Big Ben’s Weblog

I attend fellowship at Freedom Fellowship Church in Greer, South Carolina, and we have been doing a series called One Prayer.  One Prayer begs the question, “if you had one prayer for the church as a whole that you would want God to answer, what would it be.  My pastor prayed to “Make us Matter,” and brought up the question of if the world would miss the existence of the Church if it ceased to exist right now.  I wonder if anyone one would miss it, or even worse, be glad that it’s gone.  Then we watched videos of Craig Groeschel and Perry Noble, and their prayers were, “Make us One,” and “Make us Dangerous.”  Well right now, i’m on tour with my band, and when I woke up this Sunday morning, I did so, right as the Freedom service would be starting, well actually I was an hour ahead….crap.  Anyway, I started to think about what my one prayer for the Church would be.  ”MAKE US KNOW.”  I believe there is sooo much that we as the body of believers in Christ don’t know about His Love for us, and His Sacrifice for us, and our own stupidity.  This is not meant to look down on the dumb things that I and others do, I just want to emphasize what might happen if were to truly KNOW what the implications of what we read in the bible were, and if we were to truly KNOW how much time is wasted on little things, and how little effort we put into the things that do matter.  GOD MAKE US KNOWLEDGEABLE OF WHAT IT MEANS TO BE THE CHURCH, OPEN OUR EYES TO THE NEED IN THE WORLD AND THE GREED IN OUR LIVES.  

I was reading through Colossians today and I came across this passage that rattled my sphincter.   Colossians 2:12 – Having been BURIED with Him (Christ) in Baptism, and RAISED with Him through your Faith in the Power of God, who RAISED Him from the DEAD.  Up until this point in my life as a Christian, I have viewed Baptism as a public declaration of one’s decision to follow Christ, and I still know that to be true, but God just hit me with this: that We are dead without Him. PERIOD. And that THE ONLY reason that we can be Baptized is because of the complete Sacrifice that Christ made on the Cross for all, and we are Baptized in His Death, and made clean in His Resurrection.  IF WE TRULY KNEW, the price of the Cross, the world would be different.  I realize that many have an reasonable view of the pain that our Saviour felt on the cross, but still it is in no way the HATE, the PAIN, the LONELINESS, the GUILT, that He faced….for us.  GOD MAKE US KNOW EXACTLY WHAT HE FELT, because if we did, the world would not be the same.

One more thing that I am feeling led to share is something that I read in the book The Signature of Jesus, by Brennan Manning, and there is soo much that I could quote from this book,  I mean, the man spent seven months in a cave in Spain, not seeing a single person the entire time, in complete solitude with our Creator.  He stated this that hit me early on, “Power affects behavior; Love affects the Heart.”  I fear that we as the Church are trying to gain way too much power, in our communities, and in the world as a whole.  And power might affect behavior, I.E. everyone actin glike good Christians, but God seeks the renewal of the heart, and for that.  We must clothe ourselves in LOVE.  GOD MAKE US KNOW, THE POWER OF YOUR LOVE IN US, AND THROUGH US.  He then later writes, “If we preferred to be FAITHFUL, rather than successful, the walls of indifference to Jesus Christ would crumble.”  GOD MAKE US KNOW WHAT TRUE FAITHFULNESS IS.   

GOD MAKE US KNOW WHAT YOU WANT US TO TAKE FROM EVERYTHING, AND NOT JUST TAKE WHAT WE WANT TO SEE.