Prepare the Way for the Lord
Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedPrepare the Way
for the coming of the Lord.
This phrase
was part of the dramatic call
I received in 2006.
Raise up an army of Artists
who will build Jesus a throne
and make a way for the coming of the Lord.
You will father a new generation of artists
who make a way for the coming of the Lord.
In Scripture
there is really only one forerunner
John the Baptist.
His message can be broken down into four parts:
1.Prepare the Way for the coming of the Lord.
2. Change your thinking.
3. Produce works that show you have changed.
4. He must increase
and I must decrease: when he comes turn to him and be filled with the Holy Spirit.
These four points are the core of the character and the nature of every person called to be a forerunner.
Before we talk about John
we have to talk about his lifestyle.
John was a Levite.
He was the son of a priest,
and when the book of Matthew was written,
the priesthood in Israel
was politically compromised.
The priests
who had led the Maccabean revolt two hundred
years earlier against the Greeks
were now collaborators with the Romans
in order to keep an uneasy peace in Israel.
John was born to be a priest
and at some point
he walked away.
At some point he made a choice
that there would be no compromise.
The image of John is a wild and crazy one,
but behind this image
is a man who had to have been well trained,
and knew the Scripture.
There are a couple indications
that underneath that rough exterior
there had been wealth and refinement.
He wears a leather belt,
and that means there was a buckle.
That means money.
He eats wild honey and locusts.
To us that sounds a bit disgusting,
but those were rare delicacies in the ancient world.
It would be like us saying he ate truffles all day.
Yes, they were natural
and hard to come by,
but John knew how to find them,
and he lived on delicacies.
From the image we get of John
he is a man
who at some point
chose
to live
completely outside the system.
He was beholden to no one.
When God really calls you out to make a way for the coming of the Lord
he is going to disconnect you from the corruption of your generation.
John was born to be priest,
and he chose instead
to go into the desert
and be schooled by God.
You can walk from the cave of Elijah
to the spot where John was baptizing.
You can see the Jordan from the cave.
It is one of the driest places I have been.
My guess is,
John knew about Elijah’s cave,
and probably stayed there.
God takes you into the desert
to tune your heart.
We used to say that violinists were
unhappy,
because most of them have perfect pitch,
and when you have perfect pitch,
you have to live in a world that is slightly out of tune.
When Jesus pulls you away
you suddenly find your self
out of tune with everyone else.
And out of that irritation
you begin to proclaim the call on your life.
Prepare the way for the coming of the Lord.
And anyone who has a true forerunner calling
is going to carry
emotion
behind the message.
That emotion is a force.
The core of the message of the forerunner is in Isaiah 62:
Go through, go through the gates,
prepare the way for the people;
build up, build up the highway,
clear it of stones,
lift up an ensign over the peoples.
Behold, the Lord has proclaimed
to the end of the earth:
Say to the daughter of Zion,
“Behold, your salvation comes;
behold, his reward is with him,
and his recompense before him.”
Clear the stones.
Break up the fallow ground.
Make the way smooth.
2. Change
The English translation here
uses the words “repent” and “works worthy of repentance.”
The Greek here matters,
because the words in the Greek are Metanoia
and Metanoiete.
In the English Bible tradition,
the word that is most often translated “repent”is the Greek word,“metanoia.”
It’s a compound word,
made of a prefix and a noun to form a verb.
Meta means to change.
It does not mean“to turn” or change direction.
It simply means change.
It comes down to us in the term for how a caterpillar
becomes a butterfly:
Metamorphosis.
Which, if you know Greek
is also a compound word of a noun with a prefix and a suffix:
Meta—to change
Morphe—shape or form
osis—process of.
Metamorphosis is the process of changing shape
from one thing to another.
It’s very simple.
The second part of this word
is also very simple.
“Noia” means mind or thinking.
The Greeks thought that thinking
and the mind were one.
As you probably do as well.
The way this comes to us in English is the word “paranoia.”
It’s a full on Greek word we all know. ”
“Para” is the word for come behind or come ahead,
or even come along side.
It can mean both—as in paramedic—a medic who gets there first.
To be paranoid is to think someone is behind you.
So, now that we understand the component parts
we can put the two together and we have our word
Metanoia.
To change your mind or thinking.
And intrinsic in this,
because the Hebrew mindset does not
isolate the thinking from the doing,
is the idea that your thoughts
are going to change your behaviour.
Jews did not understand the mind the same way.
Jews understood the mind, thinking,
and the heart as one,
as the “soul.”
Jews did not think things sprang out of your head,
but rather,
out of your center,
either the area of your heart
or your intestines.
The Hebrews thought that the mind was connected to your gut,
or your bowels.
So when Jesus had compassion,
it says he “felt it in his gut.”
The head is never floating somewhere apart from the body.
Have you noticed something?
I have not mentioned sin.
Metanoia is not about sin.
It’s about change.
Metanoia is about an inside out transaction,
that is not about morality, reparation, or even consequences.
It’s about becoming something else.
Maybe it’s about becoming a new creation.
When you truly metanoia,
the sin
which is really a symptom
of the separation from God,
and of a wrong identity,
begins to go away.
You are changed.
That’s why a lifestyle of repentance
is eternal, but hopefully,
a lifestyle of sin is temporary.
This is why sin based revival movements die.
When people get transformed
things change
and you can’t keep going to the altar.
At some point you have to start living like Jesus.
God is always finding places in your thinking
that need to change.
Even if it
doesn’t really add up to sin.
Turning to God
will in turn
bring a transformation of your thinking.
Turning and Transformation
must be held together.
The Forerunner calls people to action.
So
if you are making a way for the coming of the Lord
and people are suddenly giving up their wrong ways of thinking,
the next piece is very important.
John called the people to works worthy of repentance.
And he called them to a “mikvah.”
This was a ritual bath
either for ritually unclean people
like women after childbirth,
or a person who has touched a dead body,
or a new convert to Judaism.
If wanted to come to Israel,
you had to humble yourself
and get baptized.
John is saying
you might be Jewish
but your are not Israel,
and you need to get birthed into Israel.
John’s baptism
was a baptism without the power of the Holy Spirit.
It was just a human sign of a choice.
And there were people that John refused.
He refused the religious experts,
the professionals,
the ones were compromised.
John turned them away and called them a brood of vipers.
This would be echoed later
when Jesus said,
“many of you will come to me saying ‘Lord, Lord
we did all these great thing in your name,
and the Lord will say
depart from me
I never knew you.”
John’s baptism is not our model,
because there was no Holy Spirit.
He was preparing the people for something greater.
You have to produce works that look like you have had a metanoia.
Finally,
the forerunner
points to someone else.
He must increase
and I must decrease.
We are not making a way for ourselves
or our ministry.
It is not about you
or your ministry.
It is about Jesus
and all signs are pointing to the truth
that Jesus is coming
and every eye shall see him.
And John is saying to us,
I baptize with water,
but there is one coming
who will baptize with the Holy Spirit
and with fire.
John like so many in his generation
confused the promises of the first coming of Jesus
with the second one.
Bob Tuttle at Asbury used to say,
Jesus came once as a little Baby,
but he is coming again
with a ROAR!
Let’s take these four ideas
and land this airplane
with some practical thoughts.
Last year Mark Pierce
told me I had a John the Baptist calling.
I was called to be a priest,
and then God forced me to leave a system that was
grossly corrupted
and live in the desert
for a long time.
And when I was called to raise up an army of artists
I was given a few basic directions:
and those directions were in opposition to the prevailing wind
of ministry building,
consumer Christianity
obsession with money and big organizations
and building cultures around events and celebrities.
On January 7
I will officially be cranky for twenty years.
This past year
we experienced the hardest pruning
in our ministry history.
It’s been a hard season.
In the midst of this hardness
I have had to ask God to turn the pruning into growth.
He called me to go against the flow
but not be weird.
If you have a forerunner call,
you are going to be asked to do unusual things,
like not go to professional events and
not go raise money
and not network
or even hang out with people who may be into the arts
but who are not interested in metanoia.
Some of you listening
need to permission to
say to other Christians in the arts,
you are a just secular artists in the secular world
doing a few religious things,
but Jesus is calling me to be a disciple,
and that means I have to listen to God everyday
do what he tells me
and go and do the thing he asked me
even if it doesn’t make sense to others.
And if you do this,
you are living a lifestyle of repentance.
And you cannot walk this way
with the resistance that is going to come with it,
without a baptism of the Holy Spirit
and fire.
But the baptism
comes second
after the decision.
So as we look toward the return of the King
and the coming of our Lord Jesus,
we need to ask God to come
Come Holy Spirit.
Fill us with the fire and the glory
that you poured out on Pentecost.
We need a fresh baptism
to continue to walk in the forerunner anointing.
We ask Lord,
for an increase of dreams,
vision, and revelation in our house
that we would be magnetized
to attract the men and women
who are like iron that was forged in the fire.
Come Kingdom of God,
be done will of God.
Amen.
You can support Belonging House at https://belonginghouse.betterworld.org or buymeacoffee.com/christjohnotto.
We have a Mighty Network for artists and creative people who are committed to a lifestyle of discipleship: https://belonging-house.mn.co
You can get our Friday email at https://belonginghouse.substack.com
Member discussion