Yeah you read that title correctly. I’m truly glad the church is closed. The American church has needed a change for quite awhile. We’ve became a church that is selfish and only go for us, for our ticket into heaven, our hour service on Sunday and we’re good until the next week. This isn’t what the church was created to be. We were created to become equipped then go out and make disciples. Last year while I was in Colombia the pastor of the church we worked with said He doesn’t want his church to be full, ever. His goal is to train his church and then send them out, once that happens new people come to the church and the he sends that group out as well. I was literally blown away by this perspective, but its the perspective that most of the world has (outside of the western church).
Don’t get me wrong, the western church has some incredible things going for it! We have so much influence on the rest of the world and we really do send a lot of people out. But we’ve lost our focus, we’ve become numbers focused and all about being saved so we can go to heaven and we forget about what Jesus asked us to do. We all know the great commission on Mathew 18, but we tend to forget Matthew 10:8 where Jesus tells us to “Go and announce to them that the Kingdom of Heaven is near. Heal the sick, raise the dead, cure those with leprosy, and cast out demons. Give as freely as you have received.” We are literally called to bring kingdom “On Earth as it is in Heaven” that’s our purpose here!
I’ve watched during this quarantine people freak out over not being able to attend a church gathering, does it suck? yeah it does, but i’ve been cheering it on. As I wrote in my last blog, God has brought us back to the family unit, to the way we were designed to be. What if we took the time to stop complaining and make the most of the time that we have now? We can have church in our homes, instead of everyone being congregated in one building, we are now spread out in multiple homes, literally increasing the number of churches! We’ve got to gain a new perspective, instead of complaining about the “bad” times, let’s look for the good and ask God what He is doing in these moments.
I truly believe that He is using this time to bring us back to our authority and give the church a voice again. For too long we’ve allowed our situations and atmosphere to influence us when we are called to be the influencers. What would it look like for the church to pray again, to prophecy again, to heal the sick again, to contend for revival, to influence government and business and every other sphere of the marketplace. Instead of people running to psychics and tarot readers and horoscopes and coming to us for the answers because we hear from Heaven and from the King of Kings. I look at the underground church in Iran (which is the fastest growing church in the world) at how despite some of the worst persecution imaginable they are still making disciples in their nation, healing the sick, casting out demons and truly making an impact on their country. Can we take some advice from them and model what they are doing here? Let’s not waste this very unique time that we have, a time to stop and reset and change the way that we’ve done things. Even if we never go back to normal, He is still good, would you be satisfied with that? My friend Jasmine Tate wrote a song Simply Jesus, and that’s the message we have in this hour, “Its Simply Jesus.”
