5. Walk It, Speaking Personally

In previous posts I’ve shared the Christian worldview. God created good, man screwed up and Jesus sorted it all out. I’ve explained that it is the Holy Spirit who makes things come alive and gives us the power to do the right thing moment by moment. As promised, I now share my personal outworking of this all getting practical, explaining the role of the prophetic and hopefully helping you connect the dots.

I’ve previously explained that I hate religion. If I didn’t make it clear previously, I hate it with a passion. I appear to be in good company, as my take is that Jesus reserved His greatest venom for the dicks um, should I better say, “the religious leaders” who enslaved the little people all around Him in His day.

This means that the phrases so loved by the current religious leaders, such as “spirituality”, “born again” (aka “conversion” or “coming to Christ”) and “walking in the Spirit” piss me off, to put it a little impolitely. They do however represent concepts that are important, so forgive me for using them here. You’ll get over it if/when you mature I am sure!

It is my understanding based on the Good Book and decades of observations that everybody inherently knows:

1. That there is a God (a very kleva writer/philosopher once called it the “God shaped void inside of us all” that needed filling);
2. That there is such a thing as absolute truth (the evil of relativity should have gone to the grave with that Einstein fraud and the world is a lot worse off for the replacement of moral absolutes with moral relativity); and
3. That the name of Jesus gets out attention (it catches us all out, somehow when we first hear it, come across it, meet it or are challenged by it.

So there is the starting point upon which I begin. For those who doubt or want to argue with any of the above, please do the research & get real, or b*gger off – just click the little red circle on the top left of a Mac or the little x on the top right of a PC. All of Creation just shouts “design, created, Creator”. Absolute Truth is simply self-evident logic. If the name of Jesus means zip to you then you either have Autism or you’re a BS artist. Either way you’re not someone I want to waste my time investing energy into.

The obvious thing about this list is that if these three things are related (and I believe that they are) then you have the answer to the biggest question in life – who the H*ll is this Jesus dude? If He did what is recorded, said what is recorded to have said, then did what it is claimed to have done then working backwards – He is the Son of God, all come to the Father through Him and when that happens, Global problems all solved [Nirvana] and Bob’s your uncle. Let’s all go away, have a BBQ and beer then get beamed up to the happy place in the sky forthwith.

Humility seems to invite goodness, simplicity and wisdom. That this hasn’t all happened brings me back to me. I live in a slightly less than perfect world. I have to work my butt off to keep up with the Joneses pay the bills; the people around me are pretty much all jerks more interested in themselves than me – they try to steal from me, lie to me or use me. Sure, some of them help me (when there’s something in it for them) and there are a few out there who are better than most, but this little place we call earth is definitely not Paradise from my perspective.

So in return, I speak. I write, talk to friends I meet, answer their questions and tell it like it is. I do this because I can. I enjoy it. It suits me. It’s what I was built for. I’m “in the zone” and “hit the sweet spot” when I take the issues I find out there in the world, then give feedback based on the biblical worldview.

Technically this is called being “prophetic” – not the fortune-telling, reading of the future that is associated with the hocus-pocus New Age “spirituality”. No, this is best described as the FORTH-telling of wisdom, as opposed to the FORE-telling of future events. Yes, they cross over of course but I prefer to use the phrase that I “work in the realm of the prophetic”.

When I exercise this “gift of the prophetic” in faith (that means simply trusting that I am saying what the Lord wants me to say) then if I get it right what I am doing is “walking in the Spirit” [and I shiver all over to say it this way, but as I said, it’s not an ego thing]. The sweet-spot; having the “X” factor or being in the zone – you get the picture.

So this “gift” comes to us from different places and is outworked as a work in progress. Despite naysayers’ expectations that a Christian (and especially those who claim to be prophets) nobody, not even Jesus, woke up one day and had it all together. We grow into a ministry or a mission over time with various experiences all contributing to the mix.

My father was brought up in the depressed years leading up to the war. He started his apprenticeship after the war and sold his business before the first crash of 1987. He had a dream run, hardly lost a bean in his entire career and provided a sound solid income and security for his family.

I on the other hand never lacked, learned skills from multiple jobs and personal & business experiences over the years, made money in my sleep, lost it all a couple of times and now live day-to-day as much as I can. I care more about speaking it like it is than the consequences.

That then is the mix that I bring to the handling of the big question, “Who is this fella who claimed to be the Messiah?” way back when.

I’ve explained that my conversion occurred as a result of an external event; that I was effectively “zapped”. No human individual ever did or said anything that caused me to “flip”. As I have asked a range of people over many decades how they too “became a Christian” it also became clear that they too had all been touched by something external to the humans involved. Sure, people introduced others to church, the bible, helped others to see things through personal testimony, teaching of theory and most often through practical demonstration of some form of love but always, without exception, the conversion experience was (and is) something deeply personal – between this trio above [Our Creator, the name of Jesus and the absolute of Truth] and an individual.

On top of this observation that no human can interfere in another’s personal relationship with Jesus (it is personal and divinely ordained), I have also observed that there are two paths upon which people come to Christ – the one of truth (which is more common among men) and the other of love (a little more common in women). Both of these attributes (truth and love) can be seen manifested in Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. Nowhere else in the history of mankind since the Fall, have I ever seen these two in full measure.

So I avoid proselytism as a direct logical consequence of this all. If it is God (through the Holy Spirit) who zapped me, and if it is He who touches many in their own quiet times, even in their sleep, who am I to attempt to convert others to Him. Isn’t that His business? Oh, sure, I can and do lead people to Him the same as anyone else but that pressin desire to convert the whole world to my Saviour – nope.

It also puts paid to any thinking that the enemy owns the world, or “controls” it. Nah – bunkum!

I think of the scriptures used to justify evangelistic endeavour, the primary one being Matthew’s recording of Jesus telling His team to “get out there, go, into the world” then dive a little deeper to see that the Greek word “go” is continuous present tense. This is much less of a command to get off your butt and travel to inner Mongolia and preach to the unconverted masses, than it is an exhortation to “disciple, teach and explain to those that we meet, AS WE ARE GOING ALONG AND CONTINUING TO GO ALONG doing our business”.

So that’s the model I use.

I do what I can to expound the scriptures; to explain reality as I see it all through the Christian worldview day by day. It’s a shock to hear and see the name of Jesus in our current culture, I grant you but it always has been, and even more so when the person you engage with seems to actually know Him, and worse still even love Him!

So the prophetic is simply applying biblical principles into life’s various challenges – and then doing it “in the Power” of the Holy Spirit, in time and in season. Again, as I’ve blogged about many times before, it is not TO ACHIEVE something; not TO GET something, nor TO CONVERT, which is a means or goal orientated activity. No I write, teach, preach, share, risk, live and work BECAUSE of something. This is the polar opposite of 99% of human activity that goes to work to EARN money; that teaches our children to MAKE them into something; where giving even in the context of our closest relationships is often to GET something; and even in a Christian context to go to church, tithe and look after the desperate and needy in order to GO TO HEAVEN.

When we invert this all and do it because of Who He is, we can finally let go and let God. Boy does that take some faith! The interesting thing though, is that when we do this it seems that the Holy Spirit is then empowered to do what He wants even more.

So, legendary are the dudes that obeyed their call and had to labour for years, if not decades, before they saw ‘results’ [tell me about it after a decade of being a target in Samoa], but I tell you what, the Good Book doesn’t count up our achievements in the entry quiz. No, no, no, St Peter simply asks ya if ya know ‘Im or not. “Get away from me because I never knew you!” should be the thing that puts the fear of God into us – not some dodgy man-made virus BS that is designed to panic the bulk of the world into relying on and even begging for governmental oppression.

As I have matured, it has been much easier to listen to that still small voice that says, “Nisi, you’re doing the right thing!”; to be able to back myself against a sea of historical self-doubt and losers who have knocked me (or tried to) over the years; to be able to explain things so simply that even a child can see how to connect the dots. It sometimes takes seconds before the others ask questions, other times it is years later that they return and note the words I shared. The point though is that the words have been spoken, and hopefully accurately and in season.

Over the eons previous to my time in the sun, there have been many other dudes who have taken it to the people, speaking it like it is. We need them. “Listen up, you lot!” they would say, “The Creator loves you and has set the guidelines for living. Will you just DO what He says for a moment, rather than charging off on your own as if He doesn’t exist? Maybe this is a better way?”

When the SHTF, the people often start to do the right thing, but sadly, usually only when they have to. Wisdom though, defined as the seeing things from God’s perspective in any given situation, comes from the prophetic. One needs to apply principles into any given situation in order for the penny to drop. That’s what I do. Be it faith put in the immoral, ungodly political system that encourages the populace to go out and kill others that the politicians gang up on for the sake of that ‘god’ they call “democracy” or to pay tribute to the ‘mighty’ financial system that borrows at interest from a privately owned banking system that ‘invents’ the people’s own credit, hides that debt and then profits from it all by way of usury; or down to the little old lady that is struggling to make ends meet, or to work out why her husband is acting so stupidly . . . the answer is always so simple.

In my next post I dive into the thorny issue of faith and try to explain the difference between blind faith that assumes and follows the crowd like Lemmings or real faith based on good logic applied to fact that really ‘has legs’. Even if Jesus did teach and preach and even if He did live a perfect life, and even if He is the Son of God, it all means zip unless He is alive and well and works in our lives today, now, and sorts the issues out for us, today, here and now. We all live in the present after all, don’t we?

It’s a real challenge to the boffins and intellectuals among us, but it’s not to the prophet. We can see things so simply because we have learned that faith outworked in speaking the Truth, gives us greater faith; greater understanding and greater motivation to get in there and get our hands dirty. Standby for more shocks to the equilibrium of your normality as I walk it, some more in my next post.