"We are sleeping through life in a dream which we can not escape. God wants to wake us up" (inspired by N.F. song "Wake Up")
"When the Lord brought back the captivity of Zion, we were like those in a dream" (Psalm 126:1)
"What will it profit you to know all the Scriptures if you do not know yourself?" - Anthony De Mello
"The World is sleeping in the dark that the church just can't fight because it's asleep in the light"
- lyrics written by Keith Green
The alarm bells are going off every where for the American Church. "Stuffy, irrelevant, hypocritical, judgmental and dying." What is worse than the younger generation does not want anything to do with the church is that many members of churches across America want to participate as little as possible. The American church is taking a beating from the outside as well as from those on the inside. Many Christians who love the church know and feel in their gut that something is terribly wrong.
I remember a Christian article I read in the early eighties when Evangelical churches were growing where someone questioned what kind of Christianity were we bringing people into? This writer prophetically said if we bring them into a water-down version of the gospel where churches are more concerned about fitting into society than being a counter-cultural church, it may be the church's undoing in the end. Thirty years later, it looks like this concerned Christian's prediction is actually coming true.
What is a Christian to do? What is a church to do? Many churches continue to go on like business as usual either ignoring all the warning signs or simply throwing up their hands and thinking that there is nothing anybody can do about it so let's keep bailing water as long as the boat is still afloat. I remember several years ago I heard the Lord speak these words in the core of my being "Emergency! Emergency!" If the church does not wake up to the new world we all live in and take a hard deep look at itself, the church may miss it's greatest moment.
God is going to raise up a new generation of leaders that is quite different than the way we have always done it before. Crazy Christians with crazy ideas from God. The older generation will critically ask, "Who told you that you could do that" and they will respond and answer, "God told me!" In the last days God will pour out visions and dreams on young and old alike and the days may seem terrible but to those without spiritual eyes will have a peace and strength that only comes from above. Our worldly attachments, prejudices, inner divided hearts, and tendency to take control of our own lives will all have to die!
Here is one of things God wants us to know to prepare us for what is coming next if we are going to be battle ready for the Lord.
Understand the Spiritual Discipline of Awareness. We think we know God but we have so much baggage we are carrying that we are like drug addicts who really love God but don't know how to kick the habit of all the weight of the world and the inner struggles that consciously and unconsciously drive us. We can't see God clearly because we can not see ourselves clearly. We need a deeper revelation of our self if we are going to have a deeper revelation of God. God is going to have to strip us totally and we may think this process is going to kill us but we will actually be stronger in the end for it after going through the fire of God's purging love.
We think we are strong and confident but we are weak and wounded and many of us don't see it much less acknowledge it. Like the Laodicean Church that thought is was rich and did not need anything, only to find themselves wretched, poor, blind and naked (Revelation 3:17). We need God's disciplining fire to renew and restore us. We need God's righteousness to walk in the Spirit every day. We need God's eyes to see ourselves, the world, and God from a view from above and not a view from below.
So where does it begin? We must acknowledge our pride, our false humility, and become aware of our false self and the many ways it deceives us. We are all highly skilled in self-deception without knowing it and we are not very skilled in the art of spiritual awareness. We have to stop the many ways of avoiding, managing, and hiding our sin problems. For anything done without faith is sin (Romans 14:23). Why do we let things bother us? Because our concerns are on other things beside God. Why do we let other people bother us? Because we see clearly their problems but we can not see our own problems which is usually a mirror of ourselves.
The false self is a creation of our own making and God simply wants us to rediscover our own true self which we have lost since we have been children. The journey back is to become like a child again in the gracious loving arms of Daddy God. Our identity and mission comes from our identity as a Beloved Child of God. Our desires are not bad but they are often focused on the wrong thing or object. Christ must become our everything so that nothing gets in the way of God in our lives. Self must die every day so that self can become born anew every day. You already your true self but do you see it? You are already in the presence of God but are you aware of it?
Why are we amusing and doing ourselves to death? We isolate and grab every form of pleasure and entertainment we can get our hands onto to fill the gapping holes in our lives. But all this does is lead to more unhappiness, guilt, shame and confusion. God is primarily concerned with who you are and not with what you do. We think doing leads to being but we have it backwards. Being leads to doing. Doing simply leads to exhaustion, burnout, discouragement and despair. God wants to transform our hearts which will change our perspective on everything. God wants us to change our pace of life and so that we may enter into the rhythms of the Holy Spirit. God wants to change the place we are in and this has more to do with our inner being than outward location.
We are entering a new season where we just want to praise the Lord for so much and thank the Lord for so much but God is going to be having us sow much into our own lives and the lives of those around us that everything around us will seem like its ablaze by the fire of the Living God. Are you awake?
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