A Failure to Imagine (Part 3)

See the series here

• Part 1 noted the church may be losing ground, spiritually, with substantial portions of The Lord’s 3rd age harvest already loss, and more may be at risk of loss.
• Part 2 noted that each age has stages and requires strategic adjustment.
• Therefore, the pertinent question is: how should believers think differently in the late-stage of this current age?

Imagine with me: 

 

You have just been given a remarkable, coveted reward for something extremely positive that you personally initiated, with great potential to expand beyond your and others’ wildest imaginations. But before hunkering down for the intense work and glory of the next stage, you decide to take a well-deserved, greatly extended VACATION! You selected a new destination, and have allowed yourself 6+ months to prepare. How would you prepare?

How much time, energy and other resources would you spend on:

 

•  Reviewing the nitty-gritty details of your accomplishment—the initial vision, strategic outline, team evolution, numerous failures and near successes, frustrations, and impulses to ‘throw in the towel’, etc.; versus

•  Planning every conceivable aspect of your well-deserved vacation?

 

In light of that, which of the following strategic approaches do you perceive the worldwide church might be emphasizing now, versus should be emphasizing as we believers, and the world, navigate the ‘late stage’ of this current, 3rd age?

 

A.  Continuing with the status quo:

1. Looking backwards to the cross, tomb and resurrection of Christ?

2. Studying the experiences and persecutions of the early church?

3. Promoting evolving Christian values in the face of their apparent powerlessness in this modern age?

4. Continuing to emphasize stale, unproductive, denominational doctrines learned in ‘ceminary-type’ institutions?

5. Policing a ‘do this, don’t do that, believe this, don’t believe that, vote like this, don’t vote like that’, etc., types of Christianity?

 

B.  Versus adopting a radical, forward-looking, strategic approach that:

1. Proactively imagines various aspects of our pending departure in Heaven’s next resurrection and rapture event at the end of this 3rd age, possibly when He opens the 6th seal on His scroll?

2. Proactively prepares potentially useful resources for 4th age believers, including former 3rd age believers who will have been left behind, and who will quickly return to extreme Christian faith in a time of great persecution?

3. Cultivates and catalyzes deeper, broader Holy Spirit-inspired insights about the places of our eternal destination—our nations on the massive, new, eternal Earth, and its capital city—the massive, new, eternal Jerusalem?

4. Ponders and explores plausible aspects of the post-apocalyptic, Millennial Reign age, as we try to imagine our personal and corporate assignments, as Earth’s immortal rulers, facilitating The Lord’s reign as its Global King?

5. S-t-r-e-t-c-h-e-s our imaginations about the incredible, personal rewards The Lord promised to give us, based on our best personal and corporate performances during our ‘salvation internship’ in this life? 

Ponder this insight about rewards: There is absolutely no way we can realistically imagine the nature, extent and number of rewards with which The Lord will bless His most faithful saints. We only know His rewards will be different from His GIFT of eternal life for our successful internship. So why my 5th  point above about rewards?? 

 

Think the flip side--the inverse of The Lord’s judgments!

 

Since Adam and Eve, we have learned a LOT about various types and intensities of judgments The Lord has unleashed across our world, in response to our mounting sinfulness. And we are well versed about how Father God spiritually piled upon Jesus, the FULL LOAD of every human sin that will have ever been committed—past, present and future. 

 

What if… the degree and depth of The Lord’s HATE of sin, as demonstrated by His various judgments, mirrors…

 

The degree and depth of His LOVE for righteousness, and

His willingness to demonstrate His love with totally

un-imaginable rewards, based on our faithfulness in this life??

 

Stretch your imagination around this question:

 

For starters,

what kinds of rewards might mirror

 the judgments of the global flood, the apocalypse,

and other significant, but far lesser judgments in history???

Selah…

 

Friends, like me, do you strongly intuit our ‘business as usual’, institutionalized approaches to church Christianity need major overhauling—dumping stale, institutionalized, politicized, polarized, racialized, culturalized, modernized, and heavily monetized approaches that have driven so many of us away from churches, and from fake versions it purports to represent?!

 

Is the Church trying to maintain

a 3rd-age, middle-stage strategy, 

in a 3rd-age, final-stage reality.

 

When church signifies institutions, each with differing doctrines, customs and restrictions, more than it signifies people and their comprehension of what lies ahead for us, that’s when values shift, eventually diminish, and people drop out. Recall how The Lord threatened to vomit lukewarm believers out of the early Laodicean church. Imagine what He might be thinking about the increasingly ineffective, institutionalized, impotent, worldwide church TODAY?! I imagine He might be looking forward to His pending fresh troops. See: Fresh Troops, Incoming (Poem).

 

I encourage you to spend some quality time in meditation and prayer, asking The Holy Spirit to develop within you, The Mind of Christ which you have been given to enable you to:

 

     •  S-t-r-e-t-c-h your imaginations to assess your current salvation internship performance, and reveal areas in which you may have been ‘weighed in His scales, and found wanting’; and

     •  Perceive how you might help to IGNITE and GROW somebody’s faith and determination to ‘run the Christian race in a manner worthy of The Lord’s high calling.’

 

My passion is to help us to… 

perceive and prepare us for our pending promotion to immortality,

and what that might mean in our pre-departure present.

 

At the ends of the 1st and 2nd ages, The Lord intervened to SHIFT what the righteous on Earth should be thinking and doing differently—from majoring on the minors—past strategies they embraced during the middle stage of those ages; to majoring on the miners—teaching folks how to receive and develop by faith, and THEN mine the inexhaustible Mind of Christ—what He might be thinking, seeing and planning for us and the world, NEXT.

 

Might He be doing something similar TODAY?