THE DIVINE PARTNERSHIP

THE DIVINE PARTNERSHIP

                Well, guess what? Things are coming together here in Tennessee and the Lord is guiding us step by step into His harvest field. The connections that Bonnie has been looking for have finally come through. She is now connected with a ministry to Israel here in Tennessee, a church that sends a container of supplies every month to the poor that are flocking to Israel in fulfillment of prophecy. And now they will be shipping Bonnie’s dresses to Israel as well.

                She got her start at our Messianic congregation in Vancouver, where we joined a ministry called Tikvah Rabba. We made quilts for Holocaust survivors in Israel as well as making clothes for Ethiopian Jewish refugees fleeing persecution and returning to Israel as God said they would.

                As I have mentioned before, the Lord rather quickly put me on a worship team playing bass and singing and I am now lined up to teach a class on the Feast Days, the appointed times of the Lord in September. I would not even mention these things, since when it comes to giving to the Lord we should not let the left hand know what the right hand is doing. But the Lord has also commissioned me to be a watchman on Facebook and to share our journey with others as a matter of instruction and encouragement to fellow travelers.

                It is such a small thing to make dresses for little Ethiopian girls. It is such a small thing to play bass and sing with a worship team. It is such a small thing to teach a Wednesday night class on Jewish Feast Days. But if every member in the Body of Christ did the little thing that God put before them, all of those little things added together would indeed be a big thing. So if you want to do something big, then be faithful to do the little thing and in due time God will make it into a big thing.

                Jesus said to the people: “He who receives a prophet in the name of a prophet shall receive a prophet’s reward; and he who receives a righteous man in the name of a righteous man shall receive a righteous man’s reward. And whoever in the name of a disciple gives to one of these little ones even a cup of cold water to drink truly I say to you he shall not lose his reward.” Mt. 10:41-42

                “And he said to him, ’Well done, good and faithful servant, because you have been faithful in a very little thing, be in authority over ten cities.” Luke 19:17. Did you realize that these are promises of Jesus concerning His coming millennial reign? If we are faithful over the little things now, He will make us rulers over cities, in His coming kingdom.  In fact Revelation 5:10 says: “And Thou hast made them to be a kingdom and priests to our God; and they will reign upon the earth.” If we are faithful in eth little things, Jesus will yet put us in charge of bigger things, when we, in our glorified bodies, will reign with Christ on earth for 1000 years.

                The Christian life is not a sedentary life. We are not sitting and passively waiting for the Lord to come. We are called to engage in a divine partnership… not to earn salvation, but for the love of our Master and for love of the people He is calling into His kingdom.

                Do you want to fulfill the Law? Then love God with all of your heart and soul and might and love your neighbor as yourself. Such love will never allow you to sit around and wonder if you are being legalistic in your doing. You will, in fact, have a passion for what you are doing and when you have a passion for something it isn’t work at all.

                It is amazing that in any given congregation 10% of the people do 90% of the work and the rest remain inert spectators… ducking out whenever help is needed… giving nothing and thereby receiving nothing… complacent Christians with nothing better to do than to complain about the air conditioning, or the volume or the color of the carpet.

                I hear daily from people who have nothing and yet they are trying to feed a dozen starving orphans. They are so proud when God enables them to build a church, which in many cases consists of a few pieces of tin stretched out over 4 poles. They drink muddy water and scavenge around garbage dumps for scraps of food and yet their faces are beaming with the love of Christ.

                What drives these people to do the little thing? It is love pure and simple… love for God and love for their fellow man. And we in America sit in our air conditioned churches and argue fine points of doctrine, never entering into the work and the privilege of the Gospel of the Kingdom that Jesus taught and demonstrated. We have turned Christianity into a spectator religion and we guard oh so tenaciously against legalism, even as hundreds in our own cities go to sleep hungry every night. We are not doing the little thing that our hands could have found to do.

                Divine partnership is found in many areas. If, for instance, you want to be healthy, it isn’t enough to believe in divine healing. You must also follow God’s instructions for healthy living. If you want to be healthy you must eat, sleep, drink and exercise like a healthy person. God has given us a body and He has given us stewardship over that body and He has told us that whatever we eat or drink, do all to the glory of God. It is not legalism to take care of your body.

                Everyone understands divine partnerships when it comes to the farmer. He can have all the faith in the world, but he isn’t going to have a crop unless he plows, plants waters, fertilizes and weeds his fields. God taught Israel how to be industrious concerning their part of the partnership, while having faith in God’s part. We can plant and cultivate the soil, but only God can supply the soil, the sun, the rain and the life in the seed.

                We need to grow in our understanding of divine partnerships. There is a huge harvest to bring in and no one can come to the Lord unless the Holy Spirit invites them… and yet Jesus has commissioned us to go out into the world making disciples and doing the works that He did.

                Today the church at large is so complacent and the laborers so few that it seems to me, that we are going to have to endure some sort of a major wakeup call in order to wake the sleeping church. And don’t think for a minute that God won’t provide a wakeup call for us of biblical proportions. Have you read your bible lately? God gave us the children of Israel as a pattern… not only in feast days and prophecies and tabernacles, but in the way God dealt with Israel both in times of faithfulness and unfaithfulness.

                God’s judgments on Israel seem overly severe at times and yet they still fell back into idolatry over time. But what about America? Are we not following the same pathway? Are we not turning back to godlessness and idolatry and perversion? Are we not as Sodom? Are we not as it was in the days of Noah? Are we not offering our children to the flames of Moloch? Do we not call evil good and good evil?

                It is almost humorous in Exodus chapter 32. Over and over again throughout scripture, God said to Israel,” I am the one who brought you out of Egypt. I am the God of your fathers Abraham, Isaac and Jacob… I bore you out on eagle’s wings.” But here in Exodus 32 the people are found worshipping a golden calf and Aaron is telling them that these are the gods that brought them out of Egypt. What a slam in God’s face. There were many ways that God could have chosen to describe these sins. After all, they were dancing naked around the altar and engaging in orgies and all sorts of obscene stuff, but God describes it all in what sounds to us like the most mundane of terms. He said, “The people sat down to eat and to drink and rose up to play.” Ex. 32:6.

Now here is the sadly humorous part. God said to Moses: “Go down at once, for YOUR people, whom YOU brought up from the land of Egypt have corrupted themselves.”

                It reminds us of the proud father who says “Yep, that‘s my son”… that is until the son messes his diaper and then he says to his wife, “Honey, your son has made a mess.” And if he could somehow safely hold his son at arm’s length and still plug his nose he would do so. But as it is, he makes haste to carry his son to his wife.

                God, in fact, seems to have done just that at this time.  He called them Moses’ people whom Moses delivered out of Egypt. Moreover He told Moses to step aside and allow Him to destroy them, promising Moses that He would begin again with him in making a called out nation.

                Of course, we need to understand that God wasn’t out of control mad. He was setting patterns here of divine intercession  by One coming who would be a prophet like unto Moses who would plead Israel’s case and our case even when we didn’t deserve to be represented. God is not afraid to clean up our messes, but He does want us to cooperate with Him in divine/human partnership.

                We can’t earn our salvation by our works, but as James says: Faith without commensurate action is not faith at all. James 2:17. God is like the divine tight rope walker. We know He is able to keep us from falling, but when He invites us out to walk with Him we say “No way Lord. I believe in You, but there ain’t no way I’m going out there.”

                 But all of the blessings of God lie on the other side of our chasm of doubts and fears… and walking the tight rope with Him by faith is the only way to cross over. We have to step out! By faith we have to do the little thing… take the little step… move beyond the shell of self… act in love rather than in self-preservation… move into the sphere of others. This is the godly way.

                God so loved the world that He gave… God gives

                “Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility of mind let each of you regard one another as more important than himself; do not merely look out for your own personal interests, but also for the interests of others. Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bondservant and being made in the likeness of men. And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore also God highly exalted Him and bestowed on Him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow , of those who are in heaven and on earth and under the earth and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of the Father.” Phil. 2:3-11

                Is it too much to ask, for us to do the little thing that God sets before us? And should we not stop being offended or hurt because we don’t get recognized, or we get overused? Can we ever out -give the Lord? What is this little thing we do compared with being fed to lions in the circuses of Nero? We have not yet resisted to the point of shedding blood have we? Heb. 12:4-14

                 I fear that the church has become so adverse to legalism that they are no longer willing to obey God's instructions or to suffer for their faith, or submit to the refiner's fire. We have created a sort of Sesame Street Christianity that is not designed to endure hard times or persecution. But God has a remnant... a Philadelphia Church among churches... people being forged in the fires of adversity to serve the Lord at all costs. For these, grace is more than a happy platitude... it is the power of God to overcome and to finish the race strong.

                We are living in a divine partnership with God through His most holy covenant and we are learning to live each day by divine appointment….not as man pleasers, but as God pleasers, for we have become His bondservants.