Recognizing Your Day and Its Message
'To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven' (Ecclesiastes 3:1).
God's Word apportioned through the aeons has not returned to Him void but has accomplished the purpose for which It was sent. We see It in nature all around us. He allotted His Word through the six thousand years man has been on this earth - here a little, and there a little, and He predestinated a people who would by faith receive and become the manifestation of the Portion allotted to their day.
In every Age there was a Portion of Word and a people foreknown by God who would become written epistles of His Word. In the days of Noah God delivered a salvation Message and predestinated Noah and his family to receive that Message. Moses also delivered a salvation Message, and God had a people foreknown and prepared to receive It. In the days of John the Baptist, God called for repentance, and once again, there was a tiny group foreknown and foreordained to receive that Message.
Looking back, we see few received God's grace through the ministry of these great men. This should cause us to work out our salvation with fear and trembling, for if the righteous are barely saved ... Five souls in the days of Noah; (Mrs. Noah, Ham, and his wife were afterwards lost); three souls in the days of Moses - all the adult Israelites were blotted from the Book of Life through unbelief, and not too many from the preaching of John. (Seventy of the original apostles rejected Messiah; another betrayed Him to death).
More recently, God sent Martin Luther with the Message of justification by grace through faith alone. Although his Message kindled a world-wide Reformation, only a small percentage of Christendom paid heed much less received the new-birth for that day by His Message. Next, God added another line, another Word by John Wesley's Message of sanctification added to Luther's justification, and less received It.
As God Reformed the church through successive Protestant revivals, the measure of revealed faith (or the Portion of the Spirit of God) required for the new birth increased through these Moves of the Spirit Which manifested in progressive revelations of His Word. Justification in Luther, Sanctification added to It in Wesley's Revival, then the Gifts of the Spirit added to them in the Pentecostal Revival.
The saints of each of these Ages recognized their day and its Message, and became born-again, or written epistles of that Message. 'A life lived by the Word is the Word expressed'. But the descendants of the original saints who denominated, never had another revival. They did run well in their Age, but once bound by denominational cords, they were no longer free to be led of the Spirit into the next Revival. Those who refused that Call rejected the Holy Spirit, had their ear marked with an awl, and could never receive the new birth.
We do not live in the Age of Luther's Message. We are not living in the Wesleyan (Philadelphian) Age, and neither are we living in the Pentecostal Revival. These things have passed into history. There will NEVER be another Revival. We live in the days of the apostasy of the church, the days of the God's LAST Message to the Gentiles.
Let us not deceive ourselves by trying to impersonate the Message of an Age gone by. Moses could have stood up and said, 'I'm a savior, I was born a peculiar child, I'm the one God promised our father, Abraham. Let's build an Ark and float down the Nile'!
It was the vindicated Word of the Lord. Noah's Message worked for Noah, but It would not work for Moses. Moses lived in another day with a different Portion of Word predestinated to be fulfilled by different people under different circumstances.
Likewise Moses' Message would not work for John the Baptist, John's would not work for Luther, neither would Luther's work for Wesley, or Wesley's Message work for the Pentecostals. Nor will the Pentecostal and these other Messages produce the new birth today.
'We are all baptized into one Body, but it is not one member, but many'. In order for us to be baptized into That Body in THIS day, we need to recognize OUR day and it's Message, and 'walk in the Light AS He is in It'. strat003.htm
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