Many of us pray for revival - hoping for fresh waves of God that enable many to turn to Jesus. They will be great days ... but we shouldn't forget that revival coming does not mean that there is no cost: it will require people to lay down their lives, be prepared to be disrupted, all to join in with what God is doing.
In this episode in Mark 9 his closest followers are talking about greatness and power - who will have the best seats when Jesus kicks out the Romans and re-establishes the Kingdom? Surely it will be Peter - he has all the bravado! No - it will be John for his quiet wisdom. Or maybe a less obvious choice among the others ...
Yet Jesus is trying to remind them what will happen. Taking them aside he says 'You need to know that I will be taken from you, they will kill me, but don't worry because within 3 days I will rise again'. Peter, James, John and the others cannot compute this message! They were born into the Jewish people who had a collective history that involved 'Up', 'Down' and the 'Promise of back up'. The 'Up' was when God marvellously formed them as a people, leading them out of slavery to become His people Israel. The 'Down' was the result of the people losing that focus and relationship with God, being taken off to exile and so on ... and yet with the promise of God one day restoring them.
That restoration was still 'work in progress' in the time of Jesus and His followers. They were occupied by the Romans, and many thought that if they could 'just get' themselves right in their standing with God then at last He would send his promised anointed leader to declare the Kingdom, remove the Romans and restore them all to 'Up'! In Jesus Peter and the others could now see that the anointed leader was among them, and so they were excited that the big 'Freedom Day' was going to happen real soon now. Surely there would soon be the uprising that would restore all things. With that, being the closest people to Jesus, they naturally had thoughts of 'in that day, who among us will get the top jobs?'.
But Jesus was talking a different language: He was talking of His life being taken, of dying - the exact opposite to their thinking! So He says to the disciples: 'I know what you are thinking, but you have got to turn it upside down! I will be taken from you and die - you have got to learn to become servants, not lords'. He went on: 'Check out these little children - those with the least status in our society - welcoming them is like welcoming me ... the total opposite of your power play thinking!'.
The point is that with Jesus 'revival', that 'promise of Up' was indeed possible, but it wasn't 'just get ...', but rather 'lay life down'. Jesus had to die ... and something in us has to die. The 'just get ...' mentality has to go too.
Over the years, as a church leader, I've had many a good mature Christian come to me saying things like: 'If people would just get their lives more pure (removing bad) then we would see more of the Lord moving among us ...', or 'If people would just get themselves more into the Word, then God would move among us ...', or 'If people would just get themselves more to our prayer times, then the spiritual tempo would be raised ...' and so on. They mean well of course, but they can be characterised as a 'just get' syndrome that is not as helpful as it seems.
Let us be clear: it absolutely would be better for all of us to let God pinpoint stuff in our lives that we need to get rid of / stop / leave behind. It definitely would be better if we formed deeper habits of engaging with Scripture individually and together. For sure things will move up a gear if people were more actively engaging in our church prayer times. To all these we want to say 'YES'!
However, the 'just get ...' logic will let us down. Rich and good all the above are, the truth is that something in each of us needs to die - it is for us to be abandoned to Jesus and His way, to completely drop any pretence of self-importance, to give up thinking 'If I can just get this or sort that' to enable progress. Instead base every opinion, every hope, every aspiration in Him who predicted that 'he is going to be delivered into the hands of men, they will kill him, and after 3 days he will rise again'.
Remember that for us to grasp at stuff, to grab at solutions ... is exactly the same as the Genesis story where Eve (with Adam alongside) reached up and grasped the fruit of the the one tree God said should be off-limits - it is us thinking 'we can be like God - we've got this ...'. No! That has to die - let it go down with Jesus on the cross.
All of us should live in the hope that revival is for sure possible - it is absolutely in the resurrection of Jesus and the outpouring of His Spirit ... but it is not without cost. For some (not all) it is the cost of relocation to speak Jesus elsewhere, for some (not all) it is the cost of opposition or persecution, for others it will be costs in other ways.
But for all it is the cost of abandonment to Jesus in every department: lives surrendered to Him.
No comments:
Post a Comment