Roar: In Praise of Dissatisfaction and Restlessness

More and more, there is a restlessness of spirit among people of faith.   Some mistakenly perceive it to be a “critical spirit” or a bad attitude.  But it’s not.  It’s an answer to prayer.  For years people have talked of a coming move of God, an outpouring of His power for renewal in the church and vision for the practical inbreaking of Kingdom of God in the streets and in the neighborhoods.   There has been talk of being “on the cutting edge” and “catching the wave” of the Spirit’s present action and power. And there has been prayer.  Prayer neighborhoods, for the church, for personal repentance and revival and corporate renewal and justice and reconciliation.  But even in all that, the words, the language and the God-talk fall short.  None of the phrases really packs the punch it once did.  The techniques and formulas and programs and ideas all just “kind-of” work.  But deep down, we know.  We want more.  MORE!          More and more of us are less and less willing to settle for faith that “kind-of” works.  We’re not willing anymore to “listen to reason” and “be patient”.  The still small voice of God inside us is getting louder and rowdier and more insistent.  We have prayed for revival and renewal, and God is sending a holy restlessness.  A blessed dissatisfaction with the way things are and have been.  We have been taken by surprise.  We asked for vision, because without it people lose heart and perish.  We have asked for the mind and sight of Christ, yet we remain profoundly unprepared to recognize and embrace the vision He gives us.          So in answer to our prayers, he gives us a longing.  He gives us dissatisfaction and restlessness.  He calls us to move on quickly.  We can receive provision and survive on manna and quail, but still fail to enter the promise.  He calls us to step into the promise.  To watch and pray.  To look for the next thing He is doing.            We know as a church that God is taking us to the next level.   We simply do not know what that means.  What it looks like.  So we need to listen.  Those afflicted with this gift of vague vision and holy frustration need to answer the Spirit’s call to WATCH and PRAY…”I have set watchmen on your walls, O Jerusalem, who shall never hold their peace day or night.  You who make mention of the Lord, do not keep silent, and give Him no rest till He establishes and till he makes Jerusalem a praise in the earth”–.Isaiah 62:6-7.  We need to obey the Spirit’s call to our hearts to give the Lord no rest till He establishes His Kingdom.          God is answering our prayers, by calling us to prayer.  He is calling us to war.  The sadness we sense at times, or the anger over the enemy’s schemes, is itself an answer (discernment) and a call to battle.“For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in heavenly places.”—Ephesians 6:12.  We are being called to move on…to get angry in the Lord and go to war.  We are being called to stand between the devil and our families, our leaders, our church, our country, our neighborhood.  We are being called to see the enemy’s schemes and step between him and his targets with the authority of Jesus and intercede with new boldness and power.  We are being called not only to pray defensively, but to move out and run him off territories he has held for ages.  NOW!  Not next year or next month or next week.  NOW!  We are being called to stand in the gap for those who are too weak or small or wounded or broken to stand on their own.  We are being called to radical, life-saving, fire-breathing, glory-walking, devil kicking intercession. But even more.  We are being called to start living prophetic lives that are a countersign to the world around us.  Lives of personal integrity, and joy, and love, and mercy and justice. Many of you reading this right now recognize this call.  It’s been stirring in your spirit for quite some time and you haven’t known what to do about it.  Now you do.  Embrace it.  It is an answer to prayer and a call to prayer.  It’s a sound.  A Kingdom sound.  A battle cry in the Spirit that is going up as God gives vision and calls us to move out.  It is the roaring of the Lion of the Tribe of Judah calling His people to war, to prayer, to intercession, to overcome, to dance a  dance of wild and fierce worship, to roar. 

Jesus in the Streets

Andy was a college student when we met,  then an intern, then volunteer, then combination street minister/tutor/mentor…He started out white kid from Ohio going to the inner city church.  And he fell in love.  With Jesus.  With Jesus in the streets.  His personal involvement with tutoring neighborhood kids grew to a tutoring program, which grew to a center, which got all tangled up in the kids’ broader lives and that of their families, and their need for Jesus.  Andy always wanted to talk about the kids and their hurts and their prayer needs.  And how to minister to them with more power, practically.  About four years after the center began, Andy got married.  About six months later he went home to be with Jesus, the result of brain cancer.  But he stayed with the kids…with the neighborhood…the street…until he absolutely couldn’t anymore.  He gave himself away.

Servanthood 

I remember reading or hearing somewhere a rather graphic description of how one became a bondslave.  You start out as a regular slave, and at some point (in New Testament times)

you were given the opportunity to go free.  At this point, a choice was made, out of the bond of love that had been established, and blood was shed.  The slave would be bound by love to his master for life.  His ear would be pierced, nailed through to the doorpost. And in this shedding of blood, if the master had no heirs, the slave became heir to the firstborn’s inheritance, with all attendant rights and privileges. Servant. 

To serve.

To wait tables and wash feet…and feed the lambs…and chase ‘em.  And beat off wolves. And listen and love and rejoice and cry…

Yeah. 

It’s messy stuff.  Do we really give up our right to get Pi–ed when people take advantage of us, or abuse us, or despitefully use us because we’re naive enough to keep trying to do justice and mercy in a crummy screwed up world?  Did Jesus shake His head and sigh when all those lepers walked away clean without even so much as a thank you? I mean, the idea of servanthood gets down and dirty real fast.  It gets personal. Doesn’t it?  I’m talking about doing real ministry in the real world with real little gang bangers  and whores and junkies and crack-heads and third generation welfare moms who are stone expert at playin’ the system because that’s how they’ve been taught to survive.  And you know ‘em by name…and the church has whitebread college kids laying down their lives every day tutoring and mentoring their kids and praying for ‘em and fighting with the schools not to throw ‘em out.  And when you drive into the neighborhood from outside, you can “feel” the atmosphere change…like you’ve passed through a curtain.  But you keep going.  And you press in.  And you take time to get refreshed and drunk (in the Spirit) now and then so you don’t get combat fatigue, or dark and spooky and looking for demons under rocks and trees.  (My daughter Sarah has a button that says “On my planet we laugh once in a while”) And you try to soak up enough in His presence to carry it out into the street and let it shine out from you some kind of practicalways…And you love…and you listen. 

Servants…Friends…

“These thing I have spoken to you , that My joy may be in you, and that your joy may be made full. This is My commandment, that you love one another, just as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends.  You are My friends, if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you slaves; for the slave does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all things that I have heard from My Father I have made known to you.”–John 14:11-16  The people I know who are doing this stuff usually don’t have the time or the energy left to fuss about titles. Or to waste on taking shots at each other.   Most of them are a little too rough around the edges for most church folks’ tastes. But that’s OK, because they’re on the lines, breaking ground and laying down foundations and doing ministry that there aren’t any books about yet. They’re really not too fussed about whether anybodysees them as being “prophets” or “apostles”.  They’re too busy being prophetic and apostolic.   

And servants.    And friends. 

Love and Let the Wind Blow, 

firedancer