What Does This Look Like?

I asked that question a little over a year ago. I was thinking about all of the changes in our world, in our country, in our Churches. It sometimes feels that we have been placed into a blender and everything once familiar is now unfamiliar, changed, foreign. We live in what they call the "Post-Modern" generation. I'm not sure I can define that exactly, but someone can I'm sure. I taught the subject of Bible prophecy many times in various Bible studies, and it was always taught as a sort of "here is what is coming--be prepared--be informed!" Suddenly, it began to actually look more real--the reality was here and now my focus changed to "What are we, the body of Christ, supposed to look like to the world as the world begins to turn upside down?" Are we supposed to take up arms and fight? Are we supposed to join in the movements with Christian activists and "take back our country?" I stay up to date with world news, but I grew weary of the many angry commentators getting into arguments on the news talk shows, finding myself becoming angry and frustrated and even fearful every time I heard the latest "change" facing us and the latest "rights" being removed from us.


So, what does Jesus want me, His follower and disciple, to look like in the face of the coming darkness? Reading Jeremiah I heard Him instructing me. As in the days of Jeremiah, we find ourselves facing a spiraling down of everything familair in our nation and as with Israel, there was a time to fight, to take back our country, to do everything in our power to maintain the status quo. But God told Jeremiah to tell the leaders not to fight this time. He told them to relinquish their own beloved Jerusalem and go willingly into captivity. The time for God's refining of the children of Israel, and the purification of the Land had come and they were to submit to His refining. They had gotten off track, lost their focus, forgotten what was important to their God and developed their own religious system. The leaders cried out "NO! This cannot be. This is the Land God gave to us; the Temple is here!" But Jeremiah continued to stand his post, the post God assigned to him and warned the religious leaders to submit and to go into captivity--into Babylon. God would protect them there, but he would not protect them if they refused to submit.


How does this look in my life today? What should I look like to the world that is careening headlong into darkness? I am to have Hope--the "Blessed Hope" that is Jesus. In a hopeless world, what will the people want more than anything? They will want Hope. We have hope. We have the only Hope there is; the only Hope that is real--Jesus Christ.


So often in the past several years, when despair met me at the door when I entered into my house, I walked through my house speaking out loud to the enemy who wanted to rob me of joy, quoting from John 17 that Jesus prayed for me. He prayed that I would be in Him and He would be in me and we would be one in the Father and that His joy would be in me and my joy would be full! Therefore! No one can have my joy because it isn't mine--it is His and His prayers are always answered.


Today I choose to walk in His joy no matter what is going on around me. Amen