Let Revelation Set Your Expectation
If you are going to make full use of the influence God wants to bring your way, you will need to set your personal expectation by divine revelation and not by human limitation.
It's true of any field of activity work in this life: if you totally accept another person's motivation, you will also accept his or her limitation. If you can't exceed human motivation you will accede to human limitation.
History has only ever been changed by people who have refused to accept the status quo. People who shape the world more than it shapes them won't tolerate what they know must change. They recognize that things do not have to stay just as they are, despite what others may tell them.
On October 31, 1517, a little known German Monk nailed a document to the wooden doors of the castle church in a university town called Wittenberg. Until then, nobody had heard of Martin Luther. Yet his simple document sparked a revolution which in the end gave us many of the religious and social freedoms we enjoy today.
For his efforts to get the church back to its roots, Luther was excommunicated from the institutional church. In 1521, the German Emperor called him to appear before a council of princes.
The Emperor demanded that he recant on his teachings. But after a day spent in earnest prayer, Luther's response was clear.
'Unless you can prove from the Bible that I have made wrong statements,' he said, 'I cannot and I will not take back anything.'
'My conscience is bound by the Word of God. Here I stand. I cannot do otherwise. God help me. Amen.'
In setting out to change something, Luther held his focus on what he had received by revelation. He would not take human expectation as his measure for what could be achieved.
When we lose sight of revelation, we often replace it with imitation.
Many Christians have all the style in the world, but they've lost their soul. They happily swallow everything they read in the latest magazines and slavishly follow trends they've seen in major conferences.
They prefer not to think for themselves. They would rather borrow someone else's motivation than dig deep for their own personal revelation.
It is right to honour those who deserve honour; those who've made a great contribution to your life. Whenever you look for ways to honour deserving people you set yourself up to emulate them. We tend to copy those whom we most admire.
But excessive imitation leads eventually to slavish stagnation. No matter how good the model, you should use imitation as a temporary scaffold while you establish your own identity, based on revelation.
It is, however, much more costly to be driven by revelation than by imitation. People who are revelation-motivated are not content to enjoy the present.
They long to change the future - and those who would influence the future usually pay a high price in the present. Today always exacts a heavy toll on those who would shape tomorrow.
Christian heroes like Tyndale, Wesley, Wilberforce, Livingstone and the Booths all found that reinventing the future can be a lonely business.
Revelation people are usually way out of step with the practice and thinking of their present.
They are stargazers, like Abraham. They are weather-watchers, like Noah and wall-readers, like Daniel.
They tend to be dream-artists, like Joseph or cloud-followers, like Moses, or giant-reducers like David and Messiah-seers like Peter.
In the end, they emulate crowd-feeding, storm-stilling, demon-evicting, water-walking, cross-bearing, grave-busters like Jesus.
© Mal Fletcher 2004-2005
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