The City Worth Dying For
Introduction
Many mature Christians are sure the Lord has revealed to them something much better than the present state of Church and nation, but it has not yet come to pass. Why? A significant factor holding back the fulfilment of these visions was illuminated to me through a recent conversation with a senior national Christian leader committed to unity for mission. Especially, as we remembered the powerful times of mutual confession in Prayer Summits (https://prayersummits.net/) some years ago. The Spirit is speaking now about a move of “visible vulnerability”. Such was a priority for Paul, “I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling, 4 and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, 5 so that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God.” (1 Cor 2:3-5). On a cosmic scale, the prophetic message of “the Lamb slain from before the foundation of the world” (Rev 13:8) testifies that weakness rather than omnipotence is the basis of God’s plan to unify all things in Christ (Eph 1:10).
A Pattern for Restoration
A pattern for the healing of the Church is found in James 5:15-16, where the sick person is “raised up” (Greek egeiro) by resurrection power (egeiro is used 31x of Jesus’ resurrection) following obedience to the exhortation, “confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed”. Only a visitation of frailty in the face of the power of sin will induce such widespread confession amongst Christians. The regular falling from grace of Christian leaders (recently, Carl Lentz, Ravi Zacharias) is a sign that the Western Church lacks the gift of God-given weakness that alone exposes our deepest heart vulnerabilities. Many leaders are too fearful or ashamed to reveal personal struggles to those around them. Yet the lengthy descriptions of Jesus’ struggles in Gethsemane-Calvary with no description of the resurrection event reveal the wise ordering of the glory of God (Gal 6:14-15) that must be honoured.
Glory in God
In scripture, “glory” implies visibility (John 1:14). The unity for which Jesus prayed, “The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one” (John 17:22), is seeable. As the glory of the Son is to be the manifestation of God, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” (John 14:9), the glory given to the united Church is to be the visibility of Jesus to the lost. “I ask…that they may all be one …so that the world may believe that you have sent me.” (John 17:20-21). With our shared humanity having been taken “into God” in Christ (Eph 2:15; Col 3:3; 1 Thess 1:1; 2 Thess 1:1) the Church’s glory of manifesting the Son is nothing less than a share in the Son’s glory of revealing the Father. As Jesus “is the radiance of the glory of God” (Heb 1:3) the glory of the Bride is to reveal Christ (Eph 5:27). This involves a call to be as transparently weak before the Father as Jesus was so that his splendour alone might beam through us. Whilst only fully realised at the End (Rev 21:9-11), such transparency must be very real “now” (Eph 3:10).
Transparent Glory for a New City
Some years ago, I was inspired during a visit to the youth prayer hub, The Furnace, to sketch an image of how the glory of God would be revealed in Perth (http://cross-connect.net.au/). When the Lord connects men and women living the way of the cross (cf. Gal 6:17) through their being transparent with one another the glory of God will be revealed in our midst. This is the glory of the slain Lamb whose powerful cleansing blood takes for himself out of condemned Babylon a beautiful Bride (Rev 18:4). Sharing with one another the sufferings of Christ is the milieu in which the New Jerusalem is born (Gal 4:19; Phil 3:10) to the glory of God. Agreeing with Paul that love holds “everything together in perfect harmony.” (Col 3:14), John, the “seer” of the eternal city, exhorts, “By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers.” (1 John 3:16). Other-centred communion is the medium of the new creation. Believers who see that the goal of their agonies is the creation of a new dwelling place for God with humanity in an eternal city (Rev 21:3) will unhesitatingly share their sins and weaknesses with one another now for the release of new creation life.
Exposé: Babylon versus City-Church
“Great mystery” describes both the beautiful eternal city of God = the radiant Bride of Christ (Eph 5:25-27; Rev 21:9-10) and the end-time evil city of Babylon (Rev 17:5). In God’s wisdom these two cities are in opposition until the Last Judgement. If both cities have glory, how can they be distinguished? The luxuriant glories of Babylon (Rev 17:4-5; 18:3, 11-13) spiritually oppose the glories of the city-Bride of the Lamb in that whilst Babylon lives for herself the Bride lives for Jesus. The eternal precious treasure which shines through the New Jerusalem is the life of Christ offered up for his Church and her laying her life down for him (Rev 12:9). The Bride on earth is called to manifest the relational glory of the New Jerusalem “now” (Eph 3:10) in every sphere of life and culture. The Church alone can impart to a city sentenced to final destruction (Rev 18:21-19:3) a sense of the eternal. Only God’s people can free humanity in love with this present age (2 Tim 4:10) from the worldliness that leads to hell. This involves the deepest mystery of revealing true love as sacrifice (cf. Eph 5:25).
In Revelation the evil world city has as an escort, “the great prostitute” (17:1; 19:2), standing for the world’s false religions and an apostate church that cooperates with Babylon. In the end Babylon hates and destroys her harlot companion (17:15-18). This testifies that the Babylonian city never really loved her “church” but only used her to glorify herself. This great reversal (the end of Christendom?) is part of God’s sovereign purposes (17:17) to show the world what true love is. As we lay down our lives for the Lamb, and for one another, the Church alone shows the hollow deception of everything the world calls “love”. Sacrificial lowliness before others, especially the sharing of weaknesses, overcomes the world and opens the way to eternity.
Conclusion
The Lord is calling forth a new but old (2 John 5) type of leader with the charism of lowliness from which eternal things are built (Phil 2:5-11). From the innermost being of such men and women flows the river of the Spirit (John 7:37-39) as they share their personal struggles as a gift for the whole Body of Christ. Setting aside the distractions of busy worldliness they see in others the true treasure for which Christ died, they see others as the glorious building stones of the eternal city of God (Isa 4:11-12; Rev 21: 10-14 cf. 1 Cor 3:12). Drawn into the relational being of the Trinity they draw others into this life, suffering for them that they too might enter Christ’s glory (Rom 8:17), beginning “now”. As these leaders share the unhealed parts of their lives a wave of confession in the Church will precede “the restoration of all things” (Acts 3:21). The era of aloneness of Western individualism where folk strive alone to overcome their perceived weaknesses is coming to an end. A new and eternal city is emerging (Gal 4:26).