As we come nearer to the end, a change comes in the "Christian experience" of God's people. Their deepest heart concern ceases to be that of saving their own souls, to a concern for the glory of Christ in the closing hours of the "great controversy between Christ and Satan." (When I was a boy, some silver-haired elders in the church told me that the greatest question is that of my own soul's salvation.)
These people of God in the last days turn away from their previous concern for their own salvation to a concern for Another--that He emerge victorious from the "battle" He is in.
This change in "Christian experience" can be described in the terms the Lord Jesus uses in John 15: "Henceforth I call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth; but I have called you friends; for all things that I have heard of My Father I have made known unto you" (vs. 15).
As we come closer to the end, the concern of these "friends" is for that "battle" that Christ is in, and not for self.
This change in "Christian experience" orientation can also be described as graduating out of the Old Covenant "Christian experience" into the New. It's coming out of the shadows into the bright sunlight of "present truth" (a term in 2 Peter 1:12).
The "present truth" is New Covenant living, not Old.
This change is also passing from Revelation 18 into Revelation 19 where we find those four grand Hallelujah Choruses, each greater than Handel's (vss. 1-17). It can at last be said that "the Lord God omnipotent reigneth. Let us be glad and rejoice, and give honor unto Him: for the marriage of the Lamb is come, and His wife hath made herself ready" (19:6, 7). At last!
Although the Lord is "omnipotent," He cannot force the nuptials. It cannot be said that He "reigneth" until her nuptial devotion to Him as to a divine Husband is real. Thus there is a "woman" whose marital devotion He can only wait, and wait, to see. The good news that rejoices one's heart is that this change in spiritual growth is actually taking place. Don't be left behind!
From the "Dial Daily Bread" Archive: July 17, 2008.
Copyright © 2011 by Robert J. Wieland.
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