The Church is Eating From the Wrong Tree
A mad and unjust world does not simply bend to our ideas about what we deem to be rational or logical. The church of the West has settled for merely calling out the self-serving, overt agendas of irresponsible leaders, as if telling one another what wicked men in power are “really” doing is going to change the world.
Our Father wants to do something far beyond changing the world - He wants to heal and restore it. He has given us the way forward: humility, repentance, and intercession (2 Chron. 7:14).
In our impatience, we seem to imagine that there are better, faster solutions to the dilemma of man’s wickedness and deceit. We expose. We talk. We complain. We tell each other what’s “really going on”. We argue and post evidence of our rightness. Sometimes we even do this as a “call to prayer” that produces very little actual sustained prayer.
Historically, not one of our empty solutions have profited our families, our churches, or our neighbors.
From the garden, there are two means to acquire power: via life from the Father, or knowledge apart from Him.
In my observation, the great besetting sin of this previous season is the manner by which we have settled for the knowledge of good and evil in our powerlessness in the face of evil and injustice rather than accessing the life of the Father via His Spirit and truth.
The truth that comes via His life transforms us and re-aligns us to His perspective and value system. His truth carries so much more life than mere facts or information. The knowledge of good and evil makes us aware but does not make us alive or righteous in Him.
Brethren, we have settled for “awareness” and are therefore eating of the same tree we are seeking to “expose”. This is not our way forward. I see this on both ideological “sides” of the justice conversations raging across social media. Both sides want to call out the hypocrisy of the other group. Has this moved us forward as a people, as a family? The explosion of knowledge has left the church well-informed and morally hollow, prayerless, and unable to bear the weight of the times with the salt that preserves and the light that reveals.
Therefore, without shame and with great joy, repent. Find your way back to the Tree of Life and be filled with His life and true hope again today.