As I closed with last week’s post, the Church has quit fighting the spiritual battle on many fronts quite some time ago, and that is why we are so weak, so pathetic, and so easily manipulated. There is an arising, however, it is primarily confronting the politics and not actually addressing the real battles that we need to engage in. Like cleaning a house, you can do the ongoing repetitive light cleaning, or you can wait for it to build up, and then you have a heavier-duty cleaning job that is much harder to do than had you kept on top of it before.
There is a huge battle before us if we want the Church to be a force with power once again. And I am not talking about politics or to keep our rights and comforts. I am talking about having the Holy Spirit’s power to actually change lives and DO something for the Kingdom of God. The most sound preachers we have today are good, solid preachers who have the truth, but look around them. Is the government asking them what they are allowed to do or telling them what to do? Are schools asking the Church what they have going so they know what to schedule or plan? Do the wicked people plot and plan what they are doing based on what the Church will say about them? I think we all know the answer to that.
We have no power because we have all turned toward the flesh for our power. Even good churches do this. I am not talking about immorality here; I am talking about turning to man’s ideas, man’s methodologies, and especially, man’s intellect. I arrived at my current church about four years ago, in February or March 2021. At the time, we were about sound doctrine, and there is an absolute need for it. I felt there were people there who could actually challenge me and help make me stronger in my faith. And then we had a church split due to an Absalom spirit.
After we recovered, we have been seeking true power and for the Holy Spirit to truly come and let us experience proper evangelism and the seeking of souls once again. We just came back from our church retreat, and this was the second in four years in which the theme was spiritual warfare. The first time was right before that split happened. Two years ago, we spoke about Communion with God, last year was about Holiness, and this year was again about Spiritual Warfare. I summarized the previous three years as this: first year: going into battle, second year: recovering from battle, third year: recharging and building, and this year: a new approach to battle.
We need power. When my church’s teaching elder is on his rotation for preaching, he is going through the book of Acts. A recent sermon of his was on Pentecost. He made some extremely valuable points. First, we cannot explain Christianity in our naturalistic minds. The carnal mind cannot understand our message. Yet we have a wave of apologists who have created an industry of trying to explain Christianity in mundane language, logic, and reasoning. Now, God did not leave us without evidence. Not at all. However, Christianity is not a mere religion, a mere lifestyle, or even a mere relationship. It has the power to do the supernatural: to do things that normal humans cannot do.
While 1 Peter 3:15 is correctly cited to be ready to give an answer for what we believe, it is not correctly cited in that we give an eloquent speech that makes the carnal mind make sense of it. Instead, the actual context is about a suffering church, where people are getting killed for their faith, having joy and hope to the level where James’ executioner chose to be executed with him because he saw so much hope and joy in James that he did not want James to die alone. That’s 1 Peter 3:15. When Paul preached, he did not come with a grand speech that can wow an audience, but with a demonstration of the power of the Holy Spirit. Where is that today? I’m asking myself too.
We are unique in that in no other time of history has a nation actually been trained with Christian thinking as the foundation. However, if we want to see changes happen, it has got to start with us, and it’s not going to change with the White House or Congress. It will start with the Church. We have to get ready for battle, but our battle is not against the politicians but against the spiritual forces that puppeteer them. It’s against the false teachings that they follow. And it has to start in the Church – cleaning out the false teachings IN the Church, even while all the false teachings out there remain prominent.
Before we can fight the battle “out there,” we first have to clean up the battles we are fighting within the Church. Our walls are broken down, the enemy has easy access to us, and we have to fight the enemy WITHIN our walls before we can really start marching outward. That is what my church is seeking to do: continuing healing within, protecting our walls, and strengthening our core, all with the mindset of preparing to go out and do battle and win souls and remind our city and our nation that there still is a God here in El Paso and in the U.S. We may not get that power until persecution hits us full force, but we are tired of playing games. We are tired of playing church. We are tired of religion. We are tired of theory.
And let me tell you, we at Worldview Warriors are saying the same thing. In one of our recent meetings, our president, Jason DeZurik, was sharing his vision about this. It resonated so well with what my church is going after that words cannot describe. Are we going to save the U.S.? No. I don’t believe that even a nationwide genuine revival can do that anymore. The sins of this nation are too great for that, but one thing I can say: I want the Church cleansed and ready for action. I want to see the Church with power again, the power to be seen as a threat by this evil world system that they have to make active moves to try to stop us. I want the Church to be a spiritual force enough that society MUST recognize us once again and that they cannot go about and sin as they please.
The Church is weak and frail right now, but it’s not dead. Every time society thinks it finally put the Church down into the grave, as is being believed in the U.S. right now, we keep coming back. My local congregation is seeking that life and that power to evangelize and to start seeing souls set free once again. It is only with the power that is backed by prayer that this can happen, and when souls are set free, society begins to change because sinners will stop sinning and stop engaging with the businesses that make their money in sin. That’s what happened in Phillipi and Ephesus, and the cities were never the same again. May we unleash a spiritual bomb that so disrupts the status quo that the world will never be able to function the same again and instead be forced to function with a Church to reckon with. Let’s prepare for battle, let’s put on the armor of God, let’s train on how to use it, and let’s go to battle with the King of Kings, our true Commander-in-Chief at our head.
This forum is meant to foster discussion and allow for differing viewpoints to be explored with equal and respectful consideration. All comments are moderated and any foul language or threatening/abusive comments will not be approved. Users who engage in threatening or abusive comments which are physically harmful in nature will be reported to the authorities.
0 comments:
Post a Comment