Loosening up

I’m sitting at my Grandmother’s house in Southern Scotland, with the snow outside the window beginning to thaw.  It’s a wet and dreary day, shrouded in mist.  The branches of the trees at the bottom of the garden hover against a white veil, gesturing beyond the visible world.  A little picture of prophecy perhaps.  Revealing truth we can’t see in the present, and pointing beyond this time into the mists of the future!

Anyway, enough description of my surroundings!  Just over a year ago I felt a strong urge to ask God about his purposes and plans beyond my immediate situation and community.  I’m going to post a few entries over the next month or so describing the different things that I saw and heard towards the beginning of this time.  I’ll also throw in a few of the corresponding words that have been reported to me by those I’ve shared these prophecies with.  (At the same time we’ll also be posting some of what we’ve heard more recently... it all ties together!)  As ever, please weigh what you read.  And be encouraged, as Aaron said in his last post, Aslan is on the move!

First up I’d like to describe a word I had whilst sitting on a train pulling into London Bridge. I asked God what He had for the Church in this country, and was surprised with the immediacy and clarity of the phrase that dropped into my mind: “Release, release as one from grave-clothes”.  

This reminded me of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead (read the story in John 11).  After three days in the tomb Lazarus walks out alive but constricted, “bound hand and foot... and with his face wrapped in a cloth”.  Jesus commands those nearby to, “loose him and let him go”.  

This seems to me to describe the current position of the Church in this country.  The new life that has been granted to the Church in the last two or three decades is plain to see.  I sometimes think of my generation as the first ‘children of the renewal’, growing up (at least in our teens) in churches where the Holy Spirit’s work is sought after and celebrated (I’ve even heard the resurgence of parts of the Anglican Church referred to as ‘Operation Lazarus’!).  But what still lingers of the things that characterised the Church when it was dead?  What of that era still holds us back?  Are there grave-clothes constraining the Church in its sight, movement and ministry?

We need to ponder these questions.  Let’s be disciplined in measuring our church’s way of life against the yardstick of Scripture and the Spirit, not the yardsticks of our own experience.  And let’s be prepared to discard those things in our structures and practices that don’t measure up.  I'm not talking about a mechanistic 'out with the old, in with the new', but rather a discerning weighing up of the way we think, act and organise ourselves against Scripture and the Spirit.  Let’s ask God to bring release.  

Incidentally, a few months after receiving this word, I had a picture along similar lines.  It was of a bird shaking out its wings before swooping off.  It was ‘loosening itself up’, shaking itself out before it could fly freely.  God’s Church will soar again... let’s loosen up.