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Dear reader - You are all in my prayers to the Father daily, and I do thank you for sharing your life and living-walk together here. Please hold fast to one another in word and prayer, as we hold on to our Lord Jesus Christ and He binds us to Himself. "See that you do not refuse Him who speaks. For if they did not escape who refused Him who spoke on earth, much more shall we not escape if we turn away from Him who speaks from heaven, whose voice then shook the earth; but now He has promised, saying, “Yet once more I shake not only the earth, but also heaven.” Now this, “Yet once more,” indicates the removal of those things that are being shaken, as of things that are made, that the things which cannot be shaken may remain." (Hebrews 12:25-27) Watching the utter devastation and despair in the gulf coast states lately has left me wondering what to pray for. On the surface it would seem appropriate to pray generally for the people affected, for women and children, and the elderly and infirm, etc. And this I started to do, except almost immediately I felt the Spirit leading me to address my prayers to God's children impacted by this storm, and to the reality of God's purpose and plan being fulfilled through it all. I thought of Sodom and Gomorrah, and also how very much a Sodom New Orleans represents. Perhaps no other city in America is so vile and given over wholly to evil and lawlessness. The looting and lawless activity seen in the aftermath bears this out. Oh how proud we are - building entire cities under water then thinking our little walls and levees will keep out the rushing sea! How we have created whole societies and systems apart from the Creator of all! Will He not break the pride of man? Will He not reduce everything we have raised up in place of Him? Will He not shake the earth one final time? We are reminded of that frightful Scripture that indicates that 1/3 of all the men on the earth will die as a result of God's wrath; that perhaps in our lifetime we may see things far worse than what the last week has wrought. Death, destruction, weeping and gnashing of teeth as men lose everything, as their trusted institutions are rocked to their very foundations, and the very ground shakes beneath their feet. I thought of the seldom read prophecy of Haggai, where our Lord says that He will shake the Gentile nations, that He will shake the pride of man. All of this caused me to wonder if all that I know and believe about this God and His Christ will keep me once all of this starts to fully play out - when for example, little children are slain, and death is all around us, when human emotion, sympathy and sentiment will be taxed to its very limit and even fail in the face of the onrushing torrent of suffering. Do I actually and fully believe that this God I serve and worship is a God of love, once He roars in righteous anger and while He slays His enemies, and all of the created, unregenerate world collides headlong with His Awesome Wrath and fiery judgment? We talk of all of the victims, my friends, but the Lord kept leading me to this sense that He alone is the real victim here (and other such times) - of man's stubborn and unceasing indifference and independence - his brash resistance to all of God's prophets and pleadings. Our Lord stands at the ready to bring blessing and life, yet we will have none of it, choosing death, and sin and godless alternatives. Thousands dead perhaps, they are saying - well I say that many were dead already, dead to God, dead to salvation, dead to righteousness, dead spiritually, dead to His Beloved son, dead to the Savior of the world. I am sorry if this sounds cold and callous, but so much of what I have heard and seen surrounding this tragedy, even from named Christians, is not the heart of God, but superficial human sentiment and commiseration. We have exalted the value and esteem of human life even when it exists outside of God and His creative and sovereign purposes. What we largely see around us are the tears of Adam not Jesus Christ, who wept over the utter depravity of the heart of man, at his hardened insensibility to all things Holy and Godly. We must see with His eyes, my friends, and respond with His heart - even when it is His judgment coming down hard on a world that has largely forsaken Him. Get used to this, my brethren - for you will see things far worse, in Israel, where most of those alive today will die, and throughout the godless nations, where men have scorned the Creator for far too long. How will you respond? Is your faith rugged enough to withstand things that are incomprehensible to all human sensibility and feeling - that this Jesus, this Lamb of God will bring fire and destruction and death to the earth? In Amos 3:3, the Lord God says to Israel... Can two walk together, unless they are agreed? It is vital in this final hour that all that we are, and all that we see, and all that we claim is in agreement with the will of God as revealed by His Spirit and His Word! You see, He beholds things very differently from us. For example, the watchword of the hour is "human rights" - yet what about the Creator's right to do with His creation what He chooses, when He chooses, out of the goodness and depth of His vast and holy heart? I dare say we will see much in the days ahead that will no doubt cause us to question everything we think we know about this God; when our faith and trust will be stretched beyond anything we can imagine - Blood in the streets! The unceasing cries of the innocents! Mountains falling on men, turning them to powder! So do we agree with Him that His judgments are righteousness and true? Do we agree that it is His right to shake the nations, to raise up and destroy? I ask this because I really don't believe the church at this time as we know it will be able to follow Him down this path? Many - indeed the majority - will forsake Him. Will you be one of them my brother? What are doing right now to be sure that you won't? Is your lamp topped up with oil? Are you busy investing the spiritual talents the Lord has entrusted to you? Or will you begin right now to align all that you are with Him and His Purpose as revealed in His Word and through His Holy prophets? Is your faith of the authentic and apostolic kind, rooted in Christ, fueled and equipped by the Holy Spirit? Or is it a theoretical, romantic faith - having more to do with serving some sentimental religious urge within you than in exalting the Most High God who holds the fate of mankind and this earth in His very hands? Has this modern Zionist, political state, in the face of all its troubles, this hornet in its bed - turned to her God? Where is there a national day of repentance and mourning, a sense that all that plagues the nation represents an act of Holy judgment? How has she responded - by building tall, security walls and stubbornly seeking further political solutions? My friends, this wall will no more secure this secular, god-abandoned state of Israel than the levees in the Gulf will keep out the raging sea. And in America - where God and Jesus Christ have become mere bywords - where religion is largely about gratifying and magnifying men in the place of the Lord Jesus Christ - where sin and corruption reigns at every level of institution and society? My friends - has not America become more like godless Babylon than any other single nation in modern times? So many churches and temples and yet so little faith. So much profession of true things and so little faith in the only True Thing - the Lord Jesus Christ! I asked the Lord to enable me to see this tragedy as He does, not through the eyes and sentiment of a human being. I am sorry if this may trouble some, those who like their religion upbeat and light. My friends - if these be the end times (and I believe they are), then we must be prepared to have everything we believe about God and His Christ tested and shaken, so that all that remains is what He truly is. I recognize that this is not pleasant, but what we are witnessing are the beginning of sorrows, what can only lead to greater and more intense convulsions prior to the birth of God's Kingdom on this earth. This current secular state of Israel must die before she can be resurrected in front of the entire world; to the glory of God alone. The Gentile nations who have rejected the God of the Bible and History must be brought to the end of themselves - painfully, bloodily, swiftly. There will be anguish, tumult, heartache, loss, carnage - just as in ancient Egypt. And men will only harden their hearts further, just as they did then, shaking their little red fists at God, and cursing Him to all cursing with their lips. The love of many will wax cold as lawlessness abounds, and the faith of many will not endure such realities. How about you? My brethren - the time is coming when all of our little religious platitudes and shadows will be ripped apart by what we see around us. This "smile, be happy Christianity" that has evolved in our churches and denominations over so many generations won't help you, my brother! It never could! It is impotent and powerless against the reality of the Awesome One who holds all life and all mortal destiny between His fingers. We will need our Lord and each other even more so as the days approach. Lest our hearts fail, and our faith falters, we must turn to Him, and filter out every other noise and distraction. We must love Him enough to die for Him, and to live uprightly for Him. No longer are we to love others as we love ourselves, but we are to love them as He has loved us, with a heavenly, self-sacrificing love. We must pray all the more for God’s saints in this earth, as the apostate church, with its man-loving gospel, assimilates every supposed Christian thing. We must seek our peace and light in God, as increasingly war and trouble and darkness escalate and shatter all order and community. We must have a faith and walk refined in the wilderness, where all form and shadow gives way to substance and living reality. Let me ask you this - Is Jesus Christ the very foundation of your life? Is He why you breath in and breath out? Does His life enliven you and quicken you to all godliness and faithfulness - or do you trust and depend on yourself or in the systems of men? All that is not true will be burned away. All falseness and chaff will be purged! If these alone are what hold you up and constitute your life in God, then how can you stand in that dark day? When the levee breaks and God's righteous judgment crashes down on the world around you, will you still praise and worship Him; even when loving Him becomes increasingly harder; once His gifts and blessings give way to heaviness and dismay? Do you see man as the victim here or the Glory of God that has been scorned? Are you jealous for His Holy Name and His Glory as He is? Are you jealous for His will alone to be done? And are you jealous for His Beloved Son and His Spirit? Do you truly understand deep down what the Love of God and the Justice of God is - how it moves, that yes, it can even slay and destroy the wicked? Or do you impose upon Him your own ideas and concepts of human justice, borrowed from man's religion and wispy sense of righteousness? My brethren - as you can see, I was quite unprepared for what the Lord was to impress upon me as a result of my request to see this tragic event through His eyes. May His will be done, and His will alone - even if it defies my own understanding, even when His purposes involve judgment and death - things too profoundly deep for the human spirit to comprehend. My friends, my dear beloved brethren - hear Him now when He says that the time is coming, yes is almost here, when He will shake the earth one last time, when all that is not rooted in His Son will become undone! Oh that the heart of the prophet would become the heart of His people on the earth today! Oh that we would see what he sees, and weep for what is coming upon this world and the nation Israel! Oh that we would forsake every false and useless thing - that He would be our God, and that we would worship Him in spirit and in truth! Oh that we would be in agreement and unity with Him! My prayerful desire has always been that Living-walk would be real and authentic - rooted and grounded in the Living Truth that is Jesus Christ; that those who know the Lord and are led moment-to-moment by His Spirit find a place to share the wonder of His life in the Spirit - encouraged and encouraging - listening and hearing - sharing with one another as His life and glory spill up and out of our hearts into the lives of His children. If there be only one, then let him or her come. For one who truly serves the Lord is of more value than an entire nation or denomination who only pretends to. Amen! Pray without ceasing as that great and terrible Day approaches! The Day of the Lord spoken of by His Holy prophets! Pray in agreement with The Divine Plan and Purpose - it matters nothing what you think or feel or see! Cast aside all of your petty doctrines and man-sized notions and let Him alone be your way and truth and life! Seek Him alone, for Himself alone, that the Lord may be magnified above all that you are, that His glory would shine forth from your life, that He would be wondrously enlarged and you reduced - for this - my brethren - is the pathway to all revelation, and we will know nothing unless it be revealed by His Spirit! Stop holding on so tightly to your neatly packaged positions and opinions, your personal creeds and ideas - about His coming, and His working, and His dealings with men! Let it all go that He might build you up in His Son - the Living Truth that defies every human thing! Come before Him in all lowliness and submission, recognizing that he alone is God, and that the only way back to His heart is through His Son and His Cross. Beyond that there can only be righteous judgment - beyond life there is only death! Humble yourself before His mighty throne, claiming nothing of yourself but His mercy and grace, that the blood of the Savior would cover you in that Day of reckoning! Put away your plastic idols people - the idols of church and group and organization! Idols of wealth and lust and all self-worship! Give to Him the gift of all that you are, for He is worthy, and the King is Coming! Lay this life down that He who is worthy may take it up again - O lay it down you who are His people... lay it all down! O Father – Glorious and Eternal Father, we need You and Your Righteous Son now more than ever before. We as your redeemed need Your Holy Spirit to keep and comfort and help us as Your Day of Revelation draws near. We pray for all Your children suffering tribulation and loss in this godless world, where everything is turned on its head, and wickedness is deemed righteous by evil powers in high places. You O Lord are the strength of our lives, our high tower in the midst of our enemy. You O Lord are our grace and peace, our lying down and rising up, our very life. Come Lord Jesus Come, and may all that you have not formed and fashioned be brought low to destruction. In Jesus’ awesome name, we pray. Amen Please pray for us here at Living-Walk, that we would watch and see the Master at work, and understand what He would have us do. Your friend in Christ Jesus,
Wayne |
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