I baptize you with water for repentance, but he who is coming after me is mightier than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into the barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.
—Matthew 3:11-12 ESV
Last week I was shopping for groceries in my local Kroger when I was overcome by a staggering feeling. Turning into an aisle with two rows of cooler cases, I felt like I was displaced from the rest of the crowd in the store, pulled away, destined to persecution at the hands of those around me. It was a sobering, yet eerie, sensation. When I finally took it to prayer, I was reminded of John the Baptist’s comment on the work of Christ, the Savior’s winnowing fork in hand, ready to thresh the nations.
Many times on this blog I have commented that we are not ready. A passage that comes to mind so frequently is
For man does not know his time. Like fish that are taken in an evil net, and like birds that are caught in a snare, so the children of man are snared at an evil time, when it suddenly falls upon them.
—Ecclesiastes 9:12 ESV
Will the world soon be “caught in an unguarded moment?” Is an evil time coming more swiftly than we realize? I cannot say with prophetic certainty, but something is happening. I don’t want to blame this on two hurricanes, either. It’s more than that. It feels, to quote C.S. Lewis, as if “Aslan is on the move.”
I thought about all those people around me in the store. Chaff? I also felt like hard times were coming for us believers in Jesus, the wheat, and that we will have underestimated its ferocity when it arrives. I heard recently that Chinese Christians are praying for persecution for American Christians so that the sleeping American Church would finally get serious. Will that prayer soon come to pass?
Anyone else get this same impression recently?
Dan: “Anyone else get this same impression recently?”
Dan, be glad and thankful you don’t get these feelings all the time. I’ve had them fairly regularly for many years now.
I suspect that, one way or another, in a short time, the U.S. will cease being the global hyperpower that it is now. Now some people will definitely rejoice at this thought. But how will it happen? I don’t know. And how short a time is “short”? Neither do I know that one. Maybe when the oil finally runs out?
I was writing a reply, but it kept growing and growing, and I decided it would best take up space at my blog than in your comments. I hope you don’t mind.
http://holydogpound.blogspot.com/2005/09/open-letter-to-dan-edelen.html
Yeah, I’ve felt that before to Dan. I can never decipher what it means though, which is probably what also bugs you. Could be that you’re feeling a hurt for the lostness of people around you? Or it could just be the spirit saying “Hey, remember your an eternal creature.” I’ve grown to sort of like the fact that I don’t know what God’s up to all the time. Life would be pretty boring if I did.
Yes! Definitely! The prayers of the Chinese people will be answered, and the church houses that have been built so huge to accommodate so many will be meeting places for the few, if they dare to be seen there. But when? In five years? Fifty years? A hundred years? At a time when it seems almost too far away, He will come. In l947, I heard these words, “Before this meeting is over, before this prayer is ended, Jesus may come.” We were naive.
Dan,
Well you have known me long enough to know that my answer to your last question would be an unqualified: yes.
Brad
Dan,
Definately YES. I have been feeling this way for about 4 yrs now. The feeling has only intensified especially over the summer with the Gaza Pullout.
Living in the Gulf Coast area having been hit by Rita and having helped evacuees from Katrina makes me even more aware that we are living in the last seconds of the final hour before Jesus returns.
I am an intercessor, and the Lord wakes me up at different hours during the night to pray for America.
I hear the Lord saying “Sow in tears”, so I weep for America, I cry out for mercy even though we as a nation do not deserve it, I cry and ask God to wake up the sleeping, self centered, strifeful church. I cry for shepherds and for prophets to speak that which the Lord gives them just as Micaiah the prophet did in I kings. I cry for our youth, for them to understand the beauty of holiness. I cry and repent for prayerlessness, materialism, indifference towards missions and our brothers and sisters in North Korea, Sudan, Nigeria, India, and China.
I am not surprised that many in the church do not feel anything.
Too many in the church are too busy going to Home Depot, and Lowes and are redecorating their houses and they cannot even see prophetically that Americas house is full of termites and is about to be destroyed.
I truly believe with all my heart that America will cease to be as we know it. We will not be a superpower for very much longer, and everyone will soon find out who really is the wheat and who is the chaff. Will you still love the Lord even if you won’t see
His goodness in the land of the living? What do you think our N.Korean brethren would say to a question like that?