There is no reason to doubt the Lord at this time amidst the present world array. The only endeavor charged to the people of the Lord in every place is to find and then abide in His peace—the sole necessary proof of faith’s validity.
Many changes must take place in order for God’s visions and dreams and promises and threats to find their place of manifest fulfilment. Those fulfilments will not occur in context of the present array.
The difficulty of prophetic beliefs is that we have only the contexts of our present and past in which to envision their fulfilment. Therefore as the present context continues with no end in sight, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain expectation.
Most promises and predictions, however, are not for the present context. What God has repeatedly spoken remains for a different day. This does not mean a day “way beyond the blue,” but it also does not mean the day as we have always known the day to be or know it now. There yet remains a further but quite different intermediate day ahead before the culmination of all these things.
God has not yet revealed His best hand. He has not exhausted His powers. But for Him, a critical mass must be reached in affairs of earth before He will act to reveal that hand. During this period of approach to that inflection point, it is necessary to first purge the people of God of their own thoughts and dreams and hopes in these things—whether of expected restoration or expected destruction.
For the present then, the charge remains to keep faith in the Word, not faith in the anticipations surrounding that Word. All human anticipations must die. They must be put to death. They must become “as good as dead.” The present struggle is not so much to believe, but to die to our own power of belief. Believing is simpler than we think. It is our thinking surrounding our believing that makes believing complex. But mere fellowship with Christ, and nothing more, makes the complex simple.
In face of the seemingly interminable sameness around us propped up by the same tired prophetic words (“God is doing a new thing...”), we do not have to be able to explain what we are expecting anymore. We don’t have to have answers beyond the simplicity of fellowship with Christ. (That is hard for prophetic people, because we always want to be a people of answers.)
It remains then only for us to allow the cross to keep doing its deadly work on our anticipations and expectations until the day of inflection arrives in which the unexpectable is released. Deliverance and fulfilment must come from nowhere expectable. As long as inner peace abides, there is no reason to question the journey or its wait.
If need be, we are quite capable of waiting all the way to physical death until fulfilment arrives. But the length of the wait says nothing about faith’s validity. God is not hemmed in by our time and season to do what He has said He will do. He can keep us alive, or translate us, or raise us from the sleep of the dead—whichever He chooses, yet it will not change anything He has told us He will do.
My own best translation of Hebrews 11 reads as follows:
Faith is rock-certain expectation based on immutable, irrefutable, irrepressible, irreprovable evidentiary conviction in God’s unseen doings…. In which we endure—not looking at what we don’t see, but—looking at Him who is Invisible.
Faith is not in our expectation of what we will see God do; rather, faith’s expectation is based only in looking at His invisibility. It’s that simple. After all, it is not possible to “expect” that which is “beyond what we can ask or think.”
The following concluding anchor words can assist us in the wait for the unexpectable:
“Do not move.”
“This is not about you, it is about Me.”
“Stay out of My way.”
“Let it come to you.”
“Keep believing in Me (not in your expectation)”
“Stay the course.”
“The present will not stand and it will not last.”
“Let Me do all the talking.”
His charge to us in the present then is not, “Maintain your expectation,” it is only,
“Hold My peace.”
Selah,
Chris Anderson
First Love Ministry
- a ministry of Anglemar Fellowship
http://www.firstloveministry.org05/24
Webmaster littleflock@netzero.net
Page created January 22, 2025
