“Your love is teaching me how to kneel.”

–U2 “Vertigo”

This is not time to speculate on the direction God is taking His church. This is not the nation to be doing the speculating. If there were a nation called upon to do the leading into the era that we are currently approaching, ours is not it. Ours is a society that discriminates, boasts, builds, dominates, and overpowers its environment. Ours is a society of self-pleasure, self-help, self-sufficient, self-assured, self-righteous, self-centered, self-made and self-confident. Ours is a society that does not value the individual, body or spirit. Ours is a society that does not celebrate the mystery.

This is not the society that should be so quick to speak dogmatically about anything relating to being born of, filled with, or led by a Spirit. We are cognitive-junkies. We are information collectors. We want to examine, explore, and study something in order that we might control it. We hoard. We adulterate, pasteurize, tamper with, inject, and homogenize everything we touch that we might improve it. If there were anything of substance to be gained by anything metaphysical, we are sure to make a model of it, or fly a ship to it, in order to bring about something empirical and provable, touchable, changeable, and in any other way, make it physical, that we may have more control over it.

But, however, we are ourselves spirit. There is discernment within us. Our spirit has commonality with the Spirit of God. We are able to relate with Him for this reason. We have reason for this reason. We can know Him, and of Him as He is and as He created us to be.

Unfortunately, Christians in America are infected with the self-confident plague and we marriage this with our commonality with the Spirit God who made us. We relate to God as though He were not God, but a man. Suddenly, who He is and what He says is subjective and open for discussion. Decisions that He makes are now up for a vote. The Word as it is written and demonstrated is up for interpretation. We no longer believe in Him as much as we do our ability to understand and rationalize Him. If I don’t understand the “why” than I create a hypothesis about it. If His actions do not line up with man’s understanding of His character, than rather than challenge our understanding of His actions, we challenge God’s character. We will challenge anything less holy than our god. And the god of which I am speaking is the god of ME. And everything is less sacred than the self. Therefore, everything is subject to self.

What have we done with Reason? As 54% of Americans claim to be Christians, we do not decrease that He might increase. We rise up. We speak out. We grab a flag and begin racing to the summit. We are here to stake a claim–the claim, (as we see it) on the corner of a market that society isn’t even shopping in. The obsolete faith of self-sacrifice has been martyred for the cause of the church. To plant new churches—cool, edgy churches. To buy more land. To grow huge. To be noticed, recognized, and taken seriously. The old fashioned message of Hope has been locked out because of gossip, shortsighted greed, and attachment to possessions. The obsolete gospel of love has been trampled while we load ourselves down with mammon, agenda, success, and the pursuit of happiness.

Today, the nation is unified. We all have the same religion. The national creed is self.

From this claim, I proceed:

The impotent Christian has no alternative, but to blame themselves for the lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes, and the pride. Fallible self is ever seeking to shift the blame elsewhere. Self-perspective will always end where it started and will be no closer to truth. The self-perspective leads to depression. The self-perspective cannot be trusted—it is like the weather.

The seeing, hearing, and resulting abundance that Christ offers to the askers, seekers, and knockers cannot otherwise be obtained. One must die.

Like it or not, self will never see God. It cannot. The self desires that which is contrary to the Spirit. Were one to be led by the self, their way always ends in destruction—it exists in constant hostility toward God and is therefore by itself condemned. If God says, “I will come to you in the likeness of sinful man. You cannot see me unless you acknowledge my Son,” than we have an answer. We have a reason. We have something beyond self that can be relied upon. He cannot be a liar. He will not break His Word. Again, however, like it or not, there is simply no other way. There is a way that seems right to you, but it will kill you.

America wants God’s grace more than the God of grace. We are enamored with ourselves. We are quite pleased with what we’ve accomplished. We expect to purchase whatever it is we need. We can expect to survive a direct hit from a category 5 hurricane as long as the Ramada takes our Visa card.

What a disaster!

I pray that the church in America may be blind today that she may see forever. I pray that she may be dead now, that she may forever live.

This, aliens and pilgrims, citizens of a non-world, what we taste and see now, is not our home. One need not speculate on the direction God is taking His church. The direction is down—all the way to its knees.