The Prophet is in! :) Flagrant and Fragrant
Your words caught the eye of the prophet in me and the following spilled out. It is in solidarity and the urge to spread the Word, the Good Words, among the church. . . spread it! Speak it! Let the flame of the Holy Spirit consume all our pettiness, arrogance, complacency, smugness, fear, and self-absorption. And let what remains of our humbled, chastened, purified hearts be a glorious sacrifice devoted to the Lord by fire, filling the sky with a fragrant aroma, pleasing to our God. We must get rid of the stench of self-righteousness!! We must ardently purge the church of the stench and stains of self-righteousness, like filthy rags we could not stand to retain-we must expose and expunge! We must purge and purify-for self-righteousness, my friend, is the filthiest sin of all. It is essentially giving the finger to God and saying, Thanks, but I've got this under control.
You are a great writer. (: What are you going to do with that? It is so much needed in a world where kingdom people tend to cower in the shadows of public life and thought, hiding behind their favorite cliches, afraid of their own brains (and how much more so those of others!). There is a need for Spirit-filled Word-smiths to influence those people, but more importantly, there is the need for those Word smiths to go out and be salt and light, allowing themselves to get rubbed into the culture, rubbed into the fabric of the community like salt was rubbed into meat to preserve it in Jesus' day-- His image is not one of hiding away in sanctuaries that 'protect us' from the world, but one of running out into the river of life without fear, fueled by faith, knowing that we can do nothing in ourselves, but that through Him ALL THINGS ARE POSSIBLE, that Faith is the opposite of Fear, that where Fear waxes Faith wains and without Faith it is IMPOSSIBLE to please God.
And I'm afraid I see more fear than faith in most Evangelicals today--they are afraid that sin will get on them and will seep into their souls like cigarette smoke soaks into their clothes after an evening out at a restaurant among "the lost" (because, of course, anyone who smokes is going to hell in a hand basket And on a roller skate!) They forget the power they have not only over sin for themselves (through Christ), but to release others from their sin, to dispense Sanctification, as it were, to all who would have it.
They forget-- or did they ever get it? that the Good News is not, Hey, Guess what, you're a sinner and you're going to Hell. People get that. People know they're lost and sinking. . . what they don't know is that there is Grace that will carry them back into the light, that there is a way out of the quagmire they are in, that WE are willing to carry them on our backs to the Master, and that He will carry them the rest of the way. American Christians behave as if the Good News was this: Hey, guess what? If you climb this 2 mile high sheer cliff, when you get to the top, there is someone there who can help you to climb it. But until then, you're on your own.
Jesus never railed at the outcast sinner. He only railed at those who thought themselves holier than everyone else, those who issued unsolicited holiness grade cards to everyone else, those who were too busy being 'holy' to make anyone *whole*. Too obsessed with Justice to dispense any Mercy, too busy hating Sin to love Souls. In every case I've been able to recall, Jesus started by 'seeing' people and seeing what hurt in them. He then lovingly moved into that wounded place and administered a salve to the body, to the soul, to all that ailed them. . . and then that salvific salve that saves and sanctifies.
After He has touched our wounds and sanctified us, THEN and ONLY THEN, do we even have the power not to sin!
As I have said before, too many of us too often want the Old Testament for others and the New Testament for ourselves. 95% of the time the prophets in the Old Testament were preaching to God's people!!! They were not railing at the non-Jews! They were like, To you alone has God given this indescribable treasure of His friendship and love, and yet you have become morally bankrupt-- and you do not put out! You do not put out that love to the poor or the lost, and you do not put out to God, without Whom you would have Nothing.
Jesus turned everything on its head-- revealed to us that it is the poor who are His favorite, not the rich. Revealed to us that leaders must be servants, that those who want life must die, that to gain, you must give up. And after He turned the money tables over and drove the hard hearted, stiff-necked, money grubbing temple tyrants out of the temple, symbolic of what He was doing with His death and resurrection for the entire universe, and rent that incredible wall of a 'curtain' between the common man and the Holy of Holies, giving every little nobody access to God Himself, as He gave up all power to give us all power, dying to purchase our lives, after this great capsizing of the human slave ship that man and sin had made out of the earth, most of the church, those who Called themselves by His name, spent the next 2,000 years trying to put that slave ship back together again!
Many, many Christians over the centuries have staunchly prevented His Grace from ruling. . . We didn't put the Pharisees out of business, we BECAME the Pharisees! And so it has come to pass, in this the land of our fathers, that Christians have perverted the gospel of Christ and profaned His sacrifice by living as though His injunction had been and remains, They will know you are Christians by your laws. The church is bound to make itself a stench to the world either way it goes, with love or law as its signature feature. Unfortunately we have gone the wrong way, and have made ourselves not only a stench to mankind, but a stench to God!!
[14 But thanks be to God, Who always leads us in triumphal procession in Christ and through us spreads everywhere the fragrance of the knowledge of Him. 15 For we are to God the aroma of Christ among those who are being saved and those who are perishing. 16 To the one we are the smell of death; to the other, the fragrance of life. And who is equal to such a task? 2 Corinthians 2:14-16]
The time is short and the order tall. It is time to rise above our delusions of holiness (the ones that make us a bunch of silly little emperors running around naked in our 'new clothes' (the letter to the church at Laodicea in Revelation is quite clear about that)--we are partially naked and partially clad in the filthy rags of our own 'righteousness.' We have to give up the delusions of our own sufficiency and humbly put on the robes of righteousness we had no hand in purchasing, and THEN He will be glorified in His church and as we lift Him up from the earth, all men will be drawn unto Him. Then we will have become a sweet, sweet aroma to our God.
Keep running the good race! Keep spreading the fragrance of Christ!
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