CULTURE
PROPHETS - REVISITED
How Do I Recognize and Die to
Culture Prophecy?
Upon hearing we must lose our love for the culture or "die to the flesh," many people remove their gaze from the Lord to become preoccupied with this process as its own religious end. "Death to self" becomes their goal, meaning—in their mind—the annihilating of the soul itself. So they try to practice what they think can work this death in themselves—flesh life trying to kill flesh life.
They also see this death only in terms of what we must let go of for God. So they will deny themselves pleasures, minutely scrutinizing their every motive behind personal enjoyment. They create self-depriving maxims of "holiness" to follow, withdraw from society, stop engaging God over the world and over their desires, and so on.
While it is true that we do encounter aspects of these responses in losing our love for the world, following them self-motivatedly as ends in themselves does not truly accomplish what John calls us to. They only produce a religious imitation (See Col. 2:20-23).
No, this process of inward dying is not its own end. Nor is it only defined by what we must let go of. It is also defined by our surrender to hold onto God over life's issues in the season of His constraint. In its hour, we must engage Him—believing Him for His earthly promises, interceding with Him over the earth, and prophesying His word to the earth.
But it is only out of soul surrender that we are to engage Him over the earth. We are not to believe, intercede and prophesy as a means to preserve our natural life in this world (More on this in Part V). In the end, our dying is not about whether we are letting go of or holding onto earth's issues, but about which direction the Spirit's call to surrender is pointing us at any time, and yielding to it.
Ultimately, our inward dying has a living end. As the Lord drains us of natural soul energy through suffering, He infuses the new life of the Spirit into our mortal bodies, the same life by which He raised Christ from the dead (Romans 8:11). As David says, "He restores my soul." God did not come to destroy our souls and their faculties. He didn't come to destroy our capacity to feel or to desire or to appreciate earthly beauty or to esteem certain values. He came to destroy the idolatrous alien life force in our souls so as to save our souls with His own replenishing Spirit life. He came to exchange life for Life, old desiring for purged desiring, adamic identity for identity in Christ.
Through this life exchange, we are transformed in capacity for experience and relationship. We permanently lose some desires, including religious desires, but not the capacity to desire. We also gain new desires. But whatever desires we retain are now purged. We still enjoy and esteem temporal beauties, but now at a safe sanctified distance of heart where they can't cloud our vision for the Lord and our ultimate valuing of eternal life. It's as if the Lord puts a protective glass between our hearts and this life. It is a holy enjoyment, the context for Paul's statement that God "gives us all things richly to enjoy" (I Tim. 6:17).
The same exchange applies to our sense of self-worth and identity. We lose our natural sense of self-esteem in our blood lines and in the natural side of our church relationships—replaced by a holy sense of belonging and worth in Christ alone. In course of this, we do permanently lose some relationships, but not the capacity for relationship. In the relationships we gain or have restored, we relate with a holy affection buffered by our transcendent union with Christ. It is an affection able to convey Christ's true agape love for others, yet one that will never compromise our ultimate sense of self-worth, loyalty or identity in Him alone.
This process of exchanging life for Life is THE focal spiritual process of our earthly existence between new birth and bodily translation. Scripture refers to it in the active ongoing tense as the "saving of the soul" and the "patient possessing of our souls" (Heb 10:39; Lk. 21:19).