When you earnestly seek to do what’s right, inside a system you do not recognize as broken, you’re asking to be blindsided. When you implicitly trust leaders who depend on the system for power, image and funds, you’re asking to be betrayed. Not seeing what you need to see, you won’t have a clue what’s going on.
Even though I cannot live out any commitment perfectly, I can set my heart toward it and use my voice to affirm it. And that matters. A lot.
Today where you live, religiosity slaughters Sabbath by the very way it tries to keep it. But when people desperate for rest leave the comfort of religious exhaustion and stumble toward God himself, Sabbath remains – and the Lord of Real Rest revives them.
Choosing to go with God where my church culture had forbidden, I had no clue how much seeing and grieving lay ahead. And how very much love and life.
It’s agonizing to be bullied. And in the church? The agony multiplies exponentially when victims have believed deceptive abusers to be godly Christians.
"How long will you try to go both ways?" Elijah cried. Where people identified with God cling to deep double-mindedness, they empower a two-headed snake.
The work of exile – the work God wants to do through it – is to free you from bondage that masquerades as relationship, to draw you to himself, to show you what is and is not love. Perhaps the hardest thing you can do in exile – and by far the most freeing – is to stay there until it has done its work.
Long ago and far away, God promised a scattered people, “I will be a sanctuary to you during your time in exile,” and, “I will gather you back.”
Prayer from Qualities of a Spiritual Warrior Father, thank you that this is our time and season to fight back – to war against a religious spirit that has bound…