Part of persecution is creating choices in others. The choice others make is to either come near to my life or exit from it. As per Biblical dimensions, people largely exit my life and that leads to a lack of comrades in this journey. Is it because I am difficult? Probably! But the difficulty is an insistence on the Lord being central to all things. Obviously I have my blind spots but even to myself I am insistent that He will be all in all things. That is hard to be around.
However... If you are a person who is not in the business of making the Lord all... I've got an issue. Firstly, I can understand the journey gets tough and we fail. My hand is first to go up on this one. But I know people who consider the Lord to be a convenience, some category to sit back on and treat like a 'go-to' when all is turning to shizzle. This gets my attention because it is that sort of thing which much of the church fuels.
Jesus is marketed as a problem solver. In western thinking we largely exist to make the journey sweet. Many have the mentality of 'apply Jesus' when the road gets tough. If I was coming from a pious, self righteous point of view, looking down on the 'Jesus elastoplast' culture, I would be as wrong. My concern is much deeper.
If we don't engage the Lord for who he actually is and allow Him to deeply affect us, we are vulnerable to the great deceptions that are coming upon us. There is a great deception coming which will deceive 'even the elect' for a time. The elect are the genuinely saved people but genuinely saved people can be far from the Lord in practice. It is this which I am concerned about... the ones who are in a 'category' of saved yet live with their own passions, desires, willfulness and self as priority.
I understand that it takes a while for people to yield, abandon and submit to the Lord. I'm one who thinks the whole thing is a work of the Spirit. But I come across people who feel their life consists of a soap opera while speaking of the Lord with familiar terms. Taking on information and rationalizing the bible means nothing if the content is resisted in the core of self. It isn't an exercise in processing data... it is supposed to be a violent reconfiguring of the core self. " But Gary, isn't this a bit confronting?" Yes it is! It's supposed to be!
Because we are born into a post-enlightenment / post modernist culture, we have certain mindsets that don't come naturally. One of them is taking self and making the information a secondary issue. Without the intent to do so we will assess data on the basis of 'how does this sit with me?' While the Bible (God's word) has different intent. It wants you to re-calibrate all your self to IT. How you feel and how you consider self to be soooo precious in the equation mean that God's processes will take longer than it should. "Thanks for your harsh opinion Gary!" But this is what Israel suffered so we would get the message:
Take the painful road of abandonment, submission and yielding to God NOW!
But, alas, more and more I come across people speak of their Jesus knowledge but have little intention of laying down their lives. It's basically about their own welfare, their own life, their own journey. The hard truth in all of this is that we are given an image... an icon to consider. God came into time and said in a horrific display of torture... "This is what I am prepared to do because you are intrinsically loved and valued." The death of Jesus was supposed to shake us from our sensibilities and grip us with significance that would leave us dumbstruck:
God would demonstrate the most outrageous act of giving that we would offer self for execution.
Ask the Lord today for His grace to expose self, its love affair with 'me' and its tokenistic application to the things above. Scandalize my short changing of devotion in my core and grip me with the desire to offer all of me into your hands.
Gary Ward
