When God intervenes to save a people, to restore a culture, He does it in accordance with His good pleasure and by means of His sovereign power. We don’t need to provide anything other than our own helplessness. We cannot make Him do it, and we cannot prevent Him from doing it. The Spirit, like the wind, moves where He wills and as He pleases.
But when He moves, He moves in transformative ways. When God rises up to scatter His enemies, He will in fact scatter all the obvious ones. He will certainly throw down the instances of high rebellion that have gotten our attention, and which have distressed us so much. The abortion culture, the androgynous sexualization of everything, the worship of money, and so on. Nebuchadnezzar’s great statue is going to tumble down when the rock strikes it on the feet.
However, other things will happen as well, and will happen on a small scale—in our own hearts, in our marriages, in our families, in our close relationships. One of the things that will happen is that old dogs will learn new tricks. The human mind has fantastic powers, and those powers are on full display whenever a human being well set in his ways—over forty, let’s say—is confronted with the necessity of changing something. Unfortunately, those powers are usually utilized in rationalizing and blame-shifting, and not in figuring out how best to expedite the needed change.
But if the Spirit is coming, that means change is coming. On the one hand it will be gloriously liberating, and on the other hand, it will be not nearly as much fun as we had hoped.
All this is another way of saying that we cannot pray Lord, change us without it coming down at some point to Lord, change me.
amen
Those past 40 probably are more set in their ways. It’s best to make your big changes before then! We become blinder and more stubborn later on.
I hope prayer and repentance on the part of individuals avail with God to spare us the kind of judgments seen worldwide, from 1914 to 1945, in which Christian and non-Christian alike perished, and which contributed greatly to the prevalent skepticism (since ostensibly Christian rulers started WWI). We could be facing the kind of societal repression of religion that took hold in the Soviet sphere, and, for a time, in Germany, before things get better. In God’s purposes, the Christian Middle East and North Africa have not yet revived over the space of fourteen hundred years.
Well, John….the stituation in the Middle East and North Africa remains as it was since those areas were subjugated by Islam. They are doing the same thing a millennia and a half later. You could probably still find people making similar types of food and following similar cultural practices, particularly among bedouins.
God has ways of getting our attention! (:
Indeed Timothy. I only fear it may be far more painful to come to terms with and change those things at that point!
only fear it may be far more painful to come to terms with and change those things at that point! Well, its almost like that. What He does is show us–and I am speaking for myself here, God deals with each of is individually–where doing things in the flesh ends up. It ends up in hell. Now, the pain is in facing our damnation–literally experiencing the wages of who we are without him. It scared the crap out of me. So, yes, there is pain, but it is not God punishing us; it is the reaction of all flesh… Read more »
That’s very insightful, Timothy. As C. S. Lewis once said, “The doors to hell are locked from the inside.” But what does it have to do wtih the less striking point that it’s more difficult to change as we age? I had Christians in mind every bit as much as non-Christians. The fact is that as people age, they can grow self-absorbed and intransigent.
Jon,
I agree with you, but am only pointing out that God can reach anybody.
cheers.
t