The trees in a forest think of themselves as a community.
We’ve hashed this out before: Spiritual birth is entirely on God’s initiative. It is totally a miracle. It is tangential to what we do, but it is never a goal. The goal is to bring people under the Covenant of Christ. Our evangelism is the business of persuading people to move their conscious awareness into their hearts, and to commit to Christ as the Lord of the Covenant.
Then we teach them what the Word says about this fallen world, and how there’s no point in trying to fix any part of it. There are things we can do to mitigate the sorrows, and it boils down to understanding with the heart what the Law Covenants had to say about God and this fallen reality. We need to escape this world, but the path of escape is Biblical Law. We have to do things the way the Bible says we have to do them. We have to understand that Biblical Law is not a restriction, but a divine privilege in this world, the mark of Eternity.
We tend to avoid using phrases like “getting people saved” because that term has been loaded with baggage that didn’t come from God. What must people do to be saved? Well, we first have to explain that being “saved” means a commitment to living by Biblical Law, the reign of Christ in this world. He is our Law. We have to explain that “faith” is not a body of belief, nor a collection of simply doing and not-doing, but a personal commitment to the person of Christ as your feudal tribal covenant Lord.
For the better part of 2000 years people in churches have been denied the privileges of shalom. Do you know how heart-breaking that is? It makes me weep every time I think about it. It’s not as if all the people in churches are His people, but a lot of His people are there, and churches have kept them from their shalom. And a lot of His people aren’t in churches, so we have to find them, too.
Some of you will be led to seek the lost sheep of Christ outside the churches. I’m called to seek them from the churches. I’m limited by the circumstances; the Lord makes that clear to me. This is not a crusade to correct churches, nor waste time condemning the leadership. It’s a long waiting game for God to shake His people loose from those lies.
This is the one burden that eats up most of my prayer time. It’s front and center of the things that occupy my soul. “Lord, shake them loose from that false way of life! Cause them to doubt the system.” It really will have to be the hand of God. He’ll have to do something that causes people to question if they are actually following Him. Clearly, at least some of them are not. The grace we have is not meant for us alone. Maybe it’s not for everyone, but the fire in my soul says it’s meant to bless a lot more than have found it so far.
So for those of you who are with me, I’m also praying that we are ready to receive those whom the Lord will shake loose from the current system of mainstream religion. This is something we’ll have to do offline; it requires getting personally involved. This is where the prayer for signs and wonders comes into the picture. Not just the usual things that people associate with the term “signs and wonders,” but the ability to open people’s spiritual eyes, to deliver them from the grip of deception. This is our Spiritual Warfare.
Do you see the forest standing here? That’s the end of the series unless someone has critical questions to ask.
