Hold Your Judgment

The Fear No Fear series focuses on rejecting fear and embracing faith. Fear is seen as a spiritual force used by Satan to keep people down. The prophetic is a way for God to speak to us, even though it may seem strange or hard to understand. The prophetic uses familiar language and comparisons to convey messages from God. It is important to listen to the prophetic and not dismiss it, as it can offer insights and warnings. God always reveals what is coming and wants us to exercise our free will in response. Prophecy can also touch on political topics, as God meets us where we are. It's important to test the prophetic and wait to see if it comes to pass. Welcome to Fear No Fear. Grace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. May the Holy Spirit embrace you today. This is a series of devotions and meditations on scripture. We reject fear in any and all forms. Fear is a spiritual force, the currency of darkness and ignorance. It's what we inherited when Adam gave up his faith and Satan uses it to keep people down. His only weapon is words. If he can get you believing or looking at words of fear, he's got you. Instead, we champion faith as an allegiance to God, as a belief and trust and loyalty to the Lord God Almighty. We accept the evidence of his word as unvarnished truth, as is, just as it's written. We get close to his perfect love through the word, and perfect love casts out fear. 1 John 4.18 All scripture is taken from the World English Bible, which is in the public domain. Visit eBible.org Amos 3.8 The lion has roared. Who will not fear? The Lord has spoken. Who can but prophesy? The ministry of the prophetic is one of the easiest to dismiss. It doesn't mean you're mocking or deriding it per se, but it is easy to dismiss. The language of the prophetic is kind of weird at times. It can seem simplistic. It can seem out of sorts with our personal views of the Lord. It can be tinged with a lot of human things. It can seem to be appropriating natural phenomena, but none of that means it should be dismissed. Whether we are viewing it correctly or incorrectly, the prophetic is a very simple thing. God speaking to us. The Lord, the God of their fathers, sent to them by his messengers, rising up early and sending, because he had compassion on his people and on his dwelling place. But they mocked the messengers of God, despised his words, and scoffed at his prophets, until the Lord's wrath arose against his people, until there was no remedy. 2 Chronicles 36, 15-16 Don't quench the Spirit. Don't despise prophecies. Test all things, and hold firmly that which is good. 1 Thessalonians 5, 19-21 Surely the Lord God will do nothing unless he reveals his secret to his servants the prophets. Amos 3, 7 These verses here are a road map of the prophetic. They encapsulate the ministry of the prophet, how God views the prophetic, and how we should deal with it. Basically, they answer every question that I just asked. The Lord wants to talk to us. So why does the prophetic have such weird language? Well, it references the world around us. It uses flowery pictures. It takes things we know and compares them to other things that we may or may not think fits. I remember one prophet in recent years who was talking about a public figure and saying they appeared to him as Satan. And it took me by surprise. I liked the individual in question. I liked how they thought and expressed themselves. Not necessarily agreeing with everything they said or did, but overall sympathetic to where they were coming from. But you have to listen to the prophetic. Just because I think a thing about someone or something doesn't mean I am right. I had to reevaluate what I thought about the person. I mean, they weren't the enemy, but were they operating the way the enemy operates? Were they being used by the enemy, knowingly or unknowingly? Was there more to what was going on than I had thought? Samuel went to anoint the next king of Israel. He didn't have a lot of luck at the beginning. All these strapping young lads who looked like kings, or at least the type of man we think of as a king, every one of them had something going for them. But none of them were chosen. Because God chooses people based on what He can see, not what we can see. Samuel had to look with prophetic eyes to see what God saw. In the end, David was chosen. A runt of very young age. Dirty and unkempt. And smelly. But he had what it took on the inside. No, he didn't get it right every time. But he had the heart to be God's chosen king. The prophetic is a tool for the Lord to get things to us that we otherwise might not listen to. To get us to look at what we may not have bothered to observe. There's an awareness experiment that was done. You can search for the video on YouTube. More than one version is out there. But a group of people are gathered with two basketballs. Some of the people are in white and others are in black. There is more black than white. You are asked how many passes the team in white make. And then all the people move around passing the balls back and forth. Then the video stops and asks you if you saw the bear. A man in a bear costume walked into frame, did a little dance, and then left. If you were counting the passes the white team makes, then you probably didn't notice the bear. Although they then seem to rewind the video and play it again to accentuate the bear, it's not a trick. If you go back to the beginning of the video and watch it a second time, you will suddenly see the bear. From the beginning. The human mind filters out a lot. Just because you didn't see it doesn't mean it wasn't there. The prophetic is God stopping our video and accentuating the bear He wants you to notice. That is vitally important, because God doesn't just tell us about things that are there, but we aren't noticing. The Lord also speaks to us about what is coming. Surely the Lord God will do nothing unless He reveals His secret to His servants the prophets. Nothing is a lot. In fact, nothing means everything. God doesn't do anything unless He has revealed it first. Now Malbem, a rabbi from the 1800s, talks about the prophetic like this. 1 Samuel 25-29 This is God's grace to mankind. For in this way were the truths and foundations of belief revealed in sure knowledge to the Master of the prophets with whom God spoke face to face. Exodus 33-11 And to whom He showed His glory. Exodus 33-18 So God tells us everything that He is going to do before He does it. And He uses the prophetic because with it He sidesteps our thinking and our limitations and speaks spirit to spirit directly. Our spirit translates to us the language of God. In the prophetic, comparisons don't have to be accurate. The spiritual cannot describe things to us without using the language that we know and the natural world with which we are familiar. It uses terms of daily experience to describe what is out of our experience. We get these pictures to give us an inkling of what is coming down the pipe. It was vital that Jonah get to Nineveh to prophesy because God was coming to Nineveh and it was not going to be good. That wicked city had to be told what was coming because God always tells us what is coming. When it is good, He wants us to prepare for it with eager anticipation like little children before their birthday. When it is bad, He wants us to repent and turn away from what is bringing the bad. To move into His yard where we have protection instead of staying out in the rain, snow and sleet of the curse. If we aren't given the opportunity to do something then we haven't exercised free will. And God always wants us to exercise free will. We need to choose to accept His good gifts or we need to choose to spurn His good gifts. We need to choose to obey to accept His protection. Or we need to choose to reject Him and take the judgment for our actions. Without being told something is coming how can we have free will about it? This doesn't mean that we get a personalized warning about things. Jesus told us in the end times we would have earthquakes and disasters. Luke 21 10-18 Wisdom tells us that we should expect them and be prepared. In the modern era preparing doesn't take a lot of effort and emergency kits and non-perishables and some potable water and you've done about all you can do. He warns, we prepare and done. He made a statement, we responded with free will and now He can do what He wanted to do. He can bring blessing or protect us from the curse. He can keep His word and exercise judgment. Whichever way we choose He will respond. But He will have warned us which is as a just God He tells us He always will. What about when prophecy gets political? When every prophet seems to talk about America this and America that and everything has to do with that country and the election cycles and the politicians and everything. Well God meets us where we are, doesn't He? He wants to talk to us. He doesn't get political. We do. Us. And since we are political He talks to us about what we're thinking about talking about and focusing on. God is a communicator and He wants to communicate with us. If all we do is think on politics then that is what He's going to talk about with us. Since every nation is closely tied to every other and with the advent of electronic communication it's important to listen to what other countries are doing and experiencing. The larger the influence of the country the more important it is to listen to. The important thing is not to dismiss it. Maybe it isn't directed at you, but it's still God talking. We aren't being taken into captivity to Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar but there are a lot of principles about God's nature that we can learn from the books of the prophets where the Israelites are being talked to by God. A good prophet doesn't embellish. They report exactly what they are told to say. But sometimes our humanity gets the better of us. It doesn't mean the prophet or the words they speak are bad. But it can mean that they miss it or they miss part of it. We're not told to spurn the prophetic that doesn't come to pass. We're told to test the prophetic. The words, not the prophets. With the prophetic testing is easy. Wait. Wait and observe. It will either come to pass or it won't. Prepare for it with wisdom as the Holy Spirit leads you and then wait. If it comes to pass, it was an authentic word of the Lord. If it doesn't, they missed it. It doesn't make them a bad prophet. It means the word was missed. There's a difference between the two, a big difference. We're called to listen to prophets. We're called to take heed and pay attention to them. We would be less confident in Jesus' identity as the Messiah if there hadn't have been hundreds of prophetic words spoken about him that he then fulfilled. The prophecies confirmed what Jesus said. They pointed to his nature as the last Adam, the son of the Most High. The Lord spoke, we prophesied, and Jesus fulfilled. It's much the same today. As prophets prophesy, listen to them. Listen to the themes, listen to the specifics. Pray and listen to the Holy Spirit. Be guided into wise and prudent preparation. Don't be afraid to do something the neighbors might not get, but don't run out to the store screaming and yelling and buying all the toilet paper either. Don't make trouble for trouble's sake. Be led by the Lord, then wait. See if it comes to pass, because the word of God always comes to pass. It is always trustworthy, always worth listening to. Honor the prophets of the Lord. Don't follow them blindly. Listen, test. The Lord says nothing that is out of 100% agreement with the word. Reverence the word. Heed it like you would heed hearing a lion's roar. The Lord is moving and preparing to move all over the world. You know he's going to say something about it first. Our daily affirmation of God's love is Nahum 1.7. This is a book about judgment, about judgment on a city that had a chance to repent, to truly repent, but that on the whole did not. We are in a world that is facing judgment, a world that is being given a chance to repent, to truly repent. God doesn't have to wait. He is well within his rights to end it all right now. But he isn't, and he won't until his conditions are met. They aren't arbitrary. We weren't chosen by spinning a wheel. He loves us too much to leave anything to chance. He loves us too much not to give us all the chance to repent. God doesn't want to judge anyone. God wants to reward us. If we're saved, we don't get judged. We've been spared from that, Romans 8.1. But we were tasked with spreading the good news to the world, to make sure that every single human being hears the message, to give all the people the chance to choose. Instead of us facing judgment, it's our deeds, our words, and our thoughts that will be held to the flame. If they were founded on Jesus, they'll survive. If they're built on anything else, even good intentions, they will burn, and we'll end up with nothing to show for all of our time here, 1 Corinthians 3.10-15. Judgment is coming on this world, and God wants the maximum number of people under His wings when He does. Sheltered and cared for. He doesn't want to weep over the loss of even one person. God is good and big enough for everyone. He wants us to take refuge in Him. He wants us safe and secure. Why? Because He loves us. Everyone, big and small. He loves you so much. As we close, remember that you have birth. You are precious and valuable. Declare this. Today, God loves that I... Now you fill in the blank. Was it a meal you made? A smile you gave? Did you get out of bed? Read? Put on socks? There's no wrong answers here. There is no end to God's love, and no end to the things about you that He loves each and every day. Pick one. And remember, the Lord loves you just because you're you. 1 John 4.9-10 tells us, By this, God's love was revealed in us, that God has sent His only-born Son into the world, that we might live through Him. And this is love. Not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and sent His Son as the atoning sacrifice for our sins. His perfect love turned away God's wrath because of sin, and it casts out our fear too. See verses 18 and 19. We love because He first loved us. He just loved us. Can't get enough of us. And that is wonderful. See you next time.