A Call To The Remnant

The bedrock of Jesus Christ’s kingdom is poverty, not possession. It is not “decisions for Christ,” but a sense of absolute futility. “I cannot begin to do it.” Then, says Jesus, you are blessed. It takes us a long while to believe we are poor, but that is the entrance. The knowledge of our own poverty brings us to the moral frontier where Jesus Christ works. (Oswald Chambers)

Oh how this flies in the face of almost everything we think we know. We spend a lot of time and energy engaged in sophistry. We feel the pull of one camp or another. Our preconceived notions are the high places of our spirits. We make virtues out of words and ideas and notions. We promote and defend what we call virtues and in the end it is all Babylon. It is is either “Jesus said,” or its merely vacuous noise. Cultures are mere reflections of ungodly people. All cultures. We have not been called to appease cultures. We stand as an expression of the Lord Jesus Christ to a dying world. Christ in us should shine a light into the darkness of this dying world.

This knowledge of this kind of poverty comes from encounter. “Who can understand his errors? (Psalm 19:12) There is a light that illuminates the heavens. God set it in its tabernacle. And there is a light that illuminates the hearts of men. God set that light upon a hill upon a cross. It has shone out like a beacon down through the ages. The revelation of our own personal poverty, commonly known as “the end of myself,’ is the beginning of Jesus. I have crossed the frontier and been swallowed up by the landscape of the Kingdom of God when I journeyed to the end of myself. Isaiah cries out “woe is me for I am undone.” And he is swallowed up by fire on his lips and majesty. It sets his course. Who will cry out “oh wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death?”

The carnal mind is death. So much of our speech is carnal. The camps within the camps within the camps. Each pushing and pulling and all the while being blind to our own personal poverty that is wrapped up in the high places of our preconceived notions. Its all death and it is all wretched. Yet, if you are privy to revelation and you can see your own poverty and the coals of fire are bought forth burning the dross away, then the spirit is refined and finds life and peace. And that very life and peace shall quicken your mortal bodies, empowered by the Spirit of God.

The Spirit of God bears witness that we are the children of God. We are the sons and daughters of the living God, a royal priesthood, very much apart from and above the sophistry and the noise of this world and all its ways. We are joint-heirs with Christ and we shall suffer as our Lord suffered for His own cause and we shall bless those who curse us and do good to those whose aim is that we should stumble. For we know that the sufferings of our day cannot be compared to the glory that is to come. It’s is for Christ’s sake we gladly suffer. For righteousness sake. If God is for us brothers and sisters, who can be be against us? For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord (Rom 8:38-39)