Dependancy

(A few thoughts).

"Peace, through the blood of His Cross". Colossians 1:20.

When was the last time you heard a distinctively Christian protest song?

I'm referring to something like this or like this?

Those who are loved, Jesus states, will be rebuked and disciplined (corrected - Revelation 3:19). "Judgement" (proper discernment and its ramifications) begins in God's house and extends from there (1 Peter 4:17) - righteousness will cover the earth as the waters cover the sea. 

We become people who are content with the present when we cease to examine and question what is actually taking place... There are consequences.

Complacency brings delusion. We settle into the notion that we are doing well when in truth we are garbed in compromise.

Perhaps the most terrifying manner of judgement is not when we suffer because the world wishes us silent, but when we are mantled with the notion that all is well- that we have and are doing 'enough' to simply remain where we are.

How does Christ Himself respond to so feeble  a conclusion? - Revelation 3:15 is how!  We can so easily become a people defined by such stupor, ripe for divine disdain and disgust.

Perhaps it's no surprise that the protest songs I mentioned above were written in the seventies. 

The cost of our redemption was total war (Genesis 3:15). Our reconciliation was birthed in the shedding of royal blood and the rending of the most righteous flesh.

Today, the threats are defined as those which intrude upon our "equilibrium" rather than those which would draft us into full armed conflict, but beyond the bounds of our own perceived safety, the costs to many are just as high.

We so often act to keep ourselves 'distinct' (remote) from a true refining of our thoughts and deeds, from a repenting that would drive us away from what is all too comfortable... too familiar.

Fellowship with God as Job, Abraham, Issac, Jacob, Moses and so many others discovered, requires an intimacy that exposes us to a 'fire' and a fellowship that is truly dangerous! (Hebrews 10:31), but the alternatives are eternally deadly.

Perhaps it's time for the church to find it's 'protesting' voice once again.

A final thought here, from the world of diet...

"Health fundamentalists of certain types no longer see food as something desirable or even necessary, but merely as a threat to longevity, and there lies a 'conspiracy' to kill us. Good cooking and eating are simply not 'sentimental' in this manner - they require a knowledge of cultivation of nutrition and genuine personal and social well-being being done well- deriving from good use of the larder, the kitchen and, above all, hospitality via genuine etiquette" (Faking it).

In truth, then (to borrow from Robert Farrar Capon), what the church needs right now is a decline in the triumph of diversion and a renewal of the art of oblation... in all things.

Selah.