Shaking Them Loose (mirrored on archive.org):
Shaking Them Loose
26 October 2021The single biggest issue for people of faith today is building up faith among other Christians.
We have no pretense of telling them where faith will lead them. Our only concern is that they are set free to walk by their own convictions. The single greatest issue there is convincing them that their convictions trump all human reason and knowledge. They must be led by their hearts, not their brains. The intellect is just a servant of faith.
We can try talking to them, but that can only stir a faith already alive in their hearts. We most certainly must live by our own convictions, following our hearts wherever the Lord leads us. This is where we can claim the divine legacy of blessings, and it starts to show. It is shalom — peace with God — that is our testimony. But it’s primary value is showing it in the context of an otherworldly focus. It must be clear that we despise this world, this system of man-centered living and thinking.
The real issue is not you and I, but our prayers to God on their behalf. If He doesn’t shake them loose, they will remain lost in the grip of living for this world and the things of this world. Our walking by faith and by the Covenant shows the Lord that we are serious about building a moral infrastructure to receive His children when He sets them free from the Harlot Church. He cannot trust us to hold the door open if there’s nothing behind that door for them. It is a burden set on our shoulders to turn our own lives into a refuge, a dominion of refuge and safety in His promises.
Do you hear Him calling to you? Obey your convictions; build the habits of listening as faith makes the most outrageous demands. Then you can share with others how to take that path for themselves. Pray that He calls to others.
The primary means of His calling and His miracle power to set them free is to turn His wrath upon the system. He must shake His children loose from the Harlot Church. He is the only one who can do it. Ours is the job of preparing, and praying for His wrath to fall on sin. And of course, it starts with us. We plead for His wrath to cleanse us first, so that we can be ready.
Pray for His wrath to fall and shake His children loose, setting them free to live by His Covenant.
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3 Comments
By “Harlot Church,” does the author mean a church that is not calling sin out or building up Christians in the faith? It seems that I’m missing a key part of this. I do find the end part interesting, though. Most Christians focus on mercy for sins because that’s the lifechanging Christian message that is and was so different from the way mankind approached their deities. But wrath is also part of who God is, a very necessary one.
I don’t want to speak for him, but I want to say the Harlot church is the collective of churches in general, cross-denominationally, that are mere organizational units that have yet to pull that other foot out of their worldly concerns. Or they have both feet in the world and actively spread the worst kinds of worldly beliefs. There’s a lot of them, presumably, but we can assume there a pitifully small amount of churches, or smaller groups within a church, that genuinely get it right. Some churches (globalist-leaning ones, for instance) are much worse than others, so there’s a spectrum. The degree to which they hold to what God’s idea of what body of believers should be/act, is the degree to which they can expect God to bless it with shalom. Stuff will “be in its correct place,” in general terms.
“Mercy for sins” – nothing wrong with that, but I think too many churches are stuck on it for too long. We all need it, and it’s a part of shalom that the church exclusively enjoys. That’s part of what I call Christianity 101. It’s good for new believers who are just realizing something is wrong, but eventually we need to move on towards the meat of the phD level.
From the author: You are both correct about “Harlot Church”, though I would say the focus in this context is any church that is more concerned with human organization and being taken seriously by the secular society. In Revelation, the Harlot Church rides the Beast of human government, a major moral compromise. It’s the church in compromise with the world. The things you two associate with the label are symptoms of that.
God’s wrath falls on sin. If you are too tightly wedded to sin, then wrath will burn you, too. Mercy is the compassion of God seeking to separate you from that sin. The difficulty, then, is identifying what will draw His wrath.