Piercing the Darkness

This morning in prayer I could still feel the flow from yesterday’s prayers, and was praying some more into Isaiah 9:2, and the darkness currently felt over our land.
“The people who walk in darkness will see a great light. For those who live in a land of deep darkness, a light will shine” (NLT)

I was asking God to forgive us – the world, and especially the Church who should know better – for putting our hope in a vaccine and in seeing loved ones at Christmas. The dark despair felt by many at the removal of our hopes has exposed that even after all this time our hope is still not fully in God to rescue us, but manmade solutions and the comfort of others. But I felt God’s great compassion towards us for our pain, combined with His unflinching determination not to waver from His plan to deliver us.

It reminded me of my recent response to one of my children who got stuck in trying to get his own way (he’s a leader in the making). I had asked him to do a task before the thing he wanted to do, and he tried to negotiate to do his thing first. I said no, and explained why it was better to do the task first, but he got stuck in pursuing his own way. It ended up taking a lot of distress and upset before he calmed down and eventually did the (simple) task. I felt so sorry for him because I could see he was trapped in a pain of his own making, but I had to wait for him to come to the end of it – and then I joined him in the task and helped him to do what was needed so he could not only enjoy the unimportant thing that he wanted to do but more importantly feel the strength of our connection and my love for him.
How much more do we need to remember that what our Heavenly Father asks us to do is always so much more important and better for us that what we would choose! That He has a bigger and better solution to offer than the temporary fix we are looking to.

It’s like the picture He showed me this morning while I was praying into the darkness over our land. I saw a great line of people all sleepwalking toward a cliff and certain destruction, and I knew that represented our nation (and others), caught in sin but not seeing it. As the moved blindly towards the end of the cliff, not hearing the pleas from Heaven for them to turn away, a dark cloud came over them and they started to fall to the ground, weak and sick. I felt God’s pain as He said that it was not a plan of His choosing, but He had allowed it as a last resort to stop them from sleepwalking over the cliff.
Then I saw a little hut/ booth off to one side where people were taking the sick. It had a sign saying “hope” on it, but I felt God’s heart breaking as people went there because the hut was right on the cliff-edge, and people were not changing direction away from danger but trying to get back to their feet so they could keep going on their own path. I believe this refers to the hope we have placed in the vaccine etc. It’s not that the vaccines are necessarily bad in themselves – but they will only have limited effectiveness over Covid-19, not the greater plague of sin & spiritual death that is growing in our land.
And as the cloud of darkness grew darker and more people fell sick, I cried out in prayer for God to do the impossible and raise up a great lighthouse inland that would pierce the darkness and be so bright it would wake people out of their stupor and attract them back to the heart of God’s Kingdom. I believe that is the intercession we are in at this point. But we mustn’t think that we are trying to twist God’s arm to intervene: this is an intercession birthed out of God’s heart – He is calling us to pray on His behalf, so He can set us free.

We the Church are not meant to be part of the sleep-walking problem, but part of the answer – as we take up our place in that lighthouse, reflecting His true and glorious light, we are going to be revealed as carriers of God’s glorious Kingdom – His solution to rescuing a world lost in darkness.