Another way to say it: If you will not rise to grace, you will fall under the law. Note the play on rise versus fall. Grace puts you in the hands of God, but law puts you in the hands of Satan. This is where we remind folks that the Hebrew word satan denotes an adversary, typically someone whose official role is court prosecutor.
Grace provides the power to overcome your fallen nature. Law has no such power; it only condemns. Law pays attention to your status and objective condition. Grace reads who you are in your heart. God operates in both ways, but He delegates law to others on His staff. His children are exempt from going through delegates on things that matter.
The law applies to your flesh; grace covers your eternal nature. You may well be received into God’s embrace even as your flesh suffers discipline. God works in both realms simultaneously. To reduce your exposure to law, you must nail the flesh to the Cross. You must also keep the hammer and nails handy. And like any other parable, you can’t make that one walk on all-fours.
When your flesh has become disciplined, you are in a position to walk by your heart of faith. You can operate in the fleshly realm as a solid representative of Christ. Discipline leads to mission. You never proclaim or seize eldership; others must recognize it. When you carry divine authority, others will naturally follow your lead. Thus, if you find yourself in situations where people keep deferring to you, then you are an elder. Sheep follow the shepherd who takes care of them; it’s their instinct.
More complicated is discerning in which domains you are able to care for those sheep. Take on the wrong tasks and you’ll harm the sheep. Ask God to show you the limits He has set for you.
I have warned that my prophetic gifts are limited. At least once I failed to grasp the nature of what was revealed to me and fired off half-cocked. It was embarrassing, to say the least. Fortunately, I managed to avoid saying, “Thus saith the Lord…” Rather, I cast it as simply my convictions. Still, I gained a fresh lesson in humility from it.
As an elder headed into tribulation, it is critical that I be more careful, lest I step off into law territory where Satan is just waiting to spring his traps. I’m not the only one who will get bitten. The following prophetic convictions remain as part of our time of tribulation:
1. God will not allow the US to defeat Iran.
2. Whoever is the guiding force behind Zionists will eventually throw them under the bus. Jews won’t cease to exist, but the modern State of Israel will suffer severe losses. More to the point, the Dispensational fervor behind protecting Israel will be shown as a lie. A Zionist state has nothing to do with Christ’s return.
3. The failure of Israel to become what Dispensationalists dream will provoke an exodus from Dispie churches. This will affect a lot of Big Eva churches, including some that aren’t Dispie.
4. The US will be broken up; the Union of States will dissolve. The timing is uncertain, but I tend to believe Trump will be the last POTUS.
5. The Internet will become very frustrating for people who lack the technical savvy to keep working through the sudden increase in digital noise. For example, your average Windows user will suffer immensely from an endless series of bugs and security holes that MS will not be able to keep up. The rapid pace of fixing will overwhelm the coders; we already have fixes that require more fixing.
Side note: A software architecture that is designed to capture users and expose them for exploitation cannot keep third parties out. You can either snoop and force through advertising, of you can secure the OS. You cannot do both.
On top of all this, everyone can see that oppression is rising quickly. There are so few good guys in US government that we have no hope for relief from within the system.
There is more…
