Wow!
This statement hit with the force of a solid upper cut to the lower jaw. So I wondered, "Are my dreams getting bigger or smaller? What am I believing God to do in my life and for a2 Church? What is my big dream?"
For some reason I remembered a piece I read a few years ago by Peter Grieg titled, The Vision. So I went back, dusted it off and slightly tweaked it to sum up my "big dream" for a2 Church.
The Vision
Adapted from Peter
Grieg
So this guy
comes up to me and says, "What's the vision? What's the big idea?" I open up my mouth and the words come out like this...
The vision?
The vision?
The vision is JESUS: obsessively, dangerously, undeniably Jesus!
The vision
is an army of people — young, middled-aged, ..."old"...
You see
bones? I see an army.
And they are
free from materialism—
They laugh
at nine-to-five little prisons. They could eat caviar on Monday and crusts on
Tuesday. They wouldn’t even notice…
They are
free yet they are slaves of Jesus... Servants of the hurting, the dirty and dying…
What is the vision?
The vision is holiness that hurts the eyes.
It makes children laugh and self-righteous religious people angry.
It gave up the game of minimal integrity long ago
to reach for the stars.
It scorns the good and strains for the best.
It is dangerously pure.
Light flickers from every secret motive, from
every conversation.
It loves people away from their suicide
leaps—their Satan games.
This
is an army that would
lay down its life for the cause.
A million
times a day, its soldiers choose to lose
that they might one day win the
great “well done” of faithful sons and daughters.
Such heroes
are as radical on Monday morning as they were Sunday.
They don’t
need fame from names.
Instead they
grin quietly upwards and hear the "great crowd of witnesses" (Hebrews 12) chanting again and again: “COME ON!”
And this is the sound of the underground,
the whisper of history in the making, foundations
shaking, revolutionaries dreaming once again.
Mystery is
scheming in whispers, conspiracy is breathing…
This is the sound of the
underground.
And the army
is disciple(in)ed—
People who "beat their bodies into submission."
Every
soldier would take a bullet for his comrade at arms.
The tattoo
on their back boasts “for me to live is
Christ and to die is gain.”
Sacrifice
fuels the fire
of victory
in their upward eyes.
Winners.
Martyrs.
Who can stop
them?
Can hormones
hold them back?
Can failure
succeed?
Can fear
scare them or death kill them?
And this
generation prays
like a dying
man with groans beyond talking, with warrior cries, sulfuric tears and a passion for God's glory that will not quit...
Waiting.
Watching.
24-7-365.
Whatever it
takes they will give:
Breaking the
rules,
Shaking
mediocrity from its cozy little hide aways,
Laying down
their rights and their precious little wrongs,
Laughing at
labels,
Fasting
essentials.
The
advertisers cannot mold them.
Hollywood
cannot hold them.
Peer-pressure
is powerless to shake their resolve at late-night parties before the rooster crows...
They are
incredibly cool,
dangerously
attractive (on the inside).
On the
outside?
They hardly
care!
They wear
clothes like costumes:
to
communicate and celebrate,
but never to
hide.
Would they
surrender their image or their popularity?
They would
lay down their lives, swap seats with the man on death row, guilty as hell: a
throne for an electric chair.
With blood
and sweat and many tears,
with
sleepless nights and fruitless days,
they pray as
if it all depends on God
and live as
though it all depends on them.
Their DNA chooses Jesus.
He breathes
out.
They breathe
in.
Their
subconscious sings.
They had a
blood transfusion with Jesus.
Their words
make demons scream...
Don’t you
hear them coming?
Herald the weirdoes!
Summon
the losers and the freaks.
Here come
the frightened and forgotten
with fire in
their eyes!
They walk
tall and trees applaud.
Skyscrapers
bow.
Mountains
are dwarfed
by these
children of another dimension.
Their
prayers summon the Hound of Heaven
and evoke
the dream of Eden.
And, this
vision will be.
It will come
to pass.
It may not come
easily, but it will come...
It will come
soon.
How do I
know?
Because,
this is the longing of creation itself,
the groaning
of the spirit,
the very
dream of God.
My tomorrow
is His today.
My distant
hope is His 3-D.
And, my
feeble, whispered, faithless prayer invokes a thunderous, resounding,
bone-shaking, great “AMEN!” from countless angels, from heroes of the faith,
from Christ himself.
And He is
the original dreamer, the ultimate winner.
Guaranteed.
What is the vision? What is the big dream?
It's Jesus!
It's all about Jesus!
It's always about Jesus!
It's only about Jesus!
Thanks, Mark B., Peter G., and Wed AM Small Group for inspiring me to think about "the big dream."
My big dream? JESUS!
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