PEACE IN THE STORM
PEACE IN THE STORM Written by John Paul Jackson
My last e-letter was a prophetic bulletin about the coming perfect storm. Perhaps you read it, and perhaps after you read it, you discovered something — a natural soulish tendency all of us have to deal with: fear. Hard-to-hear, difficult prophetic words such as that one produce all these questions within us (for both the writer and the reader), and if we’re not careful, the questions become our focal point and not the One to whom the questions should be addressed. I didn’t write that bulletin in order to induce fear. Think about that. Fear of what God might do to us should never, ever be our concern. It should never even be a distant spot upon the horizon. Why? Because He didn’t make us for fear (2 Timothy 1:7), and because perfect love casts out fear (1 John 4:18). Let’s spend a moment or two on that thought. It casts out fear. It doesn’t nicely ask it to step aside and then hope it does. It doesn’t even roughly escort it off the premises. It casts it out. That implies a hurling is involved; it is a verb that produces distance. In hard times, such as those that are coming, we have a choice. We can choose to believe, no matter what; this is called faith. Or we can choose to not believe. That’s called fear, which leaves no room for the level of freedom God has called us to. It doesn’t make it possible to reach out and touch the state of being that David talked about:
“I have looked for You in the sanctuary, To see Your power and Your glory.” — Psalm 63:2 Yes, hard times are coming. The Dark Night of the Soul is coming — the times when you can’t tell your right from your left, when you don’t have a clue what you’re doing or what God’s doing. But the very thing that rocks us to our core is what makes it possible for us to know the truth of what David wrote. The Dark Night of the Soul is another way of saying dying to self, and — despite everything your fear will tell you — the point of dying to self isn’t to die to self, to lose everything you’ve ever wanted. The point is to gain everything you’ve ever wanted. When you choose to lower your walls and let go of the things you’re desperately holding onto, you discover what you were looking for all along. You find peace. You find safety. You find Jesus. The smoke and the fog disappear, and you can see clearly for the first time in your life. In Genesis, the world knew darkness before it knew light. In the same way, intimacy with God is possible because we first have walked through the darkness. It isn’t a darkness that is evil; it is the darkness before the dawn, the thing that moves and shakes all our preconceived ideas of Him until all that remains is Him. That level of connection, where we know what it is like to be flesh of His flesh and bone of His bone, is what He’s after. As the eye of the storm approaches and we walk through hardships and trials the generations before us haven’t known, we must resolve not to be afraid. We must resolve to be a people who see past the fury of the wind and rain to the quietness on the other side. We don’t want to be a people who forget what the One we love looks like the minute the clouds roll in. We want to be a people who remember. Small battles produce recruits — men and women who haven’t even started training for the real war. But big battles, such as the one that’s coming, produce generations of heroes and heroines who, having done all, still have the courage to take back the mountain.
My last e-letter was a prophetic bulletin about the coming perfect storm. Perhaps you read it, and perhaps after you read it, you discovered something — a natural soulish tendency all of us have to deal with: fear. Hard-to-hear, difficult prophetic words such as that one produce all these questions within us (for both the writer and the reader), and if we’re not careful, the questions become our focal point and not the One to whom the questions should be addressed. I didn’t write that bulletin in order to induce fear. Think about that. Fear of what God might do to us should never, ever be our concern. It should never even be a distant spot upon the horizon. Why? Because He didn’t make us for fear (2 Timothy 1:7), and because perfect love casts out fear (1 John 4:18). Let’s spend a moment or two on that thought. It casts out fear. It doesn’t nicely ask it to step aside and then hope it does. It doesn’t even roughly escort it off the premises. It casts it out. That implies a hurling is involved; it is a verb that produces distance. In hard times, such as those that are coming, we have a choice. We can choose to believe, no matter what; this is called faith. Or we can choose to not believe. That’s called fear, which leaves no room for the level of freedom God has called us to. It doesn’t make it possible to reach out and touch the state of being that David talked about:
“I have looked for You in the sanctuary, To see Your power and Your glory.” — Psalm 63:2 Yes, hard times are coming. The Dark Night of the Soul is coming — the times when you can’t tell your right from your left, when you don’t have a clue what you’re doing or what God’s doing. But the very thing that rocks us to our core is what makes it possible for us to know the truth of what David wrote. The Dark Night of the Soul is another way of saying dying to self, and — despite everything your fear will tell you — the point of dying to self isn’t to die to self, to lose everything you’ve ever wanted. The point is to gain everything you’ve ever wanted. When you choose to lower your walls and let go of the things you’re desperately holding onto, you discover what you were looking for all along. You find peace. You find safety. You find Jesus. The smoke and the fog disappear, and you can see clearly for the first time in your life. In Genesis, the world knew darkness before it knew light. In the same way, intimacy with God is possible because we first have walked through the darkness. It isn’t a darkness that is evil; it is the darkness before the dawn, the thing that moves and shakes all our preconceived ideas of Him until all that remains is Him. That level of connection, where we know what it is like to be flesh of His flesh and bone of His bone, is what He’s after. As the eye of the storm approaches and we walk through hardships and trials the generations before us haven’t known, we must resolve not to be afraid. We must resolve to be a people who see past the fury of the wind and rain to the quietness on the other side. We don’t want to be a people who forget what the One we love looks like the minute the clouds roll in. We want to be a people who remember. Small battles produce recruits — men and women who haven’t even started training for the real war. But big battles, such as the one that’s coming, produce generations of heroes and heroines who, having done all, still have the courage to take back the mountain.
