First, read this.
CTK Blog - 3 Things I'd Do if I Were Satan
Ok, here we go.
Dearest Church,
We need to WAKE UP to the Spirit and remember our roots, and remember that Jesus didn't preach legalism and judgement and rules and self-righteousness. He preached adoration and love for the broken. He preached the power given to us by the strength of his Spirit's supernatural work and the fact that our identity is being a Son and Daughter of the Almighty God. We have so much power that we don't use, and we have so many people that we don't love.
Wake up church. We were told that we would be able to do even greater things than Jesus did, in his name. Do you get how huge that is? Jesus healed the blind, the sick, the lame. He rose the dead. He loved like none other. And he did all of this with grace and ease because he KNEW his identity, and he knew the identity of each person he met: each of them was covered in the love and longing of God.
So then why has the work of the Spirit seemed to slow down? Why is the church known for their judgement and self-righteousness? We have forgotten our roots. Imagine a church where the Spirit is welcomed living and active and expected. We have the Living God inside our souls and all around us, and yet the American church seems to have been largely diminished to a place where people idly stand, sing a stale song, hear a message and then go back to their careers, their homes, their friends and don't really do much there either.
But imagine a place where people encounter and see the love of Jesus. Where our service to other people comes from the overflow of our hearts. Where the ashamed, the unworthy, the sinners, the broken are healed by the love of God and the love shown by his sons and daughters. But this place is not a place it all. No, it is a people. A people who are fully aware of their identity and of the identity of those around them. We are the body of God, are we not? Are we not the hands and feet of Jesus, the one who told us to go out and heal in his name and cast out demons in his name, who told us love our neighbor and our enemy in his name? That's us right?...or am I missing something? Because most of the time, that doesn't really look like us, church.
When did the overwhelming love of God and the incredible power given by his Spirit become something that we are so complacent in, that we think that we can just idly sit in? When did it become something that we sing "Glory, Glory, Hallelujah" about but do not LIVE? I think this happened when we stopped realizing that we are the children of a real, and living, and present God. Our God does not just live on through us by the stories. Yes, the Bible is a record book of the action of God and a record book of his solid teaching that we live by. But, OUR LIVES are the daily newspaper of the action of God now, we are the current stories of the work of God because he has never stopped working and he has never left us.
When will this become real again to us? Because it is REAL. His love, his presence, his work. His hand is moving, and he calls his people to mobilize. He has been for the last 2 millennia.
We are called to love and to act, and we are called to intimacy with God. And I think that this is another reason why the church is struggling. Often we become people who serve in the church, lead worship, host events, maybe reach out some, but we have lost the secret place. The quiet place, the hidden place, the place where it it just you and God together, talking and listening, being convicted and being strengthened and encouraged. From this place does the overflow of love and strength and encouragement and truth come from. And it is this place that needs to be recovered in the church. It is within the souls of men that the battle must be waged. And in our culture, this is the most difficult place to reach, because day after day, we are told that we don't have souls. Our culture says, "You are just a body, a mass of cells formed by a cosmic accident. You are temporal. There is nothing more to you." And this speaks directly against our very make up, our design, and our Designer. No wonder our souls are in crisis!
We must learn to fight against this lie, to awaken our souls to the desire of the Divine. Society tells us we don't have souls because Satan knows that our souls are meant for eternity, and he wants as many people as possible to lose that knowledge and that hope. By the cutting out of the soul, Satan removes more and more threats to himself. And this is why the battle must begin there. By feeding the soul in the secret place with God, we gather more strength than Satan could ever even have knowledge of. And by this, we become fierce and strong Warriors and Lovers who know who we are and by whose name and power we live.
Church,all of us, including myself, need to be continuously woken up. We need revival within the church so that we can have revival outside of it. We were never meant to be a stagnant people, who learned and experienced but never moved. It is from the overflow that action comes.
This has been quite a blistering critique of us, church. But know that it was written as much to myself as to everyone else. You may not agree with me, and thats ok, I have much to learn. But be blessed and go with God today, because He is with us!
Much love,
A fellow sister
