WORD to the REMNANT - James Smith
Posted by: prophetic <prophetic@...>
Baptist' Conference several years ago. Since then we have gone
our own ways, but in the last two weeks we have been talking
together quite a bit. I found his word below to be a challenge to
us all in many ways - myself included. Comments are welcome.
"WORD to THE REMNANT"
Anger and Courage - A call for action
-by James Smith.
"Hope has two beautiful daughters. Their names are anger and
courage; anger at the way things are, and courage to see that
they do not remain the way they are." - St. Augustine.
Most of us know anger quite well. Talk to someone who is involved
with the repentance scene and you will likely hear it in their voice
as they talk about the state of the church, you will see it in their
eyes as they explain the wrongs associated with the hyper-
prosperity, once saved-always saved or the seeker sensitive
doctrines. Anger at the way that things are has been at the heart
of the repentance community and is something that most of us
are well aquainted with. Anger by itself is not bad, it is a
tremendous motivator for the person seeking to change things.
But when anger is left alone and is not coupled with action, it
must end in the destruction of the ones who embrace it. Because
anger must be answered, that is its nature. It demands that a
wrong be addressed and if no solution presents itself, anger will
inevitably lead to frustration, withdrawal and ultimately a martyr
complex that can only destroy a Christian life and that is absolute
poison for any move of God.
We have seen that this frustration will many times introduce a
little known companion to anger named apathy. When the source
of frustration seems to be such that there is no ready answer for it,
apathy comes along as a form of learned helplessness. "I used to
be angry about such-and-such but then I just gave up, it is never
going to change anyway." And apathy crouches right now at the
door of the repentance community, stealing our resolve to see
change and sapping our strength for the battle ahead. I hear from
people from all over the world because of my ministry email list.
And the impression that I am getting more and more often of late
is that they are tired of hearing about everything that is wrong.
People in the community have grown tired of hearing about what is
wrong with them, with the church and with the world. Not that they
do not see the truth in what is being said, it is just that there must
be an answer presented as a solution to the problems that are
being exposed.
If a public leader or politician began listing the wrongs of a certain
country that he viewed as an enemy, it would certainly be possible
for him to generate a public frenzy in response to all that he has to
say given the proper platform. But if he were to present no ready
answer, no clear path to dealing with the situation, people who
were excited would quickly tire of the rants and quietly excuse
themselves from his rallies. That is human nature and it is no
different in this movement. We have cried foul against the current
system and the problems that we and those that came before us
have been exposing are very real. But without a plan to change
things, all of those people who allied themselves with us, even the
most ardent of our supporters, will eventually fall victim to apathy.
And apathy is the death rattle of any movement, the sound that
says that the end is inevitable.
Anger at the current state of things has carried us all this far but it
can not take us any further. The diversity of the issues that face
us when combined with their sheer size all but guarantees that
they can withstand our anger by simply ignoring us and keeping
us in obscurity. The tactic employed so far has been to ignore us
completely and when they find that they must give an answer to
our claims, they simply relegate us to being only the marginalized
fringe, conspiracy theorists and heresy hunters who are not worth
considering in the grand scheme of things, or fanatics that suffer
from too much intensity and need to just settle down.
Some people who would support what we do hear us and it all
rings true to them but what we offer as an alternative is so one
dimensional that it can not hold public attention long. Imagine if
the reformers would have contented themselves with exposing the
error of the Catholic Church and then went no further. After a while,
crowds would no longer have clamored to hear these upstarts
because they would have heard it all before. Thank God that the
reformers did not stop there but they presented real solutions,
else we would not be here today but would still be under the
domination of the Pope and that hellish system of indulgences.
The goal of any revolution is to supplant the current system. But
we have been hesitant to move in this or any other direction in the
repentance movement. Some parts of the group hate anything
organized while others hate any leadership at all in the church.
Some think money should have no part in religion while still others
believe that we do not need buildings but that it should be totally
street or home based. Some hate denominations and some even
seem to hate America in general and want to see it judged. I can't
say that any of those things are what I believe but I have seen
people who certainly do believe them in the last few years.
And with a lack of official central ideals to follow, no one knows
what to believe and so we do nothing at all and chaos reigns. If we
continue as we are without a central identity to call our own we
have zero chance of affecting any real change. The bible says that
every seed reproduces after its own kind and yet we don't even
know what we are, we only know that we aren't "them" and have
contented ourselves with that. It is my opinion that many of the
ideas that we tolerate in this group are simply utopian ideas with
no hope of practical application whatsoever. And some of the
ideas are just plain crazy and should not be tolerated at all, lest
the integrity of the movement itself suffer....
Our trumpets have been sounding an uncertain and even disjointed
sound and how can the people of God answer that? There are
many preachers out there preaching similar things, many of whom
I know personally. Some of these same men also have something
against other preachers who stand for things very close to their
own core beliefs. They will not work together, preach together or
stand together in any way and some will even go to great lengths
to distance themselves from these others. When a spirit of
fratricide is evidently running free among our ranks, how could
God ever trust us with revival? We will only bite and devour one
another in the midst of it and kill the work. That being said, is it
too hard of a question to ask what is it that draws us together?
What are the common threads that we recognized that caused us
to gravitate to one another? What do we feel that God wants us to
do in our time here on earth as a group, if anything? This is not
ecumenical agreement that demands severe compromise in order
for it to occur but simply the agreement of brethren who desire to
join together to accomplish more than they could as a lone
individual. It would seem that the core goals that we all seem to
desire the most are:
-We want to see real Christianity established in the place of the
humanistic Gospel of the last half decade.
-We want to see the power of God again and not this spirit of
Adonijah that parades itself in our day.
-We want to see revival change the course of history in our time.
As for me, I want to see the real enemy and his work destroyed
every chance that I get. I have at times forgotten about satan as I
focused on all of the wrongs in the church system. I have told
myself that he was behind all of the problems and so by going
after the church system, I was going after him. But then one day I
woke up and saw that in all my fighting, I had forgotten how to
fight him. And I vowed in myself to never make that mistake again.
Courage is the other daughter of hope mentioned at the outset of
this article and it is the one that has been most missing in what
we do. And it is the one that must come to the forefront now if we
are ever going to see God move in our day. We must do something
now before this brief window closes and there is no more need of
the watchman because the enemy is already at the gate. We
must decide what it is that we stand for, cut loose everything that
we do that does not directly apply to our vision no matter how
good it seems to be and begin to march together towards our
goals. We must put aside pet doctrines and differences that divide
us and rally around the principles that we all agree with. We must
work with one another to present a united front and a depth that
people can embrace. We must become a movement in every
sense of the word, moving together with all of the different parts
that we offer to a common goal.
And we must have the courage to remember that none of our
stances or projects really matter in the end, only what we truly do
for Jesus matters.
We will make the decision now whether this movement will have
any impact or not. If we can not move forward together then we will
lose this incredible moment in history when real change could
have occurred. I would remind you that we have come into the
kingdom for such a time as this and that not one of us should
delude ourselves into thinking that we will escape in the king's
house any more than anyone else. That if we do nothing then
deliverance and enlargement shall arise from another place, we
can be sure of that. But we may have missed the one moment
that we were born for, the war that would have given us our
identity that we could have only fought together.
~James Smith,
'American Pentecost'
Houston, Texas.