I was telling a friend of mine the other day that I really don’t write or say anything new. In this season I’ve noticed that there are three topics Father seems to be emphasizing. Everything I write, talk about, or seek to grow in comes under one of the three topics.
The first topic is God is love. For years believers have lacked the revelation that God genuinely and deeply loves them. Oh sure, we talked about His love and held doctrinal beliefs that God is love, but we didn’t know, that we know, that we know God loves us. It was just the correct thing to believe. It was merely head knowledge but it didn’t impact our reality. The actions and attitudes of believers revealed this was the case. In this hour I see Father is opening people’s eyes to His character and going beyond head knowledge and straight to the heart as He is giving people revelation of the truth that He truly is love and He deeply loves us. That is no small thing. When a person gets ahold of this everything changes.
The second topic is freedom. “Who the son sets free is free indeed.” For years, even centuries, the church has been held captive to the systems and ideologies of men. We would talk about freedom, but we didn’t even know what it meant to truly be free in Christ. That’s largely because we didn’t even know we were prisoners! We had become so familiar with our prison cells that we came to believe they were of God and couldn’t recognize them for what they were. Our captivity rendered the church powerless, impotent, and joyless. Creativity was killed as believers were forced to live inside boxes and color inside the lines. But Father is setting people free from religious obligation and turning them back to the freedom that was purchased for them through Christ.
The third topic is “love one another.” It’s been said that they will know we are His by our love. Sadly, the church somehow interpreted that as we’d be recognized as being followers of Christ by our doctrinal beliefs, our church attendance, our adherence to rules and traditions, our awesome worship services, our in depth knowledge of the Bible, and so forth. Then we scratch our heads and wonder why so many want nothing to do with God. We convinced ourselves we loved one another but the truth is the church has been totally relationally impaired. Everything has been agenda driven and all our interpretations of the Bible have been from an institutional perspective. We’d go through great contortions in order to force the New Testament that was written entirely from a relational reality to fit into our institutional boxes. Our relationships resembled those found within a corporation or a social club rather than a family. And that’s just it; for the most part the reality of the body of Christ being a family was simply not present. At most the church resembled some kind of horribly dysfunctional family in which certain brothers dominated their other siblings as they kept them at a distance from their Father, all the while convincing their siblings and themselves they were doing their Father a service. But that season is coming to a close as the children of God are refusing to allow any person to stand between them and their Father any longer. Many who once dominated their siblings are realizing they are actually equals and repenting of their domineering ways and finding great joy in simply being a part of the family. Believers are shedding old identities and starting to place their identities in Christ and Christ alone. Because of this, believers are finding it easier to love others, especially those who are different from themselves. Relationship with one another is rapidly becoming the priority among the saints.
It is my belief that if believers truly grab ahold of these three things and take them to heart we will see a strong and mature church. Each of these three things do not stand alone, rather they are interwoven and all flow out of the first, the core revelation that we are loved by God. When one sees God’s heart, freedom is the natural result. He can no longer stand for anything that robs himself or another of his or her liberty. And one cannot truly love another until He knows God is love because we are reflections of our views of God. But, we cannot love another as he or she truly needs to be until we are free within our hearts to do so. These three topics are the things that I so yearn to see become a reality in the church and what I see Father doing in this season.
Loren Rosser
