I think T.A-Sparks often put his finger on the nub of it and the nub often flies directly in the face of, (for want of a better word), the “mainstream”.
At the risk of appearing judgmental, I think this mainstream landscape is enslaving to the vast majority of Christians in this land — even when we have perhaps chosen to question and even turn from it — an enslavement that will never be successfully breached while 99% of our time and energy is funnelled into “maintenance”. I hear this procrastination so often expressed in podcasts, emails and things claiming to be sermons.
I want to know, love and trust the Lord (and acknowledge how much I haven’t); I don’t want to constantly call an unrepentant Church to its knees.
In fact, I rebuke the unrepentant Church that adores its routines, rotas and precious, precious schedules…all the while neglecting the Lord Himself.
I have been praying this morning about my strong visceral reaction internally to this mainstream Christian/church world, to the compromise and lukewarmness, the sin and unrepentant sentimentality of our traditions, the ready willingness to accommodate doctrinal error and contradiction, our bending and “including” while we should be rigid and excluding. I pray about this passion from time to time because each of us are called to increasingly love the Body of Christ and I don’t want anything in my heart or mind or mouth to ever be a grievous/displeasing thing to the Lord. (Psalm 139:23-24).
We are all suffering from this fierce unwillingness to change and to adopt a posture of desperation, entrenched in the trappings of this world and, more importantly, the Lord is being dishonoured.
However, I am growing to realise that often the passionate responses to things that we ordinarily think couldn’t possibly be the Lord…often are. At the risk of cliche, what was happening in the heart of the Lord when he premeditatedly prepared a leather whip to clear out the idolatrous temple? What was the face of God like at that moment? What murmurings, what indignation…? What love for Adonai!
Thus, I am increasingly inclined to think that, as Sparks says above, the consequences of our “turning to human associations…” rather than the Living God Himself is impossible to overstate. A strong visceral response to the monotonous doldrums of the individual/collective activity of the Church is, I think, wholly appropriate (for us all) but my fear is that, even when the land of Israel itself implodes into unimaginable travail*, this maintenance of all we have ever known will endure for some time to come.
I, for one, want no part in it… I want the Lord Himself.
*Past/future travail as per the Day of the LORD: “The most tender and refined woman among you, who would not venture to set the sole of her foot on the ground because she is so delicate and tender, will begrudge to the husband she embraces, to her son and to her daughter, her afterbirth that comes out from between her feet and her children whom she bears, because lacking everything she will eat them secretly, in the siege and in the distress with which your enemy shall distress you in your towns.” (Deuteronomy 28:56-57).
“But if millions pour out their repentance, their confessions, their contrite sorrow — not all of them perhaps publicly, but among friends and people who know them — what could all this be called except “the repentance of the nation”?”
—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Maranatha?
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