It’s my last Christmas Eve service at Heights Church serving as pastor.
It took me over 19 years of preaching to finally get a message where the points play off of a word! My penultimate message and I FINALLY get something together using one word!
I use the word TUNE to talk about hearing God. I am preaching on one of my favorite Luke passages on Simeon and Anna.
The “U” of my message is this: UNDERSTAND the times.
This part of what I said: We need a great understanding of our time. In tuning our hearts, we need to step out of our echo chambers and dare to HEAR what the Spirit may be saying to the church. It’s not a comfortable place to be, but it is a NECESSARY place in these days.
The Lord is looking for a PROPHETIC church and we have to understand the times to be PROPHETIC and not PATHETIC.
Let me extend my thoughts here:
The past year has shown the American Church to be seriously lacking in the prophetic department. We have misunderstood the times. We have used old forms, old wineskins, to judge what was going on and the Lord used this year to bust those old wineskins. The challenge ahead is this: will the American Church waste its time trying to recover the spilled out wine or will it move (finally) into the new paradigm of being truly prophetic?
We have called “good” what is actually “evil.” We have listened to voices of the past, not the voice of the Spirit. We have thumped our “evangelical” chests and declared something to be “the word of the Lord” when all we’ve done is read an old script. We have failed to stop and listen. We have surrounded ourselves with the very product we used to complain other people would have in their own lives: teachers who would say exactly what we wanted to hear.
And when we heard something given with a true heart and a shaking voice that said something different than we liked, we declared it “FALSE.” We called “good” what was evil and declared “false” what was actually true.
We need our hearts tuned. We need our lives shaken. We need to fine tune our hearing so we are more like Elijah. He could discern that the noise wasn’t God. We’ve been infatuated with the noise. We need to hear that “still small voice”… that whisper… once again.
May our hearts be stirred. May our spirits be disturbed. May 2018 be a year of the prophetic and may we repent of our pathetic ways in 2017.
Apprentice 2 Jesus 