Messes To Masterpieces

 

For every battle of the warrior is with confused noise, and garments rolled in blood; but this shall be with burning and fuel of fire. Isaiah 9:5

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Prayer, fasting ….. desperate cries are heard in the predawn hours: “God deliver, God set them free. Jesus …. do something in their life!”

Physicians ask the question: “Does this illness run in the family? Which side, your father or mother? Has this behavior surfaced in the past? What about drug and alcohol abuse?”

“You can’t see them today. Sorry you had to come all this way. They are resting in seclusion….. under heavy involuntary sedation. Come back tomorrow. Maybe they will be feeling better then.”

Satan is a coward. Say that again … Satan is a coward. He picks on the frail, the weak, the lonely, the lame, the vulnerable and those living on the fringes ….. fast pick-in’s and easy targets.

Along with that, he is a thief, a liar and a murderer. And not someone you would want to leave alone with your three year-old child or grandchild, let alone allow to sit and converse with you over coffee at the morning breakfast table.

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And their words seemed to them as idle tales, and they believed them not. Luke 24:11

This is the disciples response to what the women reported upon seeing Jesus’ empty tomb. Idle tales …

Carriages and pumpkins, pixie dust, church bells clanging the midnight hour, slippers and handsome Princes… , fairyland, Disney world, enchantment, virtual reality, love and life happily ever after – the stuff of fairy tales.

Just idle tales … this was their reaction after seeing water turned into wine, withered hands made whole, leprosy immediately cleansed, a man stumbling out of a tomb after being dead four days, a former demoniac now whole and with a sound mind, a fish spitting out money to cover the tax bill, a dead young girl miraculously raised to life, a snack lunch that fed over 5,000 people. Yeah, just idle tales.

A disconnect disrupted their faith . They defaulted into thinking the events surrounding Jesus’ resurrection were just too far “out there” to believe. Just a fairy tale (so they thought). Jesus alive after dying on a cross? You have got to be kidding. Impossible!

There was a time when Jesus’ disciples could not interpret reality and correctly process the signals life was sending them.

Unfortunately, real life is full of ugly things that don’t always have happy endings, at least from the human perspective – and death tops the list. Real life, and more specifically sin, can appear as it really is when the blinders are removed; things we would rather not see or touch like cancer, leprosy and gangrene.

These types of things do not make it in the final, concluding pages of fairy tales.

Does the church find itself in the same predicament? Are we falling into the same mindset as the disciples? Are we so “fat and happy” in this life that we have been silently lobotomized by the enemy to the extent that God’s miracles of deliverance, supernatural healing or the eminent rapture of His church all appear as “idle tales”?

Sometimes it takes seeing a scarred, mangled hand and a gaping wound to make one a believer …. it worked for Thomas (John 20:27-28).

Is the gospel of Jesus Christ amounting to nothing more than a tale to our world? As with the disciples, is the account of the resurrection so unbelievable that it belongs in a book of fairy tales?

The world is full of the fake, the phony, the vain and the empty while it attempts to force-feed cheap choices and worthless alternatives.

It is time to show Cinderella the door. Fairy tales are not allowed in this house. Give me truth, give me something that is REAL. Let me see who the real Lord Jesus Christ is. As the old TV series, To Tell The Truth would say: “Will the REAL _________ please stand up”

It is time for the church to allow the real Jesus Christ to stand up.

“You knocked looking for Cinderella. I am sorry ……. Cinderella No Longer Lives Here”