Posted on 02/09/2017 6:18:30 AM PST by Gamecock
Our readiness to perform our task becomes critical when we realize the world also has a mission—to capture and assimilate the church. If the church becomes an echo of the world, the mission of the world is accomplished.
It is our task to build the city of God. It is supremely costly and extraordinarily dangerous. He who will work to build the kingdom of God must be on guard against arrows that are directed at his face—but perhaps even more on guard for the arrows directed at his back.
Nehemiah’s work provoked hostile reactions from some of the pagans. But the real threat was grounded in the fears of God’s people. When a leader like Nehemiah, Paul, or Jesus Himself provokes a hostile reaction from enemies, the people are prone to turn on them as they bear the fallout from such attacks. Remember, it was the people who feared the wrath of Rome who turned their wrath on Jesus.
True leaders of the Christian faith, however, love believers and pagans alike and risk the hostility of both to build the kingdom of God.
Coram Deo
Do you love believers and unbelievers alike? Are you willing to risk the hostility of both to build God’s kingdom?
Passages for Further Study
John 17:14 I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. 15 I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one. 16 They are not of the world, just as I am not of the world.
ping
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“Building the city of G-d” is not a human institutional task, it is a task Christ is personally always working on via the individual believers. We WILL NOT change “the world”, or “reform” the Church as the book of revelation, and Yeshua in the scriptures explains. Christ’s Kingdom EXISTS and it is Christ who brings it to Earth. By the time Christ personally rules on Earth humans will not be living Christ-like because they have made human secular law and religious institutions reflect Christ perfectly, but because His law will be written on their hearts.
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