For a very significant number of believers 2009 is proving to be one of the hardest and most unsettling years yet. If this is a difficult season for you then I am writing to you. Hopefully to offer revelation and understanding in order to see through the process, to find comfort in knowing you’re not alone but right in line with the much larger cultural transformation the Lord is taking the church through. And most of all to offer you a fresh invigorating dose of hope, even in the midst of your very trying circumstances. The church corporately is in the midst of a great struggle that is designed to usher us all into a whole new Era of Faith, a type of faith that transcends all of our circumstances.
I would say both as a participant and as an observer of the church on a corporate level that in the thirty-eight years I have been a believer that 2009 is turning out to be the most unusual and challenging year of all. For many in the church 2009 has many of the classical signs of a mid life crisis. I might title it the year of The Great Unplug. The picture I have is of a big balloon that has been filling up for the past decades and in 2009 the Lord began the process of letting the air out. For a smaller number of people this process started in 2008.
It seems almost everywhere I turn people are struggling with issues they either have long past dealt with or never anticipated facing. In the next two paragraphs I will try to review the basic categories I am observing believers struggling with. You may be encountering your own version of the season but you will get the gist.
IDENTITY AND DESTINY
For a pretty significant number of people who have found a lot of value in their jobs, careers, vocations or simply strong internal life purposes they are finding themselves in this season wrestling with the increasing feeling of how temporal it all is. So personal fulfillment, even identity and destiny issues are being shaken. Life has taken on a season of elusiveness. Even successful ministers are finding an unsettling hollowness in their callings, wondering if there isn’t something else for them. For others after so many years the whole idea of church seems to be almost irrelevant.
FINANCES
Through the past decades the Lord has shepherded all of us through economic challenges with the intention of establishing our faith. Yet in this season where we seem to be corporately going to the next level there is an unprecedented number of people who are hemmed in by unyielding and diverse economic challenges. Even while making major financial adjustments one simply cannot engineer their way out of the situation (for now). The far bigger problem seems to be that the Lord is not engaged in delivering most people out of their financial stress or economic dilemmas.
PHYSICAL HEALTH
Though all of these categories are very hard to go through I feel the ones who are wrestling with the category of health deserve our most ardent prayers of all. They are wrestling with very serious and occasionally life threatening health issues. For them the heart trauma seems to be in their reaching out to a God who loves and communicates to them in this season yet often does not heal them.
SPIRITUAL HEALTH
I would say overall the body of Christ has been through decades of maturity. Yet in this season the Lord seems to be probing much deeper in preparation for the days ahead. This deeper corporate probing is unveiling some old issues, fears and doubts that we had dealt with and overcome long ago. Now in some cases doubt seems to speak louder than faith and of all things the goodness of God is being re-challenged. Pockets of darkness we thought were tamed are resurfacing, consequences of compromise and sin are severely dealt with and in some instances there is a battle over mental stability. Obviously not everyone is having these types of experiences but as a church culture I feel this is pretty close to the mark.
Another way to say something very similar was referenced by Chuck Pierce in the spring of 2009. He said that starting in April of 2009 and lasting for five months (August-September) the enemy would be given authority to wear down the saints. Most but not all of the more mature saints I know have been having a very difficult time, something like a prolonged wearing down. A season stronger than our ability to control. One where you can’t snap out of it, a kind of a relentless nowhere-to-hide type of changing season.
SO WHY IS ALL THIS HAPPENING?
For the past forty to sixty years the western church has had the incredible blessing of living and growing where our outer world was not in conflict with our inner spirituality. In reality most of the time our outer world was actually mutually supportive of our interior one. This allowed our inner man to flourish unimpeded. In the very near future I feel that era is about to enter an alarming transition. We are getting closer and closer to an era when our outer world will come into conflict and opposition to our interior world. That’s why for so many their circumstances or their identity and meaning in their external world is being shaken and reduced. That’s why church life, jobs, future, health, and finances are all coming up short. We are moving from externally supportive circumstances toward internal renewal and fortification that rises above the external. Up till now, in most of the trials I touched upon, our victory has been based on God changing our circumstances from bad to good. Corporately we must be delivered from that paradigm.
So Dave, are you saying that up till now we have had an era of ease and prosperity and now we are entering an era of adversity and trial? While I believe that, I’m trying to make a different point. What I am trying to say is that corporately we must come to a place where we have a full victory and God is good even when our circumstances (our outer world) are not. As a culture how do we adjust to a good God even though bad things are happening? What are we going to do with a God who doesn’t come through but brings us through? In the future victory may not come by being delivered from our circumstances, rather by finding a transcendent intimate relationship with a loving Father who can be all we need regardless of our circumstances.“Therefore we do not lose heart, but though our outer man [external world] is decaying, yet our inner man is being renewed day by day. For our momentary, light affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory far beyond all comparison. While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen; for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal.” II Corinthians 3:16-18
We have looked on the things that were both seen and unseen. This has not been bad. In fact the fruit of Christianity is to change culture in the natural or the “seen” as well as the unseen. The difference in the era we are entering is we are about to shift back to a more biblical foundation by finding true eternal value in the unseen interior world as the seen exterior world becomes more adverse.
So even in the midst of your struggles in 2009 I would encourage you without giving any ground to the enemy to lean into the process and lean into Him. The other end of the process will yield resurrection life. We will all find an understanding and compassionate Father who is preparing us to be a people who will do exploits and be overwhelming conquerors no matter what our circumstances are or what we may face.
"And remember who or what will separate us from the love of Christ? Will tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? Just as it is written, For your sake we are being put to death all day long; We were considered as sheep to be slaughtered. But in all these things we overwhelmingly conquer through Him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." Romans 8:35-39
