A Call To The Remnant

Let us keep it in the front of our minds that the time is short and the Lord is coming soon. It is a very difficult thing to keep a sense of urgency, our senses often want to take the path of least resistance and are easily dulled. It typically takes some kind of natural disaster, tragedy or act of war to jolt us back to the reality of the fragility of life and the impending coming of the Lord. Saints, let us press in and stay the course. Let our reality be the Spiritual reality that surrounds us. There is a war and its ongoing. The enemy is never at rest, in fact, as his time runs out, he is more frantic.

Only before the throne can we truly grasp the nature of the conflict. Let us arise from apathy and dullness of thought and remind ourselves of the task at hand. Let us pray with courage and knowledge that we have been called to pray for such a time as this. Prayer is the secret weapon that the enemy fears most. Why? Because to truly pray one has to come into the presence of the living God, one has to come before the throne of grace. Anytime a saint comes before the throne he is encouraged and strengthened to carry on the fight. It is no surprise that this aspect of our walk is the one that would be greatly opposed.

Let us come before the throne together and petition our heavenly Father in the name of the Lord Jesus. The enemy may whisper in your ear ” oh what’s the point,” yet we must learn to recognize the enemies voice. He is an accuser of the brethren and a discourager of the saints. We must learn to recognize it so that we may ignore it and do the exact opposite of it quickly.

The small still voice says ” come unto me.” He says ” draw near to me.” He constantly encourages us to make movement towards Him .He also lets us know that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him. He makes Himself known to those who do not lose heart and continue to overcome by the power of Him that overcame.. Now, the enemy is a  wind that never stops blowing. He will certainly try and blow ou off this course. Yet brave men and women put their faces to the wind and move forward in the direction that they have been called. The enemy blows against us individually, but uses the winds of the collective culture to pressure us into compromise. And the compromised life is the crossless life.

To stand against the winds of the culture is to take up ones cross every day. The winds of our culture howl and right now are gaining strength. Almost all run with the winds at their back, the path of least resistance. Very few will stand up against the winds that blow. Jesus Himself stood upon the mount in the midst of a cultural hurricane and gave a sermon that defied nature itself. He declared “You have heard that it was said…….. but I say to you.” He took the reality of that day , a foundation upon which that culture stood upon, and He upturned it. He took everything that they thought they knew and He declared this truth………”But I say to you.” Two worlds collided. The natural world just collided with the Spiritual world. For those who choose life, this collision is the living out of the most revolutionary sermon every preached by Jesus .ts the revolution against the very flesh that encases us, that the spirit might break free from its mortal tent and soar with the sounds of chains, breaking and falling to the earth behind it.

In every generation, in every century, the Lord’s people have stood against the cultural realities of the day. The Lord has always maintained a witness. And these cultural realities have always been endorsed and embraced and oftentimes been led by religious authorities, giving lost people false hope. And in the midst of such reality, God stands and speaks through His remnant, His witness. The martyrs down through the ages have stood against cultural hurricanes. So many brave saints.

John Wycliffe was such a saint. He and the Lollards defied the howling winds of their day and paid dearly for it. Such was the hatred for Wycliffe that the religious establishment of that day dug up his bones so that they could burn them. And all because he translated the Bible into English and exposed the false teachings of the Catholic church. John Huss was another man to stand up and defy the howling winds of culture and was burned at the stake. William Wilberforce stood in the midst of the storm for decades after coming to Christ and was rewarded by hearing on his death bed that slavery had been abolished in the British Empire.Christians who condemned slavery in America 200 years ago stood against such winds.

I had an uncle who was a conscientious objector in 1947, he refused to pick up a gun, even although there was no war. He spent 6 months in jail and it would have been six months of hell. He later spent 30 years as a missionary to Pakistan. It takes enormous courage to stand against the cultural winds. Bonhoeffer and the confessing church in Nazi Germany in the 30s stood against winds that would and did kill many of them. Muslims who come to Christ in a Muslim country stand against howling winds.

Will you stand up against such winds? When the time comes, will you have the courage to do as others have done before you? Only by a living relationship with the eternal God can men and woman stand up in so fierce a storm and head directly into the teeth of it. This is the purpose and the nature of prayer. It takes us to the place of actual reality, the eternal throne. This place is our home, not this world. This is the place where we will spend eternity, not this world. This is the place of miracles, not this world. This is the place where all things are possible, not this world. This is the place where we are fulfilled, not this world. This world is a mere shadow to the coming reality of eternity, and we are privileged people that we have access to a place that gives us a glimpse of our eternal dwelling. Let us not forsake nor take for granted this privilege. Only those who have stood against the individual winds that come against them will be able to stand when the cultural hurricane comes, and believe me brothers and sister it is coming to the West very soon.