Church of Tyre Prophecy

Woe to a people who are comfortable and complacent, and who take solace from the destruction of others. You think you will prosper at the expense of your brothers; you think you will replace Jerusalem as the apple of my eye? Have I not made known my salvation to you and revealed my goodness to you, in spite of your many sins? Then why do you delight in the judgment of your brother? Why do you, in glee, lord it over the people of the circumcision group? Why do you dismiss curtly and without compassion? Surely you should be wounded if your brother is injured? Surely you should share the suffering of your brother. But you are higher than he and you think that I am with you. I charge you with callousness and I find you guilty.  

You think I speak through you and yet your heart is far from me. You delight in your status and reputation and you pour scorn on your brothers. You think I am with you? No, I am not; I am against you. Remember what I did to Tyre when I punished her for all her haughty words. I pushed her into the sea, never to rise again. I am sending a dry wind from the east to test you and to sift you. Will I find faith when I come or will I find the rules and the religion of men? 

To those who are comfortable: you will be comfortable no more: the rug shall be pulled out from underneath you and your many buildings will be sold to unbelievers. Your goods will be seized and your broadcasting will come to an end. I am sick of your traffic and trade. You have enslaved your fellow brothers. Did I not call them out of darkness to be my children but you have enslaved them all over again to your teachings and to you gross practices. You excuse yourself and all those exposed in public. You use grace as a cover for wickedness. Not only does this greatly grieve me but I find myself aroused and jealous for my people, the sheep of my pasture. You have interjected; you should have brought them to know me but you have brought them up in your own faith, your own kingdom. 

You have not established my kingdom. Therefore I swear by myself that I am against you and I will not delay in sending this wind. It will scorch you and crack your lips, your tongue will stick to the roof of your mouth and your power of speech will be taken away from you. You shall look for relief but you will find none. You will look to the world but the world will scorn you. All who pass by you will wince at your suffering but none will lift a finger. Your tents will be emptied on the day of your wedding and your campus deserted. You were much vaunted and flirted with by the world. You drew the world into you, for the world saw itself in the mirror you held up. For a while it turned aside to see, but you will be ripped to pieces and my little ones will flood out of you as wine bursting forth from a dropped wineskin. They will escape your clutches for lush meadows and escape your reach. I will bring My People and settle them in a land far from Egypt. Once more they will call on me and I will be their Lord. The sheep of my pasture will come to me for they know me and I will gather them up in my arms. And when they walk through the desert neither their shoes nor their clothes will wear thin, for I will look over them.


Given November 2011

Confessions of a fool

When I don't post for a while you can be sure I'm either on holiday or God is dealing with me. It's November and I don't live in the southern hemisphere! I haven't been on holiday.

I have a question for you: do I sound oh-so-worthy when I write, self-important and wanting you to think the very best of me in spiritual terms? (Even that question could hide a false humility!) If I do sound like that, it is most probably because I am like that.

It's not that God's finger is sharp it's just where He's pressing is sensitive and sore and you and I both want to get out from under it. He got me in a corner this morning, digging up another piece of rubble in my heart. I don't know about you, but I seem to go round and round in circles with the same problems, the same faults of the heart. Just hold still; He's drilling deeper! The drill bit is still in the same place! I'm not going round in circles; His drill bit is. There's another sweep that scrapes off another layer. It is not His sternness that provokes this in me; many peope have said to me I'm too hard on myself. It is true; I am too hard on myself. I thought I was being humble but have since realised that the person who is truely humble isn't even aware that they are. (Oh dear, failed again.) For someone like me, it is always God's kindness that drills deeper; it feels like a drill bit, but it is just His hand bringing His truth that confronts the very need of my heart. This morning He called me His brother (Hebrews 2:11) and said that there was no condemnation for those in Christ (Romans 8:1). All my struggling and striving that had built up over the last few weeks was undone in seconds and glorious freedom came, accompanied by tears.

I was so concerned with my own character and being right and walking around with utter self-contempt that my eyes were blinded to the truth. When I realised it was His character in me that was to be seen and that He had fulfilled all righteousness, then and only then was I delivered from a priggish self-hatred that masqueraded as piety.

"Determinedly take no one seriously but God, and the first person you find you have to leave severely alone as being the greatest fraud you have ever known, is yourself."

Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest, 22nd November, page 333.

At Home in Reality

Devotions should bring you to God - not man . . . including yourself.

You cannot stand upon the wisdom of man to glimpse God.

Devotions do not have you at their centre: not your relationship to God, nor your faith, nor anything prefaced with 'your'. Devotions should exist to bring you into the life of God and should therefore take you out of your own life, so that what concerns you or what you are holding clatters to the ground as you forget what is behind. These true devotions do not preoccupy you with a new set of problems; they do not rake over old ground; they do not require you to solve problems; they do not require you to use your wisdom. These are all bleached and rolled by the confontation with God.

Anything: any writing or any speaking that is not taken with the Lord only deals with peripheral things. Devotions do not stroke your self-worth or your gifts or your ministries. Devotions have at their centre Jesus in His risen glory or in His manly life. Your ears are not cluttered with quotes from from others or interjections from well-qualified third parties. You are with your beloved. Any other noise is sandled feet on holy ground; this is why the door to the prayer closet is closed: to disallow interruptions. It is you and His voice.

You have an anointing that is not counterfeit but true and therefore He teaches you Himself. There is no intermediary, no High Priest to represent you to God continually. He has done it once and for all, the way is cleared: you are the Priesthood to minister directly to God. Anything else will muddy the water. Any figure of Moses in your life must be sidestepped; the Lord will lead you Himself from the pillar of cloud and fire, day and night. The old categories of this life and psychology will mean nothing to you. Worldly ways to diagnose the troubles of your ailing heart will prove of no value, they can only observe symptoms from afar; they can only modify the behaviour.

God is not interested in your mental health or your inconvenient behaviour, but He is interested in you; He wants you for Himself. Why let anyone or anything stand in the way? God does not call us on out of our own self-interest but out of obedience to Him. God does not bargain or barter with you, it is always on His terms. He is not interested in our dignity before men or ourselves, but our status before Him. He is not interested in you becoming 'more yourself' or being 'more human'. These so-called devotions should not try to get you back to the comfortable Garden of Eden but into the blood-sweated dark Gethsemane. We no longer become God's original intention but His greatest intention: to lift us up into God himself, wherein before we were below the angels - now we are in Christ. He is not intereseted in a 'better world' or helping you to 'cope' or to avoid suffering. He Himself is our Peace and our Truth. The reality is always found in Christ and nowhere else. God does not want you to be what He first designed you to be, the first creation of man has been abolished just as the first convenant has been surpassed. He wants you to be what He created you to be in Christ. This is the first of the last creation. We are the firstfruits that supplants the previous age, for only in Christ does the new age begin.