AS THE WORLD SLEEPS

AS THE WORLD SLEEPS (The Harlot is gaining power even as the Bride is preparing to give birth)

                Even as most of us go about our daily routines and our concerns range from where we will go for lunch or what to wear for the party, this world is being ravaged by unprecedented weather events, earthquakes, volcanoes and the dying of our oceans. We are on a course toward extinction and we generally pay very little attention to it. If it happens somewhere else then it is none of our concern.

                Southeast Africa is reeling from Cyclone Adai which struck in March with a force never seen before. The dead are still being counted as they seek to dig people out from avalanches with pick and shovel. The death toll has now passed 1000 and they are still digging… but their problems are long term because the infrastructure has been destroyed and the farm land turned upside down and the devastation is very hard to reverse, especially in poor countries like these.

                Mozambique was the hardest hit with 602 dead and hundreds of thousands displaced, 239,682 houses destroyed or displaced and cholera cases stand at 4979 with 60 deaths,

                Zimbabwe had 344 deaths and 16000 households displaced, damaged or destroyed and Malawi had 60 deaths with 19,328 households displaced, damaged or destroyed.

                Even here in America, the Midwest is suffering from recent Cyclone bombs and other radical flooding and storms that have literally put thousands of farmers out of business and thousands or even millions of acres will not be planted this year because of flooding.

                Still the world stubbornly presses on towards its goal of a godless global system and people carelessly abandon the faith of our fathers to follow their own way. And generations are coming up that know nothing of the kind of faith and faithfulness to God and to His Word that was once the bread and butter of America. And people call themselves “Christians” today that never crack a Bible as they are drawn into Me-centered worship and promises of peace and prosperity.

                The way of the cross still leads home, but fewer and fewer people want to go that way.

                Jesus tells a story in Luke 14 of a certain man who held a banquet and invited guests, but they all began to make excuses for one reason or another and so the master told his servant to go out into the highways and the hedges and bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame and to compel them to come in so that His house might be full. Then speaking of those who had excuses, Jesus said:

                “For I tell you, none of those men who were invited shall taste of my dinner and then Jesus turned to the crowd that was following Him and said something very strange. He said:

                “If anyone comes to Me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, even his own life, he cannot be My disciple. Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after Me cannot be My disciple.” Then He goes on to talk about counting the cost. Before you build a tower or a house or whatever, you first determine what it will cost you to see if you have enough to finish the job.

                Such words as these are completely foreign to our religion of comfort and convenience today… and we have to know that when Jesus says that we must hate our loved ones, He means something different by it than we would think, otherwise He would be in conflict with His own teaching about loving our neighbor and one another.

                There is an attachment to Jesus Christ which is spirit to Spirit that cannot be occupied by anyone or anything else but Jesus and this attachment comes with a price tag, because in reality it requires the forsaking of everything including our own life. Even our very survival must be secondary to our relationship with Jesus.

                When trying to win converts to Christianity these days, we tend to paint a rosy picture of freedom and fellowship and relief from our burdens, but we don’t often say that this kind of freedom comes only from the full abandonment of the self. In fact our biggest burden and our biggest blockage to the Christ centered life is the self. We are our own worst enemy because we tend to cling to the very thing that keeps us from entering within the veil. No flesh can enter within the veil and so we must let go of it… but we don’t want to. It is not a natural thing, to abandon self-interest.

                Many people come to the altar today to make a deal with God. “God, please make my life better, please take away my sin and set me free, but don’t make me die. I have my own agenda. I have my own path to follow. I have plans of my own so that my relationship with You can only be part time… on weekends… for one hour… in a padded pew… with good entertainment… and nobody falling down on their faces before God. No messy stuff Lord, like demons being cast out… no crazy stuff like tongues being spoken. Lord I just want a neat little package of tradition in which nothing is expected of me other than to show up once a week and get my spiritual battery charged up. Better yet, Lord, let’s just make our relationship with you a philosophical one… getting our intellectual ducks in a row… lining up truth upon truth so that they sit neatly on the shelf like rows of ammunition against those who disagree.”

                “But please Lord, don’t make me die. I don’t really want to be a disciple anyway… just a member in good standing. I want to come and go as I please. I want to be able to live with the smug assurance that I have the truth, but I want to do so with my own self intact and in control. Just don’t make me die.”

                Do we really understand what it means to be the Bride of Christ? A Bride to be comes to the place where she has eyes for only One. She comes to the altar. She enters into a covenant. She loses her own name and takes His name. She then enters into the bed chamber with Him, to become naked before His eyes and then to offer her virgin body to Him… and she doesn’t do this just once on the wedding night, but it becomes a daily way of life to offer herself to Him as though her body is no longer her own. And she doesn’t enter into this exchange grudgingly, but she enters into the deep emotion and passion of it with Him until both are satisfied and exhausted upon the sheets and then they sleep in each other’s arms.

                We call ourselves the Bride of Christ and yet more often than not, we enter this relationship conditionally… with the idea that we will only take His name, but will not have to consummate the marriage. We want justification, but we don’t want sanctification, because sanctification requires a kind of devotion and messy love that we aren’t willing to be subjected to.  And pregnancy? Heaven forbid that we should carry the man child to full term, because then we would have to nurse it and care for it and change our schedule for it and give of ourselves for it… We may even lose our virgin figure… and then the Man Child will turn around and become our Lord and Master and well… having counted the cost we must certainly find a different brand of Christianity that doesn’t require all of that. So let’s just go down the block and party with the saints in that big church down there that doesn’t require so much self-destroying commitment.

                The problem with our bargaining is that Jesus truly wants to be married to us and He wants a marriage with full rights. IF we are to take His name, then we must also consummate the marriage or we are not really His bride. We will never bear the fruit of His seed, for His seed has never really entered our womb… but we have consorted with other lovers so that the child in us is not even His and yet we want to go on bargaining with Him even as we play the field.

                The false church of the last days is called a harlot and we like to point fingers for indeed the Papacy has become an open harlot to the point where even Catholics are becoming disgusted with what is happening and thinking of fleeing from it. But harlotry can be much closer to home than that. For as we look into our own lives and our own bargaining with God, we can begin to see how often we too have played the harlot and we are empty and miserable and poor and blind and naked, but our nakedness has often been for other suiters. And now we have a choice between quitting the marriage altogether or entering into the kind of intimacy with Jesus that He is looking for in a Bride.

                “Let us rejoice and be glad and give the glory to Him for the marriage of the lamb has come and His bride has made herself ready. And it was given to her to clothe herself in fine linen bright and clean; for the fine linen is the righteous acts of the saints. And he said to me, “Write, “Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb.” And he said to me, “These are true words of God.”

                “And the armies which are in heaven, clothed in fine linen, white and clean are following Him on white horses and from His mouth comes a sharp sword so that with it He may smite the nations; and He will rule them with a rod of iron; and He treads the wine press of the fierce wrath of God, the Almighty and on His robe and on His thigh He has a name written, “King of kings and Lord of Lords.” Rev. 19:7-9, 14-16.

                Somewhere inside of us is a deep hunger for intimacy…we long for a kind of relationship with Jesus Christ that goes beyond our bargaining. And Jesus says to us. “If any man is thirsty, let him come to Me and drink. He who believes in Me, as the scripture said, “From his innermost being shall flow rivers of living water.” But this He spoke of the Spirit, whom those who believed in Him were to receive; for the Spirit was not yet given, because Jesus was not yet glorified.” John 7:37, 38.

                When Jesus went back to heaven after He was raised from the dead, He was indeed glorified with the glory that he had ever had with the Father and then He sent that glory down to us in the form of His Holy Spirit. When we receive of that Holy Spirit, we receive the Seed that will grow within us… and anything less than a life in which we are filled with and empowered by and guided by that Holy Spirit is a marriage that has not yet been consummated. Spirit and Truth combine together to plant the Seed of promise in us and we are in the process of learning how to live by the Spirit and Truth as it is in Jesus.

                AS those then that desire to become the Bride of Christ, we must think on these things. Our bargaining is quickly coming to an end… only real marriage will do in the end.