The Christian life in the danger zone of faith is just that…a zone of danger. There is real spiritual opposition of darkness in high places (Eph. 6:12) that would like this upside-down world of skeptical indifference to God…to continue just as it is.
According to Joel 2:28-32, God intends to pour out of His Spirit upon the entire planet at the time of the end…the latter rain…with a piercing truth like the sharp, two-edged sword it is…setting large numbers of people free from the blindness of skeptical unbelief.
This can mean nothing less than a critical zone of danger every bit as perilous as the early Christians faced in Jerusalem…proclaiming boldly after Pentecost that Jesus of Nazareth is the messiah risen from the dead for our salvation.
This can mean nothing less than a similar experience of persecution and tribulation…encountered by Paul in his evangelical mission to the first-century Greco-Roman world…that will separate-out the subtleties and nuances of a final understanding of the knowledge of good and evil…in the closing chapter of human redemptive history.
A genuine God-composed journey of faith life-script sets-up a foreordained crash and a collision between the two opposing “business models” in our approach to life.
An entirely new model of complex, well-ordered, pre-planned, and premeditated information is needed for a larger enterprise, before the “scope of work” grows.
Joshua did not think up the military strategy to bring down the walls of Jericho.
Gideon would never have dreamed up the battle plan God devised to defeat the invading Midianites.
The life-script of waiting patiently for the birth of Isaac was far outside of the initial contemplation of both Abraham and Sarah.
Peter could not anticipate all of the upcoming events that would revolutionize his life in the simply call of Jesus: “Come ye after me, and I will make you to become fishers of men” (Mk. 1:17).
Like Paul (1 Tim. 1:15), when I became a Christian at age 18, many years ago, at that time, I now looking back in hindsight would place myself at the bottom 5 to 10 percent of average people out in the world in terms of basic good character.
Sometimes God calls the worst people to follow Him, people who at the time of their conversion are totally lost, misguided, and falling far short of our created potential.
God does this, because after He places divinely motivating faith in our future potential…that at the time we cannot initially see…on our subsequent journey-of-faith road to the recovery of our true selves and our destinies, we have so much “make-up” ground to recover that in catching up there is a great deal of “all truth” basics to learn along the way (Lk. 5:8).
If I were able to go back and rewrite the course of my life… doing everything right according to an alternate reality of worldly conventional normalcy…like Saul/Paul going back to Jerusalem to live an exemplary life according to the highest values of humanistic, worldly conventional thinking…then I simply could not write this book.
It is a Christian life lived in the unconventional danger zone reality of a God-composed journey of faith life-script…having challenges and difficulties to overcome…that informs my recognition of the danger zone central to every journey of faith recorded in the Bible.
It is a Christian life lived in the danger zone that raises the interesting and compelling questions I seek answers to that motivates my drive to follow Jesus up into the heights of jagged mountain peaks and down into the depths of the lowest valleys…where the highs and lows of a “knowledge of good and evil” reside and can be found.
But I am very much like the disciples in the first-century who say to Jesus: “Declare unto us this parable” (Mt. 15:5; Mk. 4:10, 4:34).
I need the Holy Spirit to divide out for me truth from error in the middle of life experience. I need a journey of faith with divinely premeditated events and circumstances precisely sequenced to lead me step-by-step into the world of the “all truth” of John 16:13.
Otherwise, the issues are too subtle and too finely hidden for me to intellectually separate and identify, even with the gift of an analytical mind.
The small-business owner’s mindset of: “I can do everything because I am doing everything” simply does not hold true when the stakes get higher in a God-composed journey of faith.
If the “scope of work” volume of our lives expands through our adventure of faith, then spiritually we become stretched beyond self-reliance.
When we arrive at the fullness of our life’s mission, the program of godliness is much bigger and much grander than we can manage on our own.
The information-rich danger zone of God’s higher ways is where Paul received his mission, his motivation, and his inspired message (Gal. 2:20).
The danger zone of faith in God…is where and how the Holy Spirit leads Spirit-born Christians into all truth yesterday, today, and in the rapidly approaching end-times.
The Cross in the Christian Life 