What warning is there sounding from those who are coming to faith in Jesus and who immediately recognise – and express – a disconnect between the Bible they’re reading in private and the church they’ve tried to connect with in public?
Are we listening?
“As I look back upon my course, I seem to myself as one who, ascending the dark staircase of a church tower and trying to steady himself, reached for the banister, but got hold of the bell rope instead. To his horror he had then to listen to what the great bell had soundedover him and not over him alone.” –Karl Barth.
Continue reading “Church Alarmed ≠ Church Terrified”
Inspired by the highest peaks of the Karakorum, this is our new devotion to the public reading of Scripture.
Acknowledging that this first attempt is something like an ice-breaker and very humble beginning, the idea is that we create a new culture for Friday evenings whereby a group of prayerful intercessors are devoted to the public reading of Scripture.
Restricted in this first reading by tech and space issues, the plan is to develop a group of regular readers and variety of commentators so that we can go LIVE for hours – through the night if needs be – with kingdom rhythms of Bible reading, intercessory prayer and petitioning, worship and adoration.
The next reading will be of the book of Revelation: date TBC.
We are burdened particularly by the state-sponsored abuse of our children in the education systems, apostasy in the Church and neglect of the Bible.
If you would care to support our work like this, please see here. If you are excited about the prospect of what these sessions could become with a small, developing group and use of quality technology (that we’re learning!) please contact us here.
Greetings All!
We’re glad to be back after a month of extended reading, praying and discussing and hope that you’re doing well!
Mairi and Nick together will be having the first convo of season 5 a week tomorrow (Friday, February 11th, 6am GMT) and will be featuring our plans for the extensive public reading of Scripture.
“Blessed are those whose strength is in you, in whose heart are the highways to Zion.” (Psalm 84:5)
This initial episode of season 5 includes an update regarding some changes to the weekly scheduling of the podcast as well as an introductory word of warning to the often squeamish Church.
If you would like to help us we are still looking for support here and you can contact us about anything here.
Our full reading of the book of Jeremiah is happening LIVE on YouTube tomorrow night (Friday, February 4th) from 7:30pm. Preview here; subscribe here.
Our flagship content: 🚢 🔥
2021: Calling YESHUA
2020: The Draft – A Conscription of Conscience
2019: Body Zero – Radical Preparation for the Return of Christ
2018: The Bothy Sessions – Mental Health & the Church
2016: Jesus Come
Come, Lord Jesus!
Love,
Nick & Mairi xx
Do you understand that the urgent warning of the Holy Spirit to the Church today, (via His trumpeting call to prioritise knee-worn, gut-wrenched, tear-soaked, repentance), pre-dates the COVID-19 pandemic and was sounding long before vaccines and face-masks were part of our national landscape?
U.K. Church leaders today who bleat to applause about a “call to repent”, who pivot from the complicity of many churches with corrupt governments, all the while failing to adequately repent themselves regarding the chaos of the Church irrespective of these recent realities, are prophesying falsely and distracting the preparation of the Bride for His return.
U.K. Church leaders today who call governments to account before the Church, whose Twitter feeds are filled more with ‘anti-vax’ chat than their grief regarding the very idolatry in the Church that has paved the way for such abhorrences, are grievously missing the mark.
These church leaders are in fact perpetuating our corporate idolatry by displaying the bluntness of their profound prophetic impotence.
Iron sharpens iron,
Proverbs 27:17 (ESV)
and one man sharpens another.
And he said to them, “You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition!
Mark 7:9 (ESV)
Rather, the genuinely Spirit-wrought call to repentance of this hour must integrally feature the call to repentance from an arrogant attitude of superiority regarding what truly constitutes the ekklesia.
Here is one symptomatic (but critical) example of the false, half-baked call to “repentance”, currently gathering steam in the UK:
What is it that biblically constitutes ‘godly character’?
Not for one second withstanding the safeguard of Proverbs 11:14 etc., does it necessarily stand to reason that one’s character is godly because one is “submitted to another man” or because they attend a local congregation?
Conversely, does it necessarily stand to reason that one’s character is not godly because they do not submit to another man or because they do not attend a local congregation…indeed because, under God, they can not?
Commonplace thinking like this (reasoning to the affirmative) while still calling the Church to ‘repent’ (the Bride to prepare) reveals a profound prophetic ignorance regarding the Holy Spirit and the kingdom of heaven (let alone biblical illiteracy).
Brothers, forget losing sleep over mandatory vaccinations and deliberately skewed health statistics, this absurd form of christian spirituality (that divides and rejects over the presupposition that one brother is false because he is regarded as unconventional) is what the LORD first calls us to repent about!
Why? because it is precisely indicators like this that have prepared the way for these other pictures of the LORD’s judgment (muzzled, socially-distanced worship) to emerge and take root.
“Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and not do what I tell you?
But the one who hears and does not do them is like a man who built a house on the ground without a foundation. When the stream broke against it, immediately it fell, and the ruin of that house was great.”
Luke 6: 46,49 (ESV)
The kingdom of God is not coming in ways that can be observed, nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There!’ for behold, the kingdom of God is in the midst of you.”
Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it.”
Why do you not understand what I say? It is because you can not bear to hear my word.
Luke 17:20-21; 18:17; John 8:43 (ESV)
In the first place, (for both Christian and non-christian), it is the intimate proximity of this kingdom to us that explains the urgency of His command for us to repent.
Are our repentance-calling church leaders today understanding the kingdom of heaven even slightly?
If you are calling the Church to repent from your lofty pulpit without truly seeing or discerning the kingdom of heaven, while not eagerly desiring the gifts of the Spirit, (especially prophecy), you are prophesying from your carnal mind. If you are calling the Church to repent while refusing to live peaceably with brothers who do not conform to your rigid understanding of godly character, you are a pharisaical hypocrite.
Forget the masks and the vaccines, chaps! Focus on your unwillingness to be honest and truthful in emails, your reticence to be humble so as to listen or, indeed, rejoicing in the presence of olive branches when it is gently acknowledged that, sometimes, we all get some things wrong.
And the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, “Why do your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?” And he said to them, “Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written,
“‘This people honours me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.’
You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men.”
Mark 7:5-8 ESV
It is right to pray that the Spirit of God would stem the rising tide of pastoral brothers inside the denominations (and para-church organisations) who are unwilling to truly listen to (nor thoroughly read) their prophetic brothers outside of them.
It is a cosmic joke that pastoral brothers inside the denominations are calling for repentance in the Church while balking from the sincerity of prophetic brothers outside of them, who have paid (and are paying) a cost that they know not of.
It is a kingdom disgrace that pastoral brothers inside the denominations ostracise prophetic brothers outside of them for their conscience-conscription and, if needs be, for their willingness to stand utterly alone.
Dear pastoral brothers serving inside the denominations, please would you stop and listen? You may feel that you are ‘on fire’, lauded and received, but if you do not listen you will surely calcify.
It is the abandonment of the five-fold ministry in the local church that explains this death and dearth of spiritual authority in our land.
Tradition trumps kingdom; denomination trumps Spirit.
The Church will only come to truly repent regarding infinitely lesser issues (such as heinous face-masks and sinister vaccines) when we first come to repent about the chronic, long-term sullying of His glorious Name in our midst.
Our repentance is not initially to busy itself by recognising our obedience to the anti-Christ, our silent complicity regarding abortion, our ensnared fear of evangelism and lethal lethargy concerning prayer.
Our repentance is first and foremost to be fully absorbed by the dire reality that He has long since withdrawn His glory from us (ICHABOD) and that we have not even noticed so as to enquire as to why.
Before preaching repentance, first we must thaw from the ice, cover our mouths and practice repentance.
“Behold, I am of small account; what shall I answer you? I lay my hand on my mouth
Job 40:4 ESV
All denomination (and it’s hydra-headed species of pride) must bow to the coming King Jesus and not shoehorn their preaching about repentance into their systems that have required it.
In the words of J C Ryle who, (particularly in his later life, distressed as he was from the threat of both evangelical liberalism, legalism and counterfeit Catholicism) was a man who truly understood what it meant to personally repent for himself (and his broken family), to authentically call for national repentance in the comatose Church, to genuinely fear God and not man and, if needs be, to stand utterly alone.
“We want more boldness among the friends of truth. There is far too much tendency to sit still and wait for committees…We want more men who are not afraid to stand alone. It is truth, not numbers, which shall always in the end prevail. We have the truth, and we need not be ashamed to say so. The judgment day will prove who is right, and to that day we boldly appeal.”
J C Ryle
All is night that is here, in respect of ignorance and daily ensuing troubles, one always making way to another, as the ninth wave of the sea to the tenth; therefore sigh and long for the dawning of that morning, and the breaking of that day of the Coming of the Son of Man, when the shadows shall flee away. Persuade yourself the King is coming; read His letter sent before Him, “Behold, I come quickly…” (Revelation 3:11). Wait with the wearied night-watch, for the breaking of the eastern sky, and think that you have not a morrow.
Samuel Rutherford
But my words and my statutes, which I commanded my servants the prophets, did they not overtake your fathers? So they repented and said, ‘As the LORD of hosts purposed to deal with us for our ways and deeds, so has he dealt with us.’”
Zechariah 1:6
There is an infinite world of difference between a ‘reactionary narrative’, conceived by the carnal mind, and the painful and expensive process of surrendering oneself to the revelatory work of the Holy Spirit.
The former is merely an echo of human/cultural ideology, the regurgitation of others and a projection of self; the latter is the Holy Spirit’s gift of prophecy, the very witness of Christ Jesus Himself. (See 1 Corinthians 14:1; Revelation 19:10). The former is like an increasing quagmire of overdraft; the latter more like the instantaneous peace of settled accounts.
In Jeremiah chapter 28, we witness the convergence of two prophets of Israel meeting not only each other but also encountering the wider community of God’s people. It’s this ‘three-fold witness’ (Prophet-Israel-Prophet) that is important to examine as we study what this chapter of the Bible is saying to us today on the eve of 2022.
In short: Hananiah was mercifully given the opportunity to repent; Jeremiah himself was also mercifully given the opportunity to repent.
However, sandwiched precariously between these two prophets, was God’s chosen Israel: the covenantal, betrothed, hesed people of God over whom a colossal struggle in prophetic legitimacy and faithfulness was unfolding.
I’ll come back to this three-fold witness of Prophet-Israel-Prophet in a few short paragraphs.
In a similar way that I read the book of Jeremiah as a whole, as I listen to what is being said within the multifaceted British Church today, I hear the witness of three primary narratives:
1) The comatose blethering of lukewarm religious people, spiritually dead, that has resulted in the current chaos of the Church;
2) The fibrillating, fumbling attempts of the rousing people of God towards a faithful narrative and faithful call to action, that have also resulted in the current chaos of the Church;
3) The gentle whisper of God riding on the Wind.
You and I are in either the first or second camp.
I needn’t say anything about the first category; their sins go before them and should be obvious to all people who have been graced with the indwelling Holy Spirit of God. (1 Timothy 5:24).
The second, ‘fibrillating’ group of believers are the most difficult to address but perhaps also, as the seedbed of the radicalised church of tomorrow, the most exciting: ‘difficult’ because of the torrid curse of denominational brain-washing; ‘exciting’ because they are believers who are currently half-correct, disciples whose barking is toward, if not yet directly up, the right tree.
The difference between a ‘hit’ and a ‘miss’ when it comes to prophecy, (essentially, the difference between corporate discernment and corporate confusion), is where the aforementioned contrast between spiritual revelation and carnal regurgitation comes into play. Whereas the wilfully unfaithful church repeatedly returns to eat its vomit, and all the while the well-meaning ignorant church can’t yet see the wood for the trees, The Holy Spirit is like the rotating tumbleweed belonging to wild, desert places, like bizarre displays of nature that only the obscure hiddenness of creation is graced to see.
As the Church, we know tales of His mysterious wonder but will we ever see it? (Psalm 27:13).
Don’t you see? Calling the Church in Great Britain to repentance is the only sensible thing to prioritise even if one has not personally heard the voice of God; one would only need half an unregenerate heart to recognise the appropriateness of emphasising this specific call to action at this point in history.
Indeed, many Christians are quite convivially talking about repentance today who do not even believe the call to be true. (Those, for instance, who think and preach a pipe-dream about the Church —that somehow national repentance will supposedly just happen automatically when “persecution hits the Church”).
But the only way in which the call to national repentance will become anything other than the fibrillating and fumbling attempts of man to speak life into an army of dry bones, as for Ezekiel, will be when we obey God’s command, (however shocking and even seemingly inappropriate to our flesh), to prophesy to the Breath of God. (See Ezekiel 37:9). In other words, repentance will only prove legitimate when we are truly desperate and truly humble before Him, when, in faith, we are truly willing to ‘do whatever it takes.’
Then, and only then, will we think and preach and repent and pray as we are required to.
Why is the concept of turning away from man, to wholeheartedly seek God in desperation, so foreign to us?
And if you say in your heart, ‘How may we know the word that the Lord has not spoken?’—when a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, if the word does not come to pass or come true, that is a word that the Lord has not spoken; the prophet has spoken it presumptuously. You need not be afraid of him.
Deuteronomy 18:21-22
First, please read Deuteronomy 13:1-5.
In response to those today who are calling for repentance from carnality, (those who cry “repent!” while grieving the Holy Spirit by neglecting and mocking prophecy, idolising denomination, compartmentalising reformation and trivialising the return of Jesus), the most important scriptural observation from Jeremiah chapter 28 is this:
1. The false prophet Hananiah was prophesying against the oppressive powers (governments) of the day and for the prosperity of Israel (Jeremiah 28:2-4; 11);
2. God’s true Prophet, Jeremiah, was prophesying against the adulterous people of God who were graciously being sanctified through the oppressive powers (governments) of the day.
Hananiah’s indignation was with Babylon; Jeremiah’s indignation was with Israel.
Hannaiah would have vociferously argued for the unlocking of churches today; Jeremiah would have argued urgently for their immediate closure.
Therefore, a simple, child-like reading and application of this passage of Scripture is this:
Calling the oppressive government of Great Britain to account today, ahead of the adulterous Church of Great Britain today, is tantamount to prophesying falsely, misrepresenting God and misleading the Church to believe in a lie. The widespread unwillingness of the Body of Christ in Great Britain to adequately stop the unfaithfulness of our corporate proceedings, our refusal to genuinely fall on our knees regarding our idolatry, our failure to cry out to God for personal and corporate mercy, our refusal to submit to His radically disruptive ways, is the grossest showcasing of sin that, in the short months and years ahead, will be judged accordingly.
The kind of call to repentance today that is genuinely of God, just as Jeremiah was genuinely the weeping prophet of God, will be one that is authenticated by a record of tears.
Are you calling the Church to repent without a public record of your repentance? Are you glossing over your own blindness and fallenness while majoring on the unfaithfulness of the collective whole? Don’t you feel floored in your bedroom before commanding corporate flooring in the pulpit? Are you commanding the rebuke of the LORD while not fully heeding the command to thoroughly fall down yourself? Are you commanding the people of God, the Church, the Body and Bride of Christ, to a reality that you are yourself unwilling to discover?
I defy any Christian leader in the world today who accepts applause for stating the obviousness of our unfaithfulness; I am wary of those who do not publish and broadcast their congregational repentance with candour. I rebuke the Church who wax lyrical about the rarity of a leader’s backbone and vim, who applaud his volume and the most elementary of passions that every Christian should possess, and who bleat like wayward sheep while the Good Shepherd of their redeemed lives stands knocking again on the doors of their heart.
The bar is so very, very low.
Finally, to conclude, returning to the “threefold witness” of Prophet-Israel-Prophet:
The significance for me of Jeremiah 28 at this juncture of 2021-2022 is that this prophetic altercation took place in an intensely public way. The deliberation of false vs true prophecy is not to be for the privacy of email flows.
The ultimate gauntlet was laid down publicly by Yahweh’s Prophet, Jeremiah:
As for the prophet who prophesies peace, when the word of that prophet comes to pass, then it will be known that the LORD has truly sent the prophet.
Jeremiah 28:9 (ESV)
If you are truly calling the Church to repentance by the Spirit of God today, what you are doing/calling for will happen, just like Israel was carted-off to Babylon despite what the doomed Hananiah had said. Just like the imminent removal of the lamp-stands in Revelation 1-3, if you are falsely prophesying, knowingly or not, (unwittingly or not), the sobering reality is that you will be silenced.
Dear Body of Christ, (dear church leaders especially), once again hear the command, beyond all of our current cliches, in words found in Cantique De Noël:
“Fall on your knees, O hear the angel voices…”
O Holy Night
Fake prophet? True prophet? False prophetic unction? Legitimate prophetic unction?
As we haunch down to our knees within the impossibility of the situation, we must remember that it is the the Jewish people of Israel, the city of Jerusalem, the very Bride of Jesus Christ, who resides in the midst.
What else can the genuine and preparing Bride of Jesus Christ cry while we wait?
Maranatha! Come, Lord Jesus!
*Free to those in need
I’m refreshed to a point by Health & Truth’s recent videos including this 6 minute video yesterday here.
But I’m also concerned that this isn’t good enough to steer us out of our corporate chaos as the filthy Bride of Christ and, more than likely therefore, will be unhelpful for many people who are sincere in faith.
Why?
Greetings all,
Please sit back with a comforting hot beverage and listen to this rare (and unscripted) conversation between myself and compadre, Steve Buckley.
Video premiers via YouTube at 10am GMT on Boxing Day.
KEY SUBJECTS: the Church, the government, adultery in the Church, leadership, COVID, the disruption of the Church and the preparation of His people for His return.
If you would like to help us develop this and other work, please see here.
More info about us here.
Please also consider sharing this podcast to your networks for us.
Our flagship content: 🚢 🔥
2021: Calling YESHUA.
2020: The Draft – A Conscription of Conscience.
2019: Body Zero – Radical Preparation for the Return of Christ.
2018: The Bothy Sessions – Mental Health & the Church.
2016: Jesus Come
Come, Lord Jesus!
Love,
Nick & Mairi xx
Should the Church be calling the government to account for closing the churches? Should UK church leaders be revelling in this?
Via a brief examination of CC’s new magazine released this week, I can only conclude not.
This video is a heartfelt expression of standing with the leadership of Christian Concern (and other fine para-church organisations ) but also, in so doing, an honest expression of what I believe to be true – and not true – pertaining to the voice of the coming Lord Jesus to our sleepy, arrogant, calloused, unfaithful church and nation.
With the aggressive and ramping evil that we will all be aware of to some degree, this is my best effort to explain what I believe to be the major disconnect that currently renders the Church both sitting duck and laughing stock.
If you would like to help us develop this and other work, please see here.
More info about us here.
Please also consider sharing this podcast to your networks for us.
Our flagship content: 🚢 🔥
2021: Calling YESHUA:
2020: The Draft – A Conscription of Conscience.
2019: Body Zero – Radical Preparation for the Return of Christ.
2018: The Bothy Sessions – Mental Health & the Church.
2016: Jesus Come
Come, Lord Jesus!
Love,
Nick & Mairi xx
firebrandnotes.com