The fact that one doesn’t fit into the world brings comfort to a saint, but when one finds oneself at odds with most other fellow Christians about matters of the Church then there seems to be a real problem … You might find yourself asking, “Why do the oddities of the modern Church bother me so Lord, when others seem to be just fine with them”? … “Is it me Lord, or is there really something not quite right with the status quo of Your Body today, and if that’s the case then why is my spirit burdened with it”? … “Am I just a never satisfied nit picker operating out of my flesh, or is it You cogitating my spirit to action”? … “Is it You calling, and if so what type of calling is it, and what is it that You’d have me do”? …If such feelings are “self” promoted then we can just repent of them and get on about our business, but if such feelings are Holy Spirit promoted then no amount of human rationalization will make them go away … From my own experience the only way to dissolve the fire of His unction that becomes shut up in my bones is to go forth under the Power of the unction to fulfilling His instruction …This is my final excerpt installment from Os Guinness’s book, “Prophetic Untimliness” entitled:Misfits in an Ill-Fitting WorldQUOTE:For any Christians who would speak out today in a time of the church’s deepening cultural captivity prophetic untimeliness carries a clear cost. In fact, there are three in particular.The first cost of prophetic untimeliness is a sense of maladjustment. When society is increasingly Godless and the Church increasingly corrupt, faithfulness carries a price: The man or woman who lives by faith does not fit in. There is no sugarcoating the loneliness caused by prophetic untimeliness.This was the hard lot of most of the Hebrew prophets. Isaiah of Jerusalem was expressly warned by God, “You are not to call hard what this people call hard. It is the Lord of Hosts whom you should hold sacred; He must be the object of your fear and awe”. Jeremiah was told similarly, “Brace yourself, Jeremiah. Tell them everything I bid you; when you confront them, do not let your spirit break, or I shall break you before their eyes”. “Ezekiel’s commission was equally stern: “But the Israelites will refuse to listen to you for, for they refuse to listen to Me; all of them are brazen faced”. Some have said that Jeremiah’s message was the hardest of all the prophets, a patriot commissioned to speak like a traitor. Others have said his nature was the most sensitive. What we do know is that he reacted with intense feelings of isolation and betrayal: “Because I felt your hand upon me I have sat alone, for you have filled me with indignation. Why then is my pain unending, and my wound desperate, past all healing”? “0 God”, he even complains, “You are like a brook that fails, whose waters are not to be relied on”. God’s answer to Jeremiah is severe, almost unsympathetic. “If you turn back to me, I shall take you back. This people may turn again to you, but you are not to turn to them. To withstand them I shall make you strong, an unsealed wall of bronze”. Similarly, it was said of Athanasius, the great fourth-century champion of orthodoxy that he was “Athanasius contra mundum” (against the world). As many lonely and embattled Christians know in our own day, it can be strenuous and demanding to live before the Audience of One. Making unpopular stands or speaking uncomfortable words on His behalf can be painful to the point of anguish. The second cost of prophetic untimeliness is a sense of impatience. For when society becomes Godless and the Church corrupt, the forward purposes of God appear to be bogged down and obstructed, and the person who lives by faith feels the frustration. At such a moment, untimely people see beyond the present impasse to the coming time when better possibilities are fulfilled. Their response to any delay of the vision is impatience, raw, bit-chomping impatience. And their natural cry is, “How long, 0 Lord”? This point is the exact opposite of what is supposed. As the common account runs, anyone who resists the current opinions of the majority or the forward march of the dominant power must be obstructionist. The prevalent trend is “progressive”, so resistance must be “reactionary”. Those who don’t want to go forward obviously want to go backwards. Those who disagree with what the “right” people know to be wise and good are clearly wrong headed and muddled. “You’re out of line”, they’re told. Get out of our way or be crushed by the relentless juggernaut of history.Is it ever too late to be what we might have been, and to do what we might have done? For followers of Jesus the kairos moment, the right time in all its fullness of opportunity, is in God’s hands not ours. And this earth, this life, and our endeavors are not all we have. So the final End of All Days is assured, and the Days of the Lord that come before then will come again and again and again, as often as God promises or threatens them. But for those who see those days from afar, and whose faithfulness makes them untimely people in their own age, the wait will still be long and the impatience will still be strong. “How long, 0 Lord” will be their cry, and often it will be a cry of pain.The third cost of prophetic untimeliness is a sense of failure. For when society becomes Godless and the Church corrupt, the prospects of good people succeeding are significantly dimmed and the temptation to feel a failure is ever present. In today’s world, this dilemma confronts us in the form of an added double bind. On the one hand, we are told by a myriad of Christian speakers that we should be thinking about our legacy, the clear knowledge of our contribution after our time on earth. On the other hand, we are told by countless other Christians that ambition is always wrong; synonymous with egotism, it is selfish and quite un-Christian.Both of these positions are wrong. In fact, they are the opposite way around. For as followers of Jesus we can and should be ambitious, but we should never be concerned with our legacies. And the reason lies in the character of calling. When all that we are, and have, and do becomes a response to God’s call, we live, in Oswald Chambers’s famous words, “our utmost for His highest”. Created to be who we are, and called to be who God knows we can be, we each reach higher and farther as we rise to God’s call. This is the Christian equivalent of the Greeks pursuit of excellence, rising to be the very best that we can be. But “our utmost for His highest” is also the profoundest, the most sublime, and the worthiest ambition that has ever stirred the human heart.A simple consequence follows. If we define all that we are before our great Caller and live our lives before one audience, the Audience of the One, then we cannot define or decide our own achievements and our own success. It is not for us to say what we have accomplished. It is not for us to pronounce ourselves successful. It is not for us to spell out what our legacy has been. Indeed, it is not even for us to know. Only the Caller can say. Only the Last Day will tell. Only the final “Well done” will show what we have really done. ) Those who are called must therefore wait. We can, if we like, thumb our noses at the “b*tch goddess of success”, and live carelessly when it comes to concerns such as “legacy”. But being human, at times this is simply not enough. And just as we want to bring forward the vision rather than hope and trust, so we want to know if we have really succeeded rather than wait for God’s “Well done”. Any sense of failure, then, is maddening, for a calling is a project like any venture. And after all, who likes to fail at any task we take on? Yet the truth is that in certain situations and periods of history, failure is only to be expected. Such a setting is surely the key to understanding God's celebrated words to Baruch, scribe to the prophet Jeremiah: “Do you seek great things for yourself? Do not seek them”. This is often taken as a blanket veto on all ambition, but it is more a comment on ambition in Baruch’s time, a time of devastation after the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians in 586 B.C. In King David’s time, or even later in the reign of good kings such as Hezekiah and Josiah, a man of character with ambition might easily have risen to the top of society. But in the grim days of King Zedekiah, evil rather than goodness was fashionable, so there was little scope for good men or women to succeed. The price of faithfulness was apparent failure. Baruch would not succeed, God tells him, but a least his life would be protected.How do we each react when we find that our noblest dreams and most profound strivings are staring in the face failure? Never for one moment must we allow ourselves an excuse to ease up in pursuing God's call. Not for a second can we think of taking the bitter pill of apparent failure and sugarcoating it with rationalizations about the difficult times in which we live. God knew the times in which He called us to live, and He alone knows the outcome of our times as He knows the outcome of our lives and work". Our failures may be His success. Our setbacks may prove His turning points. Our disasters may turn out to be His triumphs. What matters for us is that His gifts are our calling.So every day our work is like a prayer. And every day we give back all we can of God’s gifts to Him, with love, and trust, and hope.:beard: ... This is a great little book!
