Jesus Needs a Few Good Pioneers



rantnrev.blogspot

Stories from the frontier are inspiring and mind-boggling!
The frontier culture demanded that you look at a wilderness with no roads and see a road. You saw a meadow with no shelter and saw a home. Your school, your church, and your community were the ones which you envisioned, and determined that you and your new pioneering neighbors would craft with your own hands, God being with you. That pioneering culture brought the vision of a new community to reality.
But something happens when we go from pioneer to settler. Pioneer culture assumes that we have to put our own hand with God’s hand to make the vision a reality.  But soon after we become settlers, we become accustomed to what has already been created, and we can become comfortable with what is, or, at least, begin to stop envisioning what could become reality, if we dare to dream and do.
In 2 Corinthians 4, we are reminded that in God’s kingdom, we don’t always see what is about to become. In this awesome passage, you can just hear what makes pioneering culture work! God just loves to take challenging circumstances, wilderness scenes in our life, and build a new reality where it seems impossible! But to take this and other scripture in context, this is not just our sitting and daydreaming! The context of scripture lets us know that we dream and do right along with God, who gave us brains, hearts, and muscle, because the dreaming and doing go together!

Whatever our circumstances today, may we not dream human size dreams, and live humanly explainable lives! Let us join God in dreaming and doing God-sized visions of our new Kingdom of God community!

I See Him Now!

yahoo news

850,000 people in Milan today, Sunday, June 3rd, 2012, crowed to see Pope Benedict XVI and worship. In the middle of a Vatican Scandal and a world with many troubles, people still want a glimpse of God’s kingdom! It was like that for the Old Testament Prophet, Isaiah (see chapter 6 verses 1 through 8.) A national leader had just died; there was the threat of instability in politics, society, finances, religion. But the word from God was not news of any of this, at least not yet. The big revelation of god was this: Here I Am! In all God’s glory, he made himself known. How many of our problems seem so big, until compared to our God?! Isaiah had a picture of God with which to face the challenges of the day. So do we! The wisdom, knowledge, and inspiration we need is secondary to the one we need: our Lord. Seeking him first, and then facing life with knowledge of him, our problems are cut down to size!