viewoutsidethepew

I am living a nightmare as I am haunted by a stark reality.

So many people have traded first love faith in Jesus Christ for religion and its seductive power and busy-ness.

The roots of my present torment go back less than two weeks when I saw a flurry of dialogue based on personal opinion, but no submission to the guidance of Paraclete or the Bible.

Since then I have dreamed, sometimes had visions, of past experiences of people I know (or knew) who chose submission to a human authority in complete defiance of Jesus’ teachings. Administrative activity replaced love.

And then I was haunted by the heart-shattering fact that these people speak the word love, have even convinced themselves they love, but they use the word like an abuser, “I love you so I will beat you to a pulp, isolate you from friends, take away your freedom, pound your self-respect out of your heart.”

And they don’t see it!

I am beside myself, losing sleep, tormented in my soul, and, despite my feeble attempt here,  consumed with anguish too deep for words at their blindness, coldness and idolatry.

It gets worse. In my visions I tell them to come back to the first love, elevate Jesus to the highest authority, and they brutalize me again as at first. I hear God saying that I cannot save them! I know that is true, but I long to pull them to safety from the tidal waves of human sin.

I am Jeremiah, ministry destroyed by God-haters. I am Amos rejected because I was prophet to a race not my own. I am Ezekiel weeping at the smallness of the spiritual practice of his people. I am me, broken at my powerlessness when eternal souls are at risk.

And then I see a vision of Jesus, bleeding on the cross to save those very people who mock, betray and destroy, and how small my anguish becomes against the backdrop of the Holy One’s tears and sorrow watching Creator’s children go astray.

I do not ask for consolation.

Instead I urge God’s true servants to go out and harvest, consumed by heavenly love and compassion.

“After this, the Lord appointed 70 other disciples to go ahead of him to every city and place that he intended to go. They were to travel in pairs. He told them, ‘The harvest is large, but the workers are few. So ask the Lord who gives this harvest to send workers to harvest his crops. Go! I’m sending you out like lambs among wolves’ ” (Luke 10:1-3 God’s Word).