A Word for the Church: Shattered Icebergs

I trapped my foot in a slimy pit of squelchy mud once when I was running a mud race. I told you yesterday that I hate running. Still true. But muddy obstacles tend to break up the monotony, so now and then, my husband and I will sign up for a small one near where we live.

Anyway, I temporarily lost my sneaker in the struggle. I had such an urgency to keep going, keep moving, but at the same time, I was bogged down, trapped, unable to move or see exactly what was up with my foot.

I've felt like that over the last few weeks... well, over the last year, but that sense of urgency had ramped up in recent weeks, in stark contrast to the feeling of being "stuck."

Last week as I was praying, the Lord showed me a picture of an army of small boats in a choppy sea. They were all together in a group, like flotsam, a large cloud of floating objects, and looking up, I saw the enormous prow of a ship pushing in amongst the boats. The monstrosity acted like a wedge, dividing the smaller boats one from another.

I keep a journal of these visions and pictures and I pray about them to see what God wants me to do with them, so I wrote this down. Today, the Lord took me back to this same scene, only this time, instead of boats, the floating objects were chunks of splintered ice that had once been a single, large iceberg. Again, they were floating in the choppy sea, and the towering prow of this enormous ship pushed in amongst them, dividing them on one side and the other.

In James 1:13-15, James says: "When tempted, no one should say, 'God is tempting me.' For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does He tempt anyone; but each one is tempted when, by his own evil desire, he is dragged away and enticed. Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin, and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death."

There are three stages of growth mentioned here: conception to birth, birth to adulthood, adulthood to death, which tells me one important thing:

Sin doesn't sit still, does it? Sin doesn't let you comfortably manage it. It's not a cute little deposit that sits in the dark corners of your cupboards that you can take out and play with now and then and put back behind closed doors when you're finished with it. 

Sin grows. It's like cancer: It multiplies, sometimes seemingly without any source of multiplication, and it very quickly increases beyond your ability to manage it, control it, or hide it.

So, to compensate? We talk ourselves into thinking that sin is okay. That it's natural. That the black thing rolling out of our cupboard is supposed to be there, and that if you don't have a black thing in your cabinet, there must be something wrong with you.

This morning before I opened my Bible, I asked the Lord to show me exactly where He wanted me in the Word. I had my finger on my little tab that leads to James, because that's where I wanted to go (and I did, as you see). I was all prepped and ready -- I'd glanced over the passage yesterday and had been tossing it around all afternoon. My agenda was laid on the table before the Lord. 

But as a formality, I still asked Him where He wanted to take me.

Somehow (because the Lord rarely goes with my agenda) I didn't open to James. Somehow, my Bible went to the last chapter of Jeremiah, Jeremiah 52. And my eyes fell on verse three: "It was because of the Lord's anger that all this happened to Jerusalem and Judah, and in the end, He thrust them from His presence."

So naturally, I had to go read all about what did happen to Jerusalem and Judah, and while I had some general knowledge of the Babylonian sacking of Jerusalem and Israel entering exile... there's some raw reality in this chapter. Especially having come almost directly from an in-depth study of the building of the Tabernacle in Exodus, reading about the destruction of those elements (from Solomon's Temple) in this chapter hit me hard.

God thrust them from His presence.

My immediate reaction: Didn't He love them anymore? 

Of course He did. Lamentations 3:22-23, possibly written by the same Jeremiah who wrote Jeremiah 52:3 mentioned above (though this isn't known for sure), also wrote: "Because of the Lord's great love, we are not consumed, for His compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness!"

He loves us, but He disciplines us. 

Look at Hebrews 12:5-7: "And you have forgotten that word of encouragement that addresses you as sons: 'My son, do not make light of the Lord's discipline, and do not lose heart when He rebukes you, because the Lord disciplines those He loves, and He punishes those He accepts as a son.' Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as sons."

Here's what I think is happening, and I'll try to be direct and clear, because I know I get wordy. The church is fractured. The pandemic is easy to blame, racism and discrimination are easy to blame, rioting, hatred, guns, shootings, are easy to point our fingers at. I could choose basically any sentence from any media source over the last months and lay it on the table as "This is the cause of it all." 

But it's not. What has happened to the church is the sin that is no longer able to be stuffed into a cupboard. It is long past the conception stage, looong past birth stage, has definitely grown to adulthood... and what's the next stage according to James?

Y'all, I believe that we have, by and large -- like the proverbial frog -- sat in the lukewarm water too long, and as the water temperature has heated up, we are no longer safe -- but we don't know what to do about it. Lukewarm water is dangerous. Jesus says to the church in Laodicea: "I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm -- neither hot nor cold -- I am about to spit you out of My mouth" (Revelation 3:15-16). 

Then He goes on to reiterate the importance of His discipline: "Those whom I love, I rebuke and discipline. So be earnest, and repent" (Revelation 3:19).

Lord, show us our sin. We repent of it. We ask forgiveness where we have failed to show Your love, Your mercy, Your forgiveness, Your absolute truth. Forgive us where we've bent like reeds before the weight of culture. Forgive us where we've stood on our separate pieces of splintered icebergs and shouted at each other.

We've read Your own pleading words: "I pray also for those who will believe in Me through [the disciples'] message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as You are in Me, and I am in You. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that You have sent Me." 

Lord, we've fallen flat on our faces in regard to this. We're fractured rather than come together, and so -- the world that has witnessed this cannot see the source of our unity, since we have allowed division to push its prow between us. 

Jesus, discipline us so that we are not lukewarm. Raise our temperature, Lord, so that we become bold for You, so that we are not afraid to speak the truth in love in the middle of a culture that seems blind to what truth is or what real love is.

You discipline us, because You love us. Lord, You gave them Babylon. It was horrific. It was terrible. But Lord, it showed them the full-grown sin that had given birth to death, so that out of the ashes, life would spring forth.

You said, "Unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds."

One of my favorite stories is when the Aramean army comes to surround the city of Dothan where Elisha is staying. In the morning, Elisha and his servant go out and look at the huge army around them. Elisha's servant can only see the problem: "Oh my lord," he gasps to Elisha, "What shall we do?"

Elisha says: "Don't be afraid. Those who are with us are more than those who are with them."

Uh. What? Elisha's servant blinks at the huge number of forces. He glances down at himself, and at his master. Two against... but Elisha is praying:

"Oh Lord, open his eyes so he may see."

So the Lord opened the servant's eyes, and he looked and saw the hills full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha.

A.) God opened the servant's eyes, because His servant Elisha asked Him to. The Lord delights in answering the prayers of His servants.

B.) We should never, ever put limits on what the Lord can do. Ever. The hills were full.

Lord, we're in a battle, and it's dark and hard to see past the enemy. Our enemy is not flesh and blood, we know; it is the evil one, all his forces, and the sin he's made so cute and squishable so we can put it in our cupboards. 

Lord, wake us up. Open our eyes, so that we may see that the hills are full!