There’s one thing that keeps me going: I have a dream that I will one day lead in a covenant fellowship somewhere on this earth, that I will be a part of a church that takes at least some of my message seriously.
Right away, I should warn you that it is no bright image of earthly paradise. I know for certain that any human congregation of folks will always include at least a portion who just have not embraced the fullness of faith. It means dealing with folks who suffer varying degrees of deception about what’s really real according to how God’s revelation. It’s no different from what Moses faced leading Israel in the Sinai. From this great distance in time and space, I look back upon the experience of Moses and try to learn the lesson of how to put up with people who just do not get it. It includes a very human distrust of whether I really get it, but nonetheless the worldly necessity of exercising leadership.
That’s the mission I see before me, an adventure that ends for me only with my expiration. This is the one last mission adventure I pray for. By seeing the experience of Moses, and having lived with my own wandering in the wilderness with a lot of church folks, I have been warned what to expect from them and from God. I must be ready to lead sheep that at times pay no attention to their own moral welfare. Having seen my life in the mirror of my own redeemed heart, little surprises me any more. But the mission still stands as a grant from the hand of God.
The single biggest problem Moses had, and that I still have today, is the seemingly incurable expectations of folks regarding how this world works. The Exodus nation suffered the same pagan influence that we have today — at least it’s the same in underlying principle. They don’t fully embrace the image of a God who made all things, is truly Lord of all, and wants to be our Father. They don’t really trust His revelation, and frequently misunderstand it. Instead, the sheep of His pasture always seem deeply lost in a false image of the world as quite random and capricious, a god who must compete against other powers, in a life that requires we figure out for ourselves what we can and cannot do about anything.
As you might expect, the single biggest problem is that people find themselves thrust into a reality that seems hostile, because they bear a range of expectations and dreams quite different from what God says. So it’s not a mission of simply telling them what God says. It’s a battle within each soul to leave behind the lies of Satan and replace them with divine revelation. It is not a civilized and fair battle by any means.
As we know, the primary victory is learning to walk by the heart, not by the fleshly mind. Most human minds will not roll over and play dead. We have a human history of several thousand years struggling to make the most of the human mind and flesh and what it can know and do. There’s too much of a Sunk Cost Fallacy there to easily turn and surrender that to the Spirit leadership in our hearts.
By no means can we dream of persuading the world at large to embrace this. Only a precious few souls ever seem to be touched and persuaded to seek it. And those souls typically bring with them a raft of human relationships, some of which inevitably come into the church fellowship with them. We are all saddled with commitments to outsiders. It ranges from kinfolks to governments. The flesh will always be under pressure to compromise. That’s the whole point. We aren’t expecting to create some kind of Nirvana in the fleshly realm, but only in our souls.
And I still dream of doing the work of shepherding such sheep. Pray with me.
