Landmines are a very interesting form of warfare. Buried and essentially unseen, they lay waiting for the enemy. Trained as a Combat Engineer at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, I was taught that there were things to counteract other things like mines. I knew how to operate a ‘minesweeper’. I was also taught how to probe with a stick to find mines that could not be detected. In the heat of an Ozark summer, I would be coated with a red mud after crawling on my belly through the Missouri dirt.
There are landmines in the Church.
Buried they simply wait on a believer to step on it. Wisdom would tell us to advance with caution, but the counsel is not always taken. They only await our careless step. We can know they exist, yet we can step on them without thinking. It is a definite form of deception. There are definite things which can cripple us spiritually.
Mines such as fear, doubt, unforgiveness, jealousy, lust, pride and selfishness lay waiting for us. When you step on a mine, you’ll hear a distinct click. This is the downward signal that you have engaged the mechanism of the mine. At this point it gets grim. It is highly unlikely that you can move quickly enough to get away from the explosion.
We are incredibly vulnerable to the mines of our walk as a believer. However, the Holy Spirit holds the maps that can enable us to transverse that which is ahead of us. His presence gives us a safe awareness to progress difficult ground. He is there to direct us to pass through the danger.
Too many people are getting blown up.
They make a misstep and the resulting blast is awful. Unless we listen to the Spirit’s direction we will find ourselves in a very hard place, full of difficulty and danger.
We need the Holy Spirit to help us navigate difficult places.
Without Him present we will step in places that are extremely detrimental, and very dangerous. He must guide us, step by step, through the danger that surrounds us. He will do this, if we only ask.
“Instead, be kind to each other, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, just as God through Christ has forgiven you.”
Ephesians 4:32, NLT
Great hearts are often brought through experiences that demand intense forgiving.
The Father tutors us through out our earthly lives, with many visits to this classroom. It’s here we get our learning. It will happen several times in our walk, and we carry different nuances, or slants. Each time we are required to forgive authentically. The course is set for us. We can’t choose to skip these lessons without injuring ourselves, and harming others.
We are learning to love– it is our calling and destiny. There are no “accidents” or misaligned ‘drop-outs’ here. We step into our classroom, and the Teacher and Comforter begins His instruction. Many things will strike you as diabolical. Deep inside us we have simply no idea of how “this” will turn out for good. And you’d be right. But the power of God steps in, and “all is well”.
Corrie ten Boom– Writer, speaker, Christian
Corrie Ten Boom was a Dutch Christian.
After her release from a Nazi concentration camp, she began traveling the world and speaking to any who would have her. The needs of postwar Europe were desperate. She traveled as an evangelist telling people who Jesus is and spoke about His redemption. She gave many people hope.
Through her travels she came in contact with a few of the guards that had been a part of the Nazi regime and had to practice forgiveness that only Jesus can bring. The first encounter with one of her previous jailers proved to be most difficult.
Here is an excerpt from her book, “The Hiding Place”.
“It was a church service in Munich that I saw him, the former S.S. man who had stood guard at the shower room door in the processing center at Ravensbruck. He was the first of our actual jailers that I had seen since that time. And suddenly it was all there – the roomful of mocking men, the heaps of clothing, Betsie’s pain-blanched face.
He came up to me as the church was emptying, beaming and bowing. “How grateful I am for your message, Fraulein,” he said. “To think that, as you say, He has washed my sins away!” His hand was thrust out to shake mine. And I, who had preached so often to the people in Bloemendaal the need to forgive, kept my hand at my side.
Even as the angry, vengeful thoughts boiled through me, I saw the sin of them. Jesus Christ had died for this man; was I going to ask for more? Lord Jesus, I prayed, forgive me and help me to forgive him.
I tried to smile, I struggled to raise my hand. I could not. I felt nothing, not the slightest spark of warmth or charity. And so again I breathed a silent prayer. Jesus, I cannot forgive him. Give me Your forgiveness.
She then took his hand and the most incredible thing happened.
From my shoulder along my arm and through my hand a current seemed to pass from me to him, while into my heart sprang a love for this stranger that almost overwhelmed me.
And so I discovered that it is not on our forgiveness any more than on our goodness that the world’s healing hinges, but on His. When He tells us to love our enemies, He gives, along with the command, the love itself.”
Corrie’s Wisdom for Us
There is no pit so deep, that God’s love is not deeper still.
Forgiveness is an act of the will, and the will can function regardless of the temperature of the heart.
It is not my ability, but my response to God’s ability, that counts.
When a train goes through a tunnel and it gets dark, you don’t throw away the ticket and jump off. You sit still and trust the engineer.
Faith is like radar that sees through the fog-the reality of things at a distance that the human eye cannot see.
Trying to do the Lord’s work in your own strength is the most confusing, exhausting, and tedious of all work. But when you are filled with the Holy Spirit, then the ministry of Jesus just flows out of you.
For her efforts to hide Jews from arrest and deportation during the German occupation of the Netherlands, Corrie ten Boom (1892-1983) received recognition from the Yad Vashem Remembrance Authority as one of the “Righteous Among the Nations” on December 12, 1967.
Recently I read a news story about pastors who have been led into atheism. These are all evangelical men, some with more than 20 years of experience in the pulpit. They’ve turned to a belief that God does not exist. Here is part of the article:
There is among us a prevalent manipulation that is relentlessly reaching out for us in order to destroy our faith. This force has an ally; and this ally is resident in us. My flesh becomes the connection that Satan needs to link with– to make it work. The Bible calls this residing connection, ‘the old man’.
Some of the ‘brothers’ who now walk in apostasy to the Faith still remain in ministry. Even though they don’t believe anymore, they continue to preach and counsel their congregations. Many will only speak out under the condition of anonymity.
One in particular said it was somewhat difficult to continue to work in the ministry. “But I just look at it as a job and do what I’m supposed to do,” he said. “I’ve done it for years.”
This pastor said, that when speaking to parishioners, he tried to stick to the sections of the Bible that he still believed in — the parts about being a good person. Many pastors say that they would like to leave their jobs but they can’t afford to.
Please someone, and correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t the Bible speak of shepherds and hired men? Some who are called by God, and others who do it for money? Does this disturb anyone but me?
“He flees because he is a hired hand and cares nothing for the sheep.”
John 10:13
These ‘pastors’ and their issues of faith are all on the heart of God. He loves these men. His Son died for them. They are precious. But they make an effort to conceal themselves, in order that they will continue to receive the wages/benefits they’ve become accustomed to.
When I was ordained into the ministry, it came with the provision that if I could not remain faithful that I was obligated to ‘step down’. If I ever become conflicted, I would voluntarily remove myself from the ministry. It was part of the ‘package’ and it came with that understanding. Ordination for me was as much a decision to be faithful as it was for empowerment from above.
There is so much confusion, but that is characteristic of the times in which we live. Our shepherds are an increasingly influential part of our lives in these last days. They guide and preach the Word to us. We owe much to our pastors.
Perhaps we have not prayed for them like we should? (!)
As a result they’ve become casualties. (Pray for your pastor).
There is a desperate need for us to take the darkness seriously. It has a pulling power to reach out and latch upon us. It opens its mouth to swallow us into a never-ending night. Everything that strays ends up in its claws. The thing that saves us is the presence of Jesus. His hand on our lives removes us out of Satan’s claim.
But the darkness has an incredibly sweet allure. It’s a power that is beyond our comprehension. It seems at first to want to enhance us. Satan causes us to think that we are immune or superior to all that God has commanded. Darkness is at work in our minds and we will begin to walk into even more foolishness. Our deception only deepens as we start to diminish the very tenets of discipleship.
Truth does not come to those who are trading their salvation for even more darkness.
Duplicity is just another form of hypocrisy and deception, you can’t sugarcoat poop and make it good to eat. A lie is still a lie no matter who is speaking it.
” But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed.”
“Ebedmelech from Ethiopia was an official at the palace, and he heard what they had done to me. So he went to speak with King Zedekiah, who was holding court at Benjamin Gate. Ebedmelech said, “Your Majesty, Jeremiah is a prophet, and those men were wrong to throw him into a well. And when Jerusalem runs out of food, Jeremiah will starve to death down there.”10 Zedekiah answered, “Take thirty of my soldiers and pull Jeremiah out before he dies.”
11 Ebedmelech and the soldiers went to the palace and got some rags from the room under the treasury. He used ropes to lower them into the well. 12 Then he said, “Put these rags under your arms so the ropes won’t hurt you.” After I did, 13the men pulled me out. And from then on, I was kept in the courtyard of the palace guard.
Jeremiah 38:8-13, CEV
At the very last, there was just one remaining. A single man, Ebedmelech. He was a Ethiopian; made a eunuch by the will of the king. The situation in Jerusalem has gotten very difficult. In an action of revenge and reprisal, certain men intend to kill the prophet Jeremiah. They take a certain satisfaction in this, and Jeremiah is thrown into a very deep cistern. They intend for him to starve to death, which is a terrible way to die.
The king in these last pathetic days is being manipulated by the surviving leadership of the city. Zedekiah gives tacit approval for the destruction of Jeremiah. He just lets it happen without a good reason. The prophet is lowered in the muddy cistern. Without food, he will soon starve. In the minds of this evil mob, they have taken care of the any last vestiges of a godly ‘righteousness.’
But there is one, he is a wild card. And no man would have guessed it. Ebedmelech, the Ethiopian eunuch steps forward and decides to change history. Not only his ethnicity, but his state as a castrated man are definite issues. This mob never recognized him as someone who would intervene. He was a non-entity, a non-factor. He was black, and a eunuch, and a nobody.
But Ebedmelech is intervening, in the face of terrible risk, he steps out boldly to make an intercession. He doesn’t appear to be intimidated, and makes a cry for the truth. He becomes an intense and strong advocate for the release of Jeremiah from the deep mud.
Ebedmelech is given the ‘green-light’ by king Zedekiah. Ebedmelech rounds up thirty men to assist him as he delivers the prophet. Ropes are brought out, and out comes Ebedmelech with a big armload of rags. They shout down to Jeremiah. The instructions are called down to him of what needs to take place for the extraction.
It’s interesting, but the rags are the most interesting.
They are really an extra touch, not a necessity. The rags become essentially, a form of grace. They would pad the ropes, providing a degree of comfort as the prophet is pulled up out of the mud. Ebedmelech showed the heart of God in what he did. There was his desire to somehow make the prophet comfortable. In doing so he communicated a kindness and concern that was saturated with God’s own enveloping presence.
Our illnesses– physical or mental, have moved us to a lonely place on the edge.
We are those on the so-called ‘margins.’ Ebedmelech has now become a carrier of God’s grace. Jeremiah could have been lifted up by just the ropes. It would’ve been more difficult, granted. But the rags sent down by Ebedmelech provided the prophet an extra gentleness. And I am certain it did not pass by without notice. Their mention in this Book of Jeremiah is significant, and shows Jeremiah’s deep appreciation of kindness.
We can gather up much from what has been written. We will sometimes find ourselves in parallel situations. But our kindness and concern can make the difference. Admittedly, they are quite insignificant–quite minor. Call it ‘icing on the cake.’ But when you show the kindness of our Father, you will infuse the situation with love, and grace.
So be an Ebedmelech,— an outcast perhaps– but in a position of kindness.
Broken Believers 