Violence and Blood

We must use violence and shed blood in order to do the will of God.

When Mario Murillo was a young preacher, he was frustrated with his lack of impact on people’s lives. While preaching at a series of revival meetings, he became angry that no one was being saved. He says, "It got so bad that on the final night I preached, I made a rash vow to God. If a soul was not saved that night I would leave the ministry! To reinforce how serious I was, I found a job that would begin the next morning.”

I can’t quite imagine telling God, “use me right now, or I’m going to quit serving you.” Rash behavior is for the young and immature. I would never presume to force God’s hand.

On the other hand, Mario’s mistake was one which only a visionary would make. Visionaries live in the future, and since the future is by definition potential, their hearts are captured by what might be. Mario envisioned that many people could be saved through his preaching; therefore, having seen what might be, he could not be content until that potential reality became actual. So he made his rash vow.

This sort of bursting-into-the-room rashness, this forceful determination that God had better act now or else, is part of what Jesus meant when he said, “the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and violent men take it by force” (Matthew 11:12). Jesus does not complain about violence, he praises it, pleads for it. There are some men and women of God whose vision of a godly future is so powerful upon them that they storm the throne room of God in order to demand God’s help. They take the kingdom by force.

Consider carefully the words of Charles Haddon Spurgeon, the “Prince of Preachers”: “Those who have received the Spirit in verity and truth are violent men. They have a violent anxiety to be saved, and they violently strive that they may enter in at the strait gate. Well they know that seeking to enter in is not enough, for many shall seek to enter in but shall not be able, and therefore do they strive with might and main.”

Hebrews 12:4 also points to this same rashness in God’s name: “You have not yet resisted to the point of shedding blood in your striving against sin.” We are to strive to the point of shedding blood! Your mental picture here should be of Jesus in the garden, hours before his capture and death, sweating drops of blood as he prayed, “Father, not my will, but thine be done.” Have we resisted sin, really?

The kingdom of hell is on this earth, and our task is to overtake it with the kingdom of heaven. Violence and blood are the order of the day! God’s glory will not be won by those who hold back or those who are afraid. Jesus said, “I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.” We must pick up that sword and wield it with holy violence in our hearts.

When was the last time you told anyone that hell awaits them if they do not put faith in Christ? When did you last stand before a Herod and call him down from his gross iniquity? Wickedness is rampant around us. This is not an hour for timidity. The man who takes the kingdom of heaven by force, and who resists sin to the point of shedding blood, he is the man who also preaches the gospel boldly. There is no fear in him, no holding back, no moderation, no reasonability. He (or she!) is on fire for God, and is perfectly willing for that fire to ignite everything and everyone around him, whether to purification or to destruction.

We Must Have Power

We must have the power of God if we are to realize “thy kingdom come.”

Christians have prayed the prayer, preached the prayer, and worked hard to make the kingdom of God a reality on earth, but with little widespread or long term success. My own church’s mission statement calls for us to make an impact on our city, but our influence hardly reaches past the sanctuary door. The tide of paganism and godlessness around us is a whelming torrent that we seem powerless to even influence, much less stop.

We have no power.

It is interesting to me that even though Jesus declared plainly, “I can do nothing by myself,” we do not believe him in the least. As we tend to do with all of Jesus’ radicalisms, we ignore the simple truth of his words, and filter his statement through our own perceptions in order to distill some principle that makes us feel good about what he said. It never occurs to us that Jesus plainly, simply, actually meant that he was powerless on his own. He said it, but we don’t believe it.

When we consider the fantastic works of Christ, we immediately seek the comfort of separation between him and ourselves, saying “He was the Son of God. Of course he could do those things. We cannot do those things, however, because we are only human.” We cannot stand the uncomfortable disparity between Jesus’ works and our own, so we hide behind our humanity and pretend that he was not truly human. We deny Jesus’ own testimony that, as a man, he could not preach a powerful sermon or perform a testifying miracle until the Holy Spirit descended on him.

Jesus received power and told us to do the same, but we have not. Some of us don’t even want it.

Our Christian brethren of the cessationist theology believe that miracles and other manifest demonstrations of spiritual power ceased with the completion of the New Testament. The outpouring of divine dunamis (Greek for “power”) through the lives of Jesus and the apostles was totally unique, never to be repeated again. Jesus, the Word of God among us, depended upon dunamis to empower his preaching and demonstrate his power, but we have no need of it because we have the New Testament. The cessationist doesn’t even want power; it’s against his religion.

We are like the man who purchased a new chain saw to clear a stand of timber. After a whole day’s labor, he only managed to cut down two trees. He took the saw back to the dealer and complained. The salesman looked over the saw to find the problem. When he pulled the starter cord, the engine roared to life, and the customer shouted “What’s that noise? Turn it off!”

Thy kingdom come does not mean “hurry up heaven.” It means that we are to “put on the whole armor of God” and fight against the forces of darkness that have captured the hearts of men. To push back the darkness, to quash the rebellion of men’s hearts, to impact our society with the gospel, we must have divine dunamis. Jesus depended upon the power of God to empower his preaching and to validate his words with miracles. We can do no less. We need the same anointing from heaven that he received at his baptism. The Holy Spirit descended upon him, and the Father proclaimed over him “This is my son, in whom I am well pleased.”

When the Spirit descends upon us, and the Father proclaims over us, we will do the “greater things” that Jesus promised.

A New Work

I shared with all of you last week that God is doing something new in my life. I won’t be ready for some time to share the details of the revelations that I’m receiving, but I can begin sharing some of my thoughts about why God is giving them.

If the Good Shepherd steps into the life of one of his under-shepherds and does a tremendous work, so that he replaces that man’s stony heart with a new heart of flesh, then it must be true that he intends to do the same in the lives of that man’s flock.

The Lord has done just that sort of work in my life. He has unstopped my ears, so that I am hearing his voice more clearly than I can remember. My eyes are being opened to see marvelous kingdom realities that I have long overlooked. My mind is being renewed to understand the principles by which God’s grace operates. I am being transformed in a most remarkable manner.

If he has chosen me for this profound gift, then he has also chosen you. I do not know where he intends to lead us, and don’t even expect to know in the immediate future, but I am nevertheless confident that he has prepared us for a journey that we are even now beginning. In that confidence, I am at peace, trusting God with your hearts and your future as well as my own.

Hearing me speak this way is unusual to all of you, because I have not been “on fire for God” in all the years you’ve known me. The fire is burning now, however, and I may be saying quite a lot of things that I’ve neglected to say before, and doing things I have left undone. Several times in the past ten days, I have driven through the neighborhoods north of our location, praying “Lord, I don’t know what I’m looking for, but please let me know when I see it.” Do I need to say that such an activity is unusual for me? My heart has been so hard, but God is digging up the stones within me, and I sense that he will soon begin using my life in a new way.

I expect that some of you may, for the next few weeks, look at me “like a cow looking at a new gate.” You may even feel the sort of uneasiness one feels when he knows that a change is coming, but not what sort of change it will be. Join the club! I am much more comfortable with my familiar mediocrity than with taking risk to fulfill my potential. God, however, does not alter his plans for us because we prefer comfort and mediocrity; he is requiring that we see more than we have seen, and become more than we are, which entails risk taking and hard work on our part.

We have not yet understood all that God wants to do through our humble lives, but he is about to show us. If you will look with “new eyes,” I think you may see that God is working all around us to arouse his people, to awaken his slumbering saints for a grand task which we have not imagined. Whatever he is doing in our little part of the world, it must be awesome, considering the weight of the revelations he is giving me through his word. I invite you to join me in listening for his voice.