Crucified Messenger
“Crucified Messenger”
This is the phrase I heard while in prayer; face down, trembling, crying out for God to strip me of myself. Pleading for Him to leave nothing of me, only what is of Him. In the last five years, I’ve had a handful of these moments; encounters where the presence of God is so heavy, it feels almost impossible to breathe, yet in those moments, I am more alive than ever.
After I heard those words I realized something. Don’t you know, that the primary cause of death during a crucifixion is suffocation. When we take up the cross and follow Christ Jesus we are not only dying to self, we are suffocating our own nature that the nature of God would be preeminent in our life. For me, in that moment I was realizing, in greater depth, the call to follow Him. We, as disciples of Christ, are called to take up our cross and follow Him. When a person was sentenced to death by crucifixion they would be forced to carry a cross beam(patibulum) through the Via Dolorosa(The way of suffering) til they would be either tied to the beam or nailed(they nailed those who they considered a deity). When onlookers saw a person carrying that beam, they knew that person was sentenced to death. To take up our cross is to allow the presence of God and the word of God to crush us, to suffocate our own selfish and sinful nature so that the divine nature of God can reign through our mortal bodies. My friends, do onlookers know we are carrying that beam? Do they know we are not living for self? Do they know who we are living for? Carrying the cross sent a message. God is calling us to be a crucified messenger, what message are we sending?
New Year Revolution
What is a revolution? Interestingly, the word’s English origin is from the 14th century, and “it referred to the movement of a celestial body in orbit.” That meaning then extended to be “a progressive motion of a body around an axis, a completion of a course, regularity of motion, or a predictable return to an original position.” Almost simultaneously the word took on a dual definition and meaning to be “a sudden radical or complete change”. This dual definition was due to its root word “revolt” which meant “to renounce allegiance”. In the 16th century, Nicolaus Copernicus used the word to establish the idea that the earth took 365 days to have one revolution around the sun. It wasn’t until the 17th Century that the word began to be associated more with what we know it to be today, “a rapid, fundamental transformation of a society’s class, state, ethnic, or religious structure.”
So again I ask, what is a revolution? Is it a continuous cycle? An endless orbit? Going around and around the same path, a similar trajectory, always moving but never advancing beyond our sphere? Or is it a sudden, radical, and complete change? My friends, I believe that the answer is for us to determine.
In 1971 Mayo Mohs, TIME MAGAZINE’s religion section editor wrote the cover story about the wave of young adults leaving the lascivious lifestyle of sex, drugs, and rock’n roll…. for Jesus, classified the phenomenon as a “Jesus Revolution”. What a way to classify a movement of God. A revolution. A radical change that affected our social, political, and economic world. A sudden shift in the fabric of our society. A new allegiance is being taken and the old is renounced. This is what Jesus does. When Jesus becomes our Lord, He radically affects every sphere of our life. When Jesus is our Lord, it is impossible to be stuck in an endless orbit. When Jesus is our Lord, we become revolutionists.
The title of the cover story in TIME MAGIZINE was, “The New Rebel Cry: JESUS IS COMING”. The cry of a generation who went from death to life, darkness to light, hell to heaven, was “Jesus is coming!” It was their revolutionary cry. Well, I have news for you, the Gospel of Jesus Christ has not changed. Jesus Christ is revolutionary. Everything about His person, everything about what He did both among the people and on the cross is revolutionary. He is the same today as He was during the Jesus revolution and as He was when He went to the cross.
The Jesus revolution is largely attributed to one individual, Lonnie Frisbee. I could pause here and tell you, “All it takes is one to start a revolution” and end it with, “Are you going to be that one?”. However, the truth is that it did not start with Lonnie, it began with Jesus, Jesus is the revolutionist. He does the radical change. He has been doing it for almost 2000 years and He won’t stop until “The kingdom of this world becomes the Kingdom of our God.” Jesus is indeed coming. When? We don’t know. How? Gloriously.
We at OFAM have one mission. To invite the world to come to Jesus because when they meet Him, they won’t be the same. This is what Lonnie did. He introduced a generation to Jesus and when they met Him, the changes were so radical that it got the world's attention and forced them to classify it as a “revolution”. He became a revolutionist because His Lord was a revolutionist. If Jesus Christ is your Lord then you have this same capability. I will leave you with this, if you are feeling lifeless then I want you to evaluate your relationship with Jesus. Is He your Lord? Is He your friend? Does He have your allegiance or is your allegiance with something else?