The Light You Have

Standard spiritual advice: Walk in the light you have. It’s the same as obeying your conscience as it speaks now so you can move farther along and train it to speak more accurately. If you aren’t faithful where you stand now, you cannot expect God to open doors to more challenging things.

And sometimes right in the big middle of a critical project, God tells you to stop and turn your attention elsewhere. You should incorporate that into your thinking about how God directs us for His glory. Think of it like Abraham offering Isaac and finding out that wasn’t what God had in mind after all. Yes, God is like that, simply because of our fallen nature.

It’s not a question of fault in the sense that you deserve to be misled or something like that; such is the thinking of those who don’t know God. It’s not God testing you because He doesn’t know what you’ll do, but He wants you to discover what you’ll do when conviction comes to full force in your soul.

Our virtual parish family has exploded; not just in size, but in depth. We have more regulars and their voice is stronger and it’s so beautiful to watch. You’ll know you are really getting somewhere when you realize you could probably pursue your calling without having to check in here. That’s the paradox of fellowship and communion in genuine faith; we stick around together and cling most tightly because we don’t have to. This parish will become a roaring bonfire of truth when more of you can walk in faith without this parish.

Are you ready if God allows something to shut this down? I’m not expecting it, and I have no plans to stop posting anytime soon. But at the same time, I sense that something is certainly going to change my situation in ways I could never predict. So I pose that question for you to pray and meditate — I suppose because it symbolizes what some might call the worst case scenario. It would certainly be shocking and hard to take. And it could come any day now.

It wasn’t hyperbole when I warned recently that the bottle of wrath has been uncorked, and it won’t go back into the bottle. This vintage of the grapes of wrath will be poured out generously until it’s empty, and it’s work is done. It’s a really big bottle, so that will take awhile.

You should understand that a prophetic message is not something that exists out there somewhere as objective reality-to-come. Rather, a prophetic message is fundamentally a statement about God’s moral character, typically expressed in a given context. God has always offered His covering, a way for individuals and some groups to escape what He decides to do on a larger scale. You know, that “blood on the doorpost” thing from the Exodus. You’ll still have to pack your stuff and move and you won’t always have fun, but you won’t have to endure the wrath He pours out on everyone else.

And conquering new worlds in God’s wake is much more fun than stomping mud and straw for someone who doesn’t care about God.

Tribulation is here. And if you fail to see it as an opportunity to exploit for His glory, then you aren’t ready. Truly, folks, I have no idea what’s coming at me, much less what’s coming for everyone else. But it’s right outside the door; I can’t shake that conviction.

So follow me a bit here: I was riding that new bike and planning to get a much better camera. Then the bike and my right leg were mangled. I’ll likely get the bike back long before I can ride it again, and it strikes me as funny. And now I’m not even sure I need to worry about a rowing machine or a kayak either one. And my ministry of heart-photography is on hold, too. I’m hardly finished seeking to exploit things for His glory, just no longer looking at those wonderful things I rightly planned to do. My eagerness to obey the calling threw me into another reality altogether.

But I don’t know what’s next, only that there really is a very big “next.” So it’s my duty to you as elder to suggest it could affect what goes on here, and I have no idea how. It’s not pessimism to wonder if something we do now has to end. It’s giving back to God all the blessings He has given so there’s room for what else He has in store.