says it will never deny the Messiah, wants to call judgment down on others. It imposes its own desire upon situations and circumstances instead of fully trusting in God, who brings life by His word. It sees a culture that no longer shares its values and so reacts with its own thinking. With the goal of self-preservation, it runs and hides, hordes and prepares, maybe demonstrates and takes up arms. On the other hand, God leads His own to speak what He gives us to say, do what He says to do, and completely trust Him for the results without the false crutch of self-reliance or concern for self-preservation.
God chooses the specific situations and circumstances we must experience to extricate us from all that is not from Him and to reveal our true nature as His servants with faith as a mustard seed. Only a specific confluence of factors can bring about the maturity in love God desires and make us His people who shine as lights in the world.
We cannot do much, but what we can do is place our lives in the hands of our Creator. We can accept that whatever experience in life He allows, He is working out His great plan and preparing us for our role in it. We can trust that His will is being done on earth as it is in heaven.
The heart must in connection with Christ respond in obedience to His word. The heart softened and changed by the grace of God leads the will. Peter learned this the hard way. He discovered that his determination was no substitute for the grace of Jesus to feed His sheep. Watchman Nee writes about our need to experience the cross to overcome exaltation of the human will. Jesus Himself leads us to carry the cross, die to self, and be reborn by connecting to God.
The new command is to love one another, which is possible because the love of God is far greater than the highest mountain, deeper than the deepest valley, and wider than east is to the west. God knows that what is coming upon the world and in our lives is required to bring to life a totally different mindset to trust and obey when we don't understand. We cannot control circumstances or people, even our own loved ones. Our love for them is expressed in our love for God and obedience to Him. This takes relinquishing control.
Trust and Obey
Moses overstepped when he struck the rock the second time in the desert to make water flow from it. Our love for God must lead us to obey Him even if we think we should be doing something else, something more, to bring about God’s will. These times in which we live are unlike any other. They demand sole allegiance to Christ.
Had Moses trusted and obeyed God, he would have glorified God as holy among the people. With Miriam’s passing, her well along with her care for the people no longer traveled with Israel. We now have to realign our hearts with the hearts of those we love in order to help them experience the life-giving flow of God’s Holy Spirit, the water of life. This is how others come under the influence of Christ's reign through us.
Speaking, as opposed to striking with a stick, sanctifies the Lord in the presence of others. Jesus invites all to come to Him to drink freely from the well of life, and for all who respond to this invitation, out of their innermost being will flow rivers of living water. For this to flow, hearts must be softened like the heart of the woman at the well with whom Jesus spoke but the disciples would have ostracized. Striking with a stick does not accomplish the purpose of God to soften the heart of stone. Prayer does. With our laying down our lives before the Lord, let us lay down the lives of those we love also at the foot of the cross.
Christ speaks life into people at their point of need. He does not snuff out a wick or break a bending reed. His word spoken small in the stillness of the heart feeds the flame of faith and causes the flow of living water. We shouldn’t be discouraged if the water of life in what we perceive is a heart of stone starts as a trickle. Rather we can pray for those given into our care, and we can entrust them to Christ who loves them more than we could ever express.
Is our will better than the Lord’s to accomplish His purpose? Of course not. It is only right and appropriate, then, that Christ, the author and perfecter of our faith, receive the glory due His name for the process. It must be made clear to everyone that the word of God, and not forced submission to it, gives life. There are no proxies for God. Each has ears to hear in the hidden person of the heart what the Spirit says to the churches.
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