and by saying so, i instantly had a strange combination of John Lennon's "Imagine" and MercyMe's "I Can Only Imagine" stuck in my head. sorry, Andrew.
I wonder what has happened to us. our God is the same, His power is the same, yet I can't see us as using it like we ought to be...and I suppose we never will, this side of heaven. But I think that we aren't even...attempting, I suppose, to use it as we ought. "Ye have not yet resisted unto blood, striving against sin." -Hebrews 12:4. Why aren't we doing that? I think we live with the comforting notion that we are too human to do any better than we are doing, that our spiritual highs and lows are caused by chance or that God sometimes lets us be great and sometimes holds back, but we are wrong, because He has promised that His grace IS sufficient, not that it will be when we are in a bad time, but that it IS. He has provided us everything we need, He is working in us, and we are called to work His work out, exercise and try our faith. We can do all things through Him, He strengthens us. Are we inferior to the apostles? They were just as human as us and yet they turned the world upside down. How did they do it? By living for Christ. Even the founding fathers of the United States stand as examples of what a revolution (literally) we can have when we are determined to do what God would have us to do- to worship in freedom, to not teach every man his neighbor and every man his brother saying "Know the Lord" (because all His children know Him already), but to edify our neighbors and brethren by our free open worship- these are the principles that started the immigration to the "New World" for many, and they are the principles are government stood for when the Declaration and the Constitution were written. Even the Israelites, for all their falling away and all their coming back and falling away again, had moments of unbelievable greatness as a nation, and now as the church, we are mediocre, when we should be having moments of unbelievable greatness. God has passed the torch, so to speak, from the nation of Israel to the church of the New Testament, and we are chasing our tails instead of running with it. If we would run, we could have moments like the one at mount Carmel, or the moment when God revealed His glory to Moses, or when they took Jericho, or Pentecost.
God has set every member in the body of Christ as it has pleased Him to do. Where are the members who are called to revolutionize our political system? To preach till we are thrown in jail and then preach to the jail? Is it you? Is it me? Why aren't we doing this? Why aren't we preaching with our vote? He set us with our gifts and our personalities and our interests where we belong, so why aren't we functioning as the members He called us to be?
From a practical standpoint, it seems simple yet difficult to me. How can we become the members He wants us to be? By fulfilling the two greatest commandments. Love the Lord with everything, love your neighbor the way you love yourself. Love the Lord with devoted time with Him, with continual prayer throughout the day and continual reading and meditation on the Word, with obedience to His commandments and His Spirit's guidance. Love your neighbor by having the right priorities- working out the righteousness God has given you through the sanctification of Christ's blood and the Spirit first, your spouse next if you have one, then your children or parents & siblings, dedicating your time and energy according to the opportunities God has given you, to love each person that you have an opportunity to by building them up in love and Christ and fellowship and obeying God's commandments regarding that person. God says through the apostle Paul "As we have therefore opportunity, let us do good unto all men" and He has created some set opportunities for us to focus our priorities on: spouse, household, church family, coworkers, strangers. Sometimes we get so overwhelmed, but we just have to look at it as a narrowing scope of opportunity: you have a continual opportunity to glorify the Lord in your own heart, a great opportunity to bless your spouse and glorify the Lord in your marriage, a nearly as great one with the family you live with, a very good one with your church family, about the same with your extended family, about the same with your friends, a good one with your coworkers, and the occasional one with strangers. And history reveals that with this simple format of obedience, God will do great things.
So let's imagine, let's dream a little. What if we make this a priority? What if we went back to meeting with our local church family every day, briefly enough to not interfere with our family devoted time or our private devoted time, but enough to know each other's sorrows and joys, enough to have a prayer ministry, enough to be like the church in the book of Acts, daily with one accord? What if we were immersed in the Word, filled with the Spirit, shaped by our Father? We can do this you know. What if we voted like Christians? What if we prayed for our leaders? What if we kept our leaders accountable? What if we didn't compromise the Scripture?
I have learned that one of my gifts is the ability to plan, to imagine (Romans 12:8, the gifts of exhortation and ruling with diligence, aka structuring things)- to exhort and encourage us in the gifts that we, to show others what they can be doing in their ministry and innovate ways to expand my own, while bringing those innovations to fruition in the time I have that isn't spent dreaming them up. I am so thankful that God brought me to an executive, my husband, whose gifts are practical ministry, or I would be a lot of empty ideas and not much execution! But just for a minute, humor me, and let's imagine how we could all be gifted, how our talents could serve the Lord.
Can you imagine what the world would do with a Christian celebrity? What if some one of you out there has an acting talent, and a desire to serve the Lord? It blows my mind to think about what it would be like to have an actor or actress who worked his or her way up on the stage and in the movies, only doing clean and meaningful work, coming perhaps to fame and fortune, and giving it all away. We aren't really supposed to have possessions. Christians are not supposed to accumulate stuff. We are supposed to have stuff that we use. I am trying to cleanse my life of possessions that are just that- possessions, not tools. If it's useful, even if it's entertainment that's useful, it can stay, but if not, why waste resources on it? Those resources could be used to feed the hungry, to glorify Christ. You will find I have a lot of books and instruments, and my husband has a lot of tools and gadgets, but those are things that further our own talents so that we can use them in our ministry. I want to write edifying books, my husband wants to make edifying things. We have some games, video and board, that we use to have good clean fellowship. But those are limited, because we don't need a wide variety to have good fellowship. I am trying to revolutionize. Do we need to waste money on cable TV? Do we need to waste space on games we don't often play, or movies that aren't edifying? Do we need to waste our time on those? We could use that time to serve Christ, or to watch a movie that IS edifying, or play a game that brings us fellowship. Do we need to have junk? But back to my imagined scenario, if I can try to not be wasteful, can you imagine what the world would do with a millionaire actress who lived with her parents and waited on the Lord to bring her a husband and spent ALL her profit (beyond paying her bills and the entertainment that hones her craft, not even moving out and spending more money in that way and exposing herself to the loss of accountability in her relationships) on charity? Living at home, you don't need to be making more than poverty level to keep from being a burden on your parents. Imagine if someone with millions of dollars per movie, say making a million to make a movie in one year, spent all but 20,000 of it on charity. (That's 980,000$ a year for those of you who can't fathom it.) This is the kind of miracle we could be if we would only use what God has given us to glorify Him. And then, suppose she got married and her husband provided for her, and she worked out her hours so that she could be home with him and still exercise her talents, and that whole $1,000,000 went to charity, every year that she made a movie. That's a lot of clean water in Africa, that's a lot of orphans taken in or homes built or food provided or education given or gospel preached.
What if there were figure skaters in modest clothing? Who moved modestly? Picture a girl in a beautiful outfit that covers her when she moves twirling around the ice, who in her interviews doesn't put down her competitors and talk about how great she is but thanks the Lord and makes edifying comments about other people. How about a fashion designer who makes modest clothes? Writers, musicians, officials, all those that the eyes of the world are on, living a revolutionarily, not just nominally, Christian life. What if our business owners were upfront and hardworking? What if you just knew if you worked with that Christian-owned company you would get a good deal because they are dedicated honest workers? How about godly teachers who treat children well, work hard, and esteem their students more highly than themselves? Farmers who were good stewards of God's creation and worked to raise profit crop to give away? Ex-cons who showed true repentance and gave to others, whatever the cost to prove their change? Chefs who made food to nourish rather than to maximize their wages, who fed the poor? What if?
Then the Lord would be glorified in us, and our lives and country and world would be beautified. Not perfect, not heaven, but we could be testimonies to the Lord working in incredible ways, just as the great cloud of witnesses we learn about in Hebrews 11 were.
As you're picturing this, do you feel like I do? I think it just might be worth striving unto blood, I think it just might be worth running until we are ready to faint and then looking to Jesus and being strengthened.
