Getting Started

To my friends,

It is better to light a candle than rave at the darkness. This blog will be about lighting a way. In a previous blog, I was more concerned about what was wrong with our Christian church. That is looking at a glass halve empty. The more I looked at our Christian culture in the USA the more I began to see that the glass is becoming emptier. As a church, we are stuck. Over the generations God has come down to speak to his people. However, our culture has made us deaf, blind and fearful of what God would breathe into our hearts.  In the last year I have seen where God would take us, all of us. It is a journey lost to many generations. It is an old forsaken path that would lead our hearts into eternity prepared. This is not secret revelation, this is a clear dynamic way that was abandoned long ago when the Christian church decided to be Lord over the earth and not be a servant to it. Our hearts were deceived by the position of being God’s children. We forgot the simple fact that while Jesus walked in this world he took off his robe of God’s authority (His sonship) and clothed himself with the garb of a servant unto death. In His heart Jesus would live and die the life of a servant (Phil 2:5-8). This is not accomplished as a list of doings; it is a way of being.

I would like to talk about our hearts. The word heart is mentioned over 700 times in the bible. It is of greatest importance to God, it is the home of the innermost man. It is the organ that the Lord tests and where our hardest decisions make us (or expose) who we truly are.  The heart is our “Be.” The heart is not necessarily our “do.” There are a great many things that I do that may look great on the outside but on the inside I am acting selfishly with regard only to my own desire (Mat 23:27). My “Be” in this case is selfishness. Acting out in selfish desire is a good definition for sin. I often act out with the single intent to comfort my conscience.

This is a great definition for “lukewarm” as mentioned in Revelation 3:16. When you are lukewarm, you only do enough to assuage guilt but not enough to change your heart. This lukewarmness has one goal and that is comfort. It does not generate the intense heat necessary to forge a strong heart.  Real heat is provided by suffering and trials. This kind of heat causes crisis, which forges the heart. We often avoid this and only do enough good to keep ourselves comfortable, not enough to cause ourselves to be changed by suffering.

As Americans, we are a weak hearted group. We have allowed our hearts to be fat, callous and not muscular. The American church as a whole is very much like this. We are the church at Laodicea (Rev 3:14-18). We think we are rich but we are in spiritual poverty. We must go where there is spiritual gold to be found. We must rediscover the mother-lode of spiritual gold. However, to mine its ore we must change our “Be.” Our hearts must be changed; we need to “Be” someone else. We must “Be” servants. This is the path laid down by Jesus Christ and we must follow if we are to be like Him.

 

Your Brother in Christ,

DFCutler