A Prophet to the Nations

“Son of man, stand up on your feet and I will speak to you.”

Ezekiel 2:1

“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born, I set you apart and appointed you as a prophet to the nations.”

Jeremiah 1:5

         Brothers,  

               Grace and peace to you from God the Father and from Jesus Christ, the Fathers Son. Who, through His Holy Spirit, poured out on us grace upon grace. I thank our LORD Jesus Christ that He has granted me to be a part of His redemptive purpose by renewing and conforming this world to His glorious image. I am a fellow brother and servant with you for the kingdom.

I am shocked at how easily you were deceived into stupor. Your fathers, your kings, and your teachers have not taught you the full truth of scripture, and neither did you seek to learn it. Thus, you are currently battling many issues, on many fronts, and your strength is failing. The reason you are experiencing these issues so acutely, is that you are not addressing them in the manner they require. The current predominant method to solving anything in the church has become a sham. One in which the Lord’s servants, the pastors and teachers, are afraid to speak the truth to each other because of concerns of how they will be seen, or concerns about losing their job. Because of this, they have become more careful not to offend the sinners, rather than being careful to teach the FULL council of God.

Some doctrines are never even touched, because of the fear that they may cause disagreement. As a result, ignorance or lack of desire for knowledge of the full council of God sets in. This lack of understanding leads to a warped understanding of the Lords will, and that, in turn, causes misdirection in our beliefs and actions. Churches and leaders tend to focus too much on one aspect and ignore others, as if nothing else was important. There are many things in the human experience that we must encounter, and the more we understand what the word of the Lord says about each one of these experiences, the better judgement we will be able to make. I am sure the pastors know exactly the kind of errors that some people struggle with. Their people are lost because there are many doctrines and principles that are rarely, if ever, addressed. Though those principles are not exactly pertaining to salvation and thus some may say, “it has nothing to do with salvation” as an excuse to not address those principles and doctrines. This results in a fragmented understanding of the faith, in which most of the church understands the basics of salvation, and sometimes knows the morals of the stories; but does not have a way of combining all of that knowledge into a coherent, sensible understanding of what it means to know the Lord, and his purpose for this world, the church, and eventually, the individual.

The Lord has been tolerating this incomplete, insufficient teaching for decades now. Consistently, there have been warnings and signs that showed this issue plainly. This was shown by the fact that Christian young people abandoned the faith at a rate of ~80% in the first year of college. The emptying of the churches due to compromised teaching. The most prominent of which have been in the last decade: there are hundreds of testimonies of broken faith and deconstructed belief in God. How did this happen? Because there was no foundation on which to build a solid understanding of the faith. There is a serious lack of connective linking information.

Thus, you lost your way in the desert, and have not been careful to keep His commandments and

His rules, which benefit each person individually and by extension, benefit your community and your nation.

But God, being rich in mercy with the great love with which He loved us, did not bring upon us the full measure of punishment and recompense we deserve for neglecting our duty. The Lord continued to be gracious to our nation. His long-suffering was a time given to us to repent and clean our hands and our hearts, but we as a culture and as a church did not repent, nor did we pay attention to the signs of the times. As the Lord has always done, he sent his servants, to warn his people, but we did not listen, nor did we repent, but dove further into sin. Hence, the most murderous ideology (scourge) on the face of the earth has made a comeback. Marxism has crept all the way into the highest offices in the nation. It has crept into the highest echelons of seminaries and churches, without regard to how small or large. With Marxism, came critical theory, feminism, racism, and tribalism, which divide us at the most basic level. That division creates strife and separates the believers from striving to be conformed to the image of Christ, and instead pushes them to be conformed to their group identity or race.

This process of identifying with a tribe or group or race is fundamentally religious. It replaces the image of Christ with the image of their choosing and now they act to receive approval from their new idol. This process is religious because it reorients a person’s sense of self and belonging, sets up a new system of truth, a new system of behavior, a new system of action, and a new system of reward. The phrase: “your truth,” or “my truth” has become excessively popular in this age. Imagine the shift in thought that needs to take place for a phrase like “your truth” to make sense. Truth is exclusive by its nature and its definition. By definition, if something is true, something else, (that is not the same thing) cannot be true in the same way at the same time.

As a result of all this, the Lord’s righteous judgement is upon us. We have lost common sense in our society, such that it can no longer differentiate between men and women. A culture that celebrates sin and abominations. We live in a culture which hates the truth on all subjects of life. The men are weak, lack spines, and act like women. The women are promiscuous, and seek to dominate the men. Your leaders are wolves, who line their own pockets by unrighteousness: through robbery, human trafficking, lies, and laws that are oppressive and designed to demoralize the people. Children have seen this, but the religious leaders are silent. They are silent for one of the following reasons: 1. They are truly blind and don’t see things clearly. 2. They see but cannot discern what they are seeing. 3. They see, discern, but choose to do nothing. Abomination has become a cause of celebration; depravity is praised; truth has stumbled in the public square. The Lords wrath is upon us because the trumpet has been blown, and the flames of war have reached our doors, but none go to battle because they are all afraid.

“My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge. Because you have rejected knowledge, I will also reject you as My priests. Since you have forgotten the law of your God, I will also forget your children.” “You have treated the wounds of my people lightly,” because you cannot or do not look after the health of the sheep, both spiritually and psychologically. Look at what is going on in our own house: believers are more concerned with the things of the world than the things of God. Believers are not given a proper guidance on combining faith and life. There are some serious issues in this age for believers. Serious considerations on how to combine various practical issues with the doctrines of the faith. The church can barely deal, in its own midst, with depression, anxiety, existential dread, guilt and so on. Once they realize that the church doesn’t have satisfactory answers, they look for answers elsewhere, and find them in the world, and follow the trail of crumbs out of the church, because the church didn’t have the wisdom or the knowledge to deal with them. The church has fallen asleep on the enchanted ground. The alarm bells have been ringing for decades, brothers. But only now has any attention been paid to the current issues.

The western church currently resembles the 10 virgins whose lamps are going out, primarily because the church has lost the credibility and the respect it earned over centuries, as a place for morals and spiritual integrity. Without that spiritual integrity that comes only from God, there cannot be any resolute, moral stance on biblical and righteous principles that guide the individual, and by extension, the culture. As such, the influence that the church should have had on the world, has ceased. Their ears cannot hear, and with their eyes, they cannot see. All souls are thirsty for that which is real, something that can remove their guilt from their heart, cleanse their conscience, and give them a purpose. However, when presented with Jesus, the author of life itself; when presented with the sacrifice he offered, the acceptance of the sacrifice, the resurrection from the dead to confirm all these promises, it seems like a foolish thing to them. Instead, they run after New Age Spirituality.

Even in all this current confusion and complexity, the Lord commands everyone, everywhere to repent. Who knows if He will not relent and leave a blessing behind? What do you have to lose anymore? If you believe the culture is rotting, it’s because the church did not do its job. The job of the church is to be a salt and light to the society, if the light in you be darkness, how bad is the darkness? And if salt lost its saltiness, how can it be used for anything? If you repent earnestly, the pastors to the church, the church to the pastors, brothers to sisters and vice versa, brother to brothers for your sins, and sisters to sisters for your sins. Then the LORD will pour His grace and Holy Spirit on you like a river, and you will be lifted upon the waves of His flood to breathe fresh air and clear your mind and your lungs from the stench of the decay that currently surrounds us.

Brothers, we MUST repent with our whole heart and call out to the Lord. We have abandoned the study of the Word and thus have been deceived into believing lies. Those lies are destroying our lives. There is rampant sexual immorality, materialism, feminism, gossip, and we don’t trust each other. That’s why our strength is weak and our labor yields little. Leaders, your fear and your indecisiveness are clearly visible to all who look, even the unbelievers look to you and see that you lack strength. You lack strength because you have strayed from the source, like a branch that no longer gets sap from the root. You fear to speak out and think that if you remain silent and unseen, that this trial shall elude you. You are mistaken. However, if you speak on the authority of scripture, you don’t need anyone else to stand beside you to support you or agree with you, because you have Jesus to stand beside you and support you. Only genuine repentance and return to the Lord will bring any consolation to a guilty heart and ashamed spirit.

The Lord will cleanse the guilty and show grace to the penitent. His mercy will shower the church with the riches of His spirit and remove our sins far from us. If we stay true to the word, we have his promise that we will become more and more conformed to the image of Jesus. As we strive together to be conformed to the image of Jesus, the Spirit will work in us, giving us the mind of Christ, showing us the heart of the gospel, and giving us the power to live the Christian life. In this current time we live in, the entire civilization is desperate for a truthful, unifying message. If one was paying attention, then everything we have seen over the past few years, indicate that people want to unite, they want to be a part of something greater than themselves, they want to see justice, they want to see redemption. Unfortunately, due to their blindness, and the blindness or weakness of the church, what justice and redemption looks like is distorted and perverted by sin. In attempts to bring about justice, they merely commit more injustice and add to their sins. Their methods will only bring more pain and more guilt, because their perception of atonement is sin, and they defile themselves further, thinking it is cleansing them. They look for Jesus but find themselves, their own idols, and their own gods.

Understand that you cannot just defend forever. Have you forgotten what our Lord Jesus said, “I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” What does that mean? It means that gates in the wall of a city are designed to fend off the outsiders. Christ said that “the gates of hell shall not prevent against the church.” It is the church that must be on the offensive against the forces of evil in the world in all spheres of life. We are given a mighty weapon, brothers, a weapon that is designed to destroy strongholds and demolish all powers and principalities which raise themselves against the knowledge of God. This weapon is a double-edged sword, it is sharp, and it is being polished to shine like lightning, that comes from the east and shines as far as the west. Sadly, this mighty weapon has been sheathed for far too long, and our strength to wield it has been sapped from us. Let us pray that the Lord pours out His grace for us to gather the strength and the conviction necessary to unsheathe the sword, swing it across the earth, and gather into one the people of God that are scattered. This sword is the Word of God.

Fear not, my brothers, though the world with all its evil and hatred will descend upon you, it will not overtake you. It may capture you; it may inflict pain, it may make your life miserable, it may even take your life, and the lives of those you love. But none of the world’s power and methods can take from you the Lord’s spirit, it cannot take from you your reward, it cannot separate you form the love of Christ. And Christ himself, will raise your bodies and the bodies of those you love who have perished in this righteous, holy war. Therefore, He who is able to hold you in Himself forever and ever, shall guard your heart, strengthen your soul, and invigorate your spirit for the purpose of conforming you to the image of Christ. May the Lord bless you and keep you, the Lord make His face shine upon you, and give you peace.