What happens to all the christians during lockdown?

i love Jesus and felt encouraged to share this message with as many christians who are on lockdown as i can. So please feel free to SHARE and tag your friends in this. Send it to your church leaders. Let’s get this message out…

i wrote this as a status on Facebook yesterday but didn’t want it to get lost in the myriad if posts and articles and so on that are happening there, so thought i would drop it in my blog.

An opportunity to reconnect, rediscover, realign

Every year i try to listen to a word from God for the year and the word that i had on my mind and heart at the beginning of 2020 was Realign. While i see it never made it to the blog, i did manage to drop an Instagram post of it, with a few thoughts and clarifications.

But as we head into this time of lockdown for 21 days or more, the word REALIGN came back to me as something that might be a gift for the whole church at this time. This is the status i posted the other day:

My advice to Christians for this time of lockdown: Get to know Jesus.

Take a slow read of Matthew, Mark, Luke or John (or all four) and reflect on the words and actions and life of Jesus.

Then hold that up against your own life and see how it compares.

Then hold it up against the life and teaching and practices and songs of the church you are part of and ask how it compares.

Where you find a match, hold closely to that thing. Or encourage your church leaders about it.

Where it feels opposite or dissimilar, resolve to live or speak or think or act differently. Or challenge your church leaders to consider change.

This is an amazing opportunity to return to the heart and core of your faith, which is to be found in Jesus and in Love. And being pointed towards God and to those considered ‘the least of these’.

Don’t miss this opportunity to realign or redirect or return where necessary. The world needs followers of Jesus so desperately right now and so all of us would do well to check our followingness.

i think the world could only be a better place if each of us took some time to seriously do this, right. It might be that at the end of it we realise we are in a really good place and that not too much needs to change.

But for many of us, it could be a moment of shock as we come face to face with Jesus and realise that we have deviated quite far from His path – in word or dead or attitude or association or spirit or compassion for the marginalised. It can really be so many things and right now, many of us have been given the gift of time, and so i strongly urge and encourage you to use it well. This is an opportunity for every single Jesus follower and by extension every single church congregation to move closer to the path of Jesus and His kingdom.

Lastly, i wrote a lot of poetry during our recent time away in the Philippines. One piece that i happened to write was a rendition of The Lord’s Prayer in my own words and i would love to share that with you over here.

Please make the most of this time. To rediscover love of family as you are likely stuck together for some measure of time. As well as love for Jesus and the things of Jesus.

As the church, our buildings have [largely] been taken away from us and so this is the perfect opportunity for us as one united Jesus-following church to rise up and declare the kingdom of God by our words and deeds.

And hopefully it should go without saying that as followers of Jesus we will not be the ones who are sneaking out for jogs or walks with our dogs or trying to find ways around the rules for our own personal benefit. We will more than likely be making up a large number of those on the forefront, in the trenches, doing what they can to look after those considered ‘the least of these’ and i have already seen so much of this, which makes me super happy.

[For more on character and integrity during lockdown, click here]