Dulled by Diversion
“If running with the footmen tires you, what would you do running with the horses, Jeremiah?” God asks. He replies to the prophet’s anticipations of staggering change, turmoil, death, horror, and international adjustment. As if to say, “I didn’t show you all this revelation so you would give up, son. I showed it to you so you would be ready for ‘what’s coming next.’ You should be ready for the reality because I showed you the revelation.”
A new apostolic and prophetic foundation kingdom foundation for the Ecclesia should not push believers closer to the caves and tunnels but rushing headlong with abandoned fervor into the streets! Believers do not cry to the rocks to hide them; they cry in the streets that “Kingdom come” is Good News! When the weary world wastes away from its banality, we represent Heaven in earth, a towering edifice of hope set against a mountain range of crumbling peaks of modern culture.
I find myself more concerned with banality and boredom than blistered bewilderment.
“Decrepitude” might well characterize my deeper problem with modern church-anity. The spiritual mainspring runs loosely, rewound only by an amount needed to run another week; modern church-anity seldom operates at anything approaching capacity of spirit. While I applaud duty, duty is not the motivating factor behind modern christianism. Diversion replaced duty several spiritual generations ago.
Duty replaced by diversion dwindles into dullness too diminished for spiritual excellence.
Paul says, “I gave up all that inferior stuff so I could know Christ personally, experience his resurrection power, be a partner in his suffering, and go all the way with him to death itself. If there was any way to get in on the resurrection from the dead, I wanted to do it!”
Spiritual excellence produces excellence in all arenas of life. That is kingdom! “As it is in heaven” arrives through the Spirit enters into the spirit, expands the soul with heaven, and raptures the physical expressions of life with excellence. That’s kingdom.
Kingdom living ripples through Ecclesia, crests of spiritual life rising like tidal waves that wash upon familiar shores of marriage, family, work, play, and culture. Spiritual life – the life of God! – brandishes the expanded and exercised soul into the mundane world as two-edged swords of Truth, marking and measuring the goals of heaven in an otherwise trivialized world! All platitudes of human errors silently cower before spiritual excellence, for their ‘highest’ can never unravel the ‘lowest of ‘heavenly encounters.
Kingdom soars with towering swells, sound and light, joy and peace, burning passion and sweetly whispered wisdom. Kingdom hangs masterpieces of finished grace on its hallways, period pieces from several centuries of reformation and revival, landscapes and portraits that “let the Light in” so that a person might sit for hours gazing at sovereign genius. Kingdom has no museum of memories that do not challenge, confront, and captivate a spiritual man or woman with right now, here today, relevant and rapturous opportunity.
Kingdom challenges, provokes, engages, arouses, inspires, builds up. It runs with the footmen so that God has representatives available to run with the horses in the day of acceleration and actualization.
Our efforts to impress the world with natural excellence fail miserably to answer our calling to confront the world with spiritual excellence.
I guess the issue before my mind is not “how can people do such evil?” as much as “how can people live so poorly. Why aren’t they terribly embarrassed by their banality?” If I were to perform so poorly at anything I set my hand to do, I would seek continuous improvement as a matter of course. How can people strive to maintain low ebb of living with such hardened resolve?
Jesus cold or hot remains preferable to lukewarm. He was saying that He lacks tolerance for mediocrity. Jesus clarifies that the overcomers receive the promises that empower them to fulfill purpose.
