Tales Of Agape

Opportunity

Welcome

Strange

Often our families thought we weren't thinking about the future. Truth is, our vision focused further out than theirs. It stretched to further horizons and entertained horrific possibilities.

Like the rest of the Jesus People generation we didn't expect religious freedom, our country, perhaps even the world to last. We saw true revival as the only hope for a real future.

Like our counter-culture counterparts we saw the threat of nuclear devastation as very real. We knew that our own choices effected not just our own lives, but many. If that was so, the world itself seemed to hang by the thread of a wrong, rash, unloving choice.

We did believe in the power of prayer. That was demonstrated daily in the fact, especially early on, that we actually had food to eat, clothes to wear, and a place to lay our collective heads. But we feared greatly that America was beyond saving.

A.W. Tozer and Leonard Ravenhill wrote fiery scripts we often kept in the same satchel with our bibles.

"If God does not judge America, he will have to apologize to Sodom and Gomorrah."

The sin we saw. Often the sin we came out of convinced us that this was very, very true. Real, transforming revival was, in our fervent opinion, the only hope for our cities, our nation, the world.

Later, the key word for the ministry became "influence". A good word to be sure, it speaks of salt and light, infiltration and slow change, but I must admit it seemed weak to me in light of what drove us in the beginning. Early on REVIVAL was our only mantra and compromise with the world was unthinkable.

Down the road a few years, trying to support a family without a college degree or those early years of foundational career building employment some of us wondered "What were we thinking?"

Well, I know exactly what we were thinking. Given the same set of circumstances, hearing the same call, feeling the same unction of the Holy Spirit, I would do it again without hesitation.

Yes, the choices I made then have effected where I am today, but there is still the longer look to think about. The Jesus Movement was a genuine revival, if not as powerful as we had hoped. In spite of what we thought, we weren't the only ones laboring in that field.

I truly believe that revivals occurring today and in the recent past were answers to the prayer we offered for it then and maybe, just maybe, even fruit of that labor.

In light of that the fact that some of us have struggled financially, had a hard time fitting back into the church culture or perhaps worse, while very sad, does not seem too great a price to pay.

Again, there are two main words used in the New Testament for being ready. The word that Paul uses however, is not the word for preparation by discipline. There is a readiness that does not come from physical and mental exercises alone. It has to do with vision, with conviction, with the long-term look. The word Paul uses for being ready, prothumos, means to have a future mind to be predisposed to the possibilities of the future. In a culture where everything appeared collapsing, people opting out of responsibility from the personal to the national political, these young soldiers of the army of agape took the long look. They had gazed a little on eternity and realized that while they were only teenagers for a tithe of their time on earth, the investment of the early years of their lives would give them an open heaven for the rest. The real lessons of the Agape Force were not the academic or the scholastic. They were in the school of the Holy Spirit - the realm of trust in a Living God who is the Author and Finisher of our faith. In matters both small and seemingly insignificant to the really big battles and challenges they learned what it meant that the just shall live by faith.

Winkie